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ELCA Congregational Email Turnaround
There is nothing more frustrating than asking a question and not getting an answer. Timely communication is critical in the business world, and it’s critical in the church world too. Churches seem to recognize this: as I noted in part 5 of this series, over 95% of congregations posted email contact information on their website.
Just listing an email address isn’t enough, though – someone has to check it.
Advanced Content on ELCA Websites
There are plenty of things that churches can do to make their websites more appealing to visitors and members. I was curious to find out how common some of these “advanced content” ideas were. These things aren’t advanced because they require advanced technology; instead, they are just “above and beyond” a simple brochure-style website.
Basic Content on ELCA Websites
In evaluating 101 websites, I had to pick qualities that were directly connected to website effectiveness, yet for time’s sake were easy to check. The simplest of these were the no-brainers, what I’m calling “Basic Content.” This is the stuff you’d expect to find in any tri-fold brochure, if your church still does that sort of thing.
Separating the Wheat from the Chaff
It would have been nice if all 101 websites I had sampled would have been beautiful examples of working technology. Sadly, as I mentioned before the weak and sick URLs had to be culled out of the herd.
Of the 101 websites, 84 were working. The 17 that were excluded fell victim to:
Choosing a Sampling Strategy
Special thanks to Dr. Marty Smith, a Senior Research Analyst at ELCA Research and Evaluation. His help was invaluable in deciding on a sampling strategy and collecting the congregational demographic data, and I really appreciated his help all the way through this phase of the project.
As I discussed in the last article, I needed a good mix of small, medium, and mega-sized congregations, and I needed them across rural, suburban, and urban settings. Dr. Smith and I decided to go for a stratified sample. To do this, he filtered the 10,000+ ELCA congregations to give just the ones with websites, then sorted by congregational setting (rural, suburban, etc.) and then within those categories by average worship attendance. Then he took every 23rd record all the way down the list to give me 101 congregations.
Choosing the Demographic Data
One of the advantages of being part of a large congregation is that it’s easy to gather good statistics for this kind of research. The ELCA is a large, nationwide denomination with over 10,000 congregations, and with that kind of size comes a great deal of complexity. I identified the two biggest factors as being congregation size and community setting.
Introduction to Congregational Website Study
For years, I’ve been telling people that good church website design will directly translate into more visitors coming in the door. Anecdotal evidence from my work with several different congregations as their webmaster has borne this out. After taking over decrepit old designs and replacing them with dynamic, well-designed sites, my pastors reported to me that visitors were mentioning the website as one of the big reasons they decided to visit.
But could I prove it?
Website Picks on “Pretty Good Lutherans”
Site Picks from Pretty Good Lutherans
Susan at Pretty Good Lutherans has a nice little list of some good ELCA websites. Unfortunately, it’s buried in the sidebar way down the page. But it’s worth clicking through and having a look at some of the sites. These aren’t perfect – for example, the SE Pennsylvania Synod’s domain name is “MinistryLink.org,” which isn’t particularly appropriate to a specific synod’s site, and they’re still a little jargony, but they are definitely a cut above the rest and deserving of a good long look.
New church website launched!
Our congregation in Dubuque, Lord of Life Lutheran Church, has launched a new website! I, along with those in the Lord of Life Website Task Force, are proud of the result and happy to announce it to the world. With the switching on of the new website, our email and calendaring infrastructure now is running on Google Apps. So, between the free Google Apps hosting and DreamHost’s free hosting for registered non-profit organizations, we have a sophisticated website and quality collaboration tools for free! Look for good things to come in the next few months as we prepare for Phase 2 of this project.
End of the Semester
Whew! Another semester ends, and I am now halfway through my seminary education at Wartburg. No breather for me, though, as I’ve got a number of big projects and travel plans that are going to happen in the next several weeks.
- Websites – I’m currently working with a task force of members of our congregation here in Dubuque to relaunch LordOfLifeDBQ.org, the congregational website. The prototype is built on WordPress and is up and available here, but doesn’t have all the content loaded in it yet. The theme is just temporary too – a talented designer at our congregation is working up a custom template for us to use. We’re also working to get content written for MovingToDubuque.org, a site designed to help IBM employees and others moving to the Dubuque area get settled in. (I’ve also got a super-secret project in the works, but if I told you what it is, I’d have to kill you.)
- Websites, ugly and less-ugly – Work continues on my study of congregational websites in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and their connection to demographic trends in those congregations. Hopefully results will be available in a few weeks.
- Hardware hackery – I just bought a Asus WL-500G Premium wireless router and a nice 640G Hitachi USB hard drive enclosure to build a cheap combination-embedded-BackupPC-FileServer-Wireless-router for church.
- Musicality – This semester I wrote a setting for Morning Prayer for Loehe Chapel at Wartburg Seminary called “Morning Light.” Now I’m working on scoring it and will soon be releasing it under a Creative Commons license. I’ve been especially thankful for the positive reception the Benediction and Sending piece from that liturgy has received – several classmates want to use it in ordination services this summer, and it may also be used at a wedding! Of course I’m geeking out as I do this, so I’m doing the typesetting in LilyPond and constructing a full-fledged musical build system in Apache Ant.
- Computers for Africa – Via one of our international students, I’ve been put in contact with a university in Africa that could use some second-hand computers loaded up with Linux and shipped out there. I am not sure whether this will come through or not, but it’s on the radar.
- Family Roots – My great-grandfather (via my paternal grandmother) Otto E. Matuschka was a Lutheran pastor in Missouri, Nebraska, and Kansas from about the year 1900 on. I’ve embarked on a project to find out more about him, and via his alma mater, Concordia Seminary in St. Louis and its Concordia Historical Institute, I’ve located some records. I’m looking forward to going down to St. Louis in June and doing some more research in their archives. According to one of their archivist, other family members were pastors too – who knew? Fun fact: my classmate’s husband served the same congregation in Nebraska that Great-Grandfather Matuschka served almost 85 years prior. It’s a small Lutheran world…
- The Great Missouri Trip – Our occasion for visiting St. Louis is a trip to St. Louis, Kansas City, and Columbia that will have me preaching at Good Shepherd, Manchester, MO on June 7th, visiting in St. Louis through the 10th, then traveling to Kansas City to visit family until the 13th, when we return to Columbia so I can preach at St. Andrew’s, Columbia, MO on June 13th and 14th. I guess I better get started on writing some sermons…
- Paint Chips – My classmates just discovered that their little girl has elevated levels of lead. We live in the same kind of housing they do, so we’re obviously also concerned. I’ll be looking into what kind of lead exposure testing might be necessary for Anneliese, Jennifer and I in the next few days.
- Leavin’ on a… Budget Truck? – Soon we’ll be
wingingdriving our way to St. John’s Lutheran Church in Sterling, IL, where I’ll be doing my year-long pastoral internship / vicarage under the supervision of Pr. Mark Oehlert. It’s going to be a busy summer, but an exciting one as we accomplish a lot of interesting tasks and get ready for a year of Something Completely Different. Pray for us! - And much much more! – Somewhere in here I might also send out some (painfully late) birth announcements, help edit the second edition of a book, and work half-time on some cool performance-related projects for IdeaWorks. Busy? Who, me?
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