New Websites

I have been working really hard these past few weeks to develop some websites for http://HarrahChurch.com. We will use these sites to resource  and educate our people as well as providing me an outlet for casting our vision. I have used WordPress.org as the CMS for these sites and really like what we have ended up with. The themes for the sites came from Elegant Themes who is a great place to find good themes at a very affordable price of $20 per year for access to all of their themes.

These sites are still a work in progress but we are going live with them as I continue to introduce myself to our volunteer and leadership teams and as a hub for learning about each ministry’s strategies and goals. Here is the list.

http://harrahkids.org

http://harrahgroups.org

http://renovatestudents.org

http://harrahchurchproduction.org

http://harrahchristian.org

I like that I was able to tie the sites together and still provide each with their own personalized theme. Though I have spent many hours on the sites and their configuration the theme subscriptions only cost me $20 and I am using the lowest 1and1 hosting package at ~$4.99 per month. I think we have a pretty great set of sites.

How is your church using multiple sites to leverage your reach? Is it necessarily a bad thing to spread your ministries out over several sites? I don’t think so. I don’t think people will have any problems searching us out and think that each site will lend itself well to a saturation strategy designed to help us dominate search.

Get Me Fired

Tony Morgan has started an interesting series of post about why churches should stop marketing. You can read the post and the comments at http://tonymorganlive.com/2008/11/13/churches-should-stop-marketing/  As the Marketing Director at Arrow Heights I am very interested in where Tony is going and based upon his comments I think that we may be thinking in the same direction. 

So my goal at the church now may be to get myself fired. WHAT??? That sounds crazy, but what if everyone at the church was doing my job?  So much of the new media is about putting the average Joe in the position to create as much impact as the professional. Average Joe is no longer average if he uses these new tools. The new Super Joe can invite more of his friends to do something than at any time before. A single tweet and I have invited all of my Twitter followers and everyone of my Facebook friends to attend.  Marketing is about to get personal again. 

So what are we missing?  I think that we need to teach our people how to clearly communicate the Gospel to others and then show them how/where they can communicate that Gospel to others.  I have tried to be intentional in spending our marketing dollars on pieces that are intended to be handed to someone by someone. 

I want to make an important distinction when it comes to the purpose for what we are trying to do at Arrow Heights.  We are not in the impressions business we are in the conversion business. It is not about more bang for the buck it is about more disciples for the dollar.

MySpace Advertising

        I have been checking out the new MySpace advertising network since it started a few days ago. We have a lot of students and adults who are more of MySpace people than FaceBook people. The interface was really easy to use and to target. You could drill down to women who live in Stigler who love The Shining and the Dallas Cowboys if you thought such a women existed and had a product to sell to her. After running an ad for 24 hours I had more than 3,200 impressions, but no clicks. I have a leaderboard and a 300 x 250 image ad running. I have set a budget of $150 through the end of the year for these ads to see how well this platform does at driving traffic to our site. We will see how they perform. This is not a lot of money when you consider that a 1/8 page ad in our local gazette would be about $1,000 per week. I think we are getting in front of our audience. I mentioned before that our best ad was of a funny looking fat man. I did not make a MySpace ad with him on it yet. I may do it later to see if my theory that funny looking fat men drive people to your web site. If you are interesting in advertising with MySpace I highly recommend it because of the simplicity of the interface, the demographic tools, and the reporting.

We advertise online with Google and Facebook and have used Yahoo in the past. I didn’t really care for using Yahoo since most people come through Google. Is your church advertising online with Facebook?

Text Vs. Talk

I was just reading an article on the Advertising Age web site that said for the second straight quarter text use has eclipsed talk use. An average teen 13-17 will send more than 1,742 texts per months and make only 231 calls in that same period. BTW, if you haven’t gotten your kids the text package make sure you get the unlimited text plan. With the rise of services like Twitter texting has become an important social tool and with the new site Yammer it may soon become more important to the office. We are using a service called TextMarks here at Arrow Heights to build text message groups that allow us to send a message to large groups of people without getting charged for every message. Our Upward recreation directors really enjoy the freedom to be able to update their coaches and players about weather updates and cancellations. I am planning on setting up several twitter feeds for a scavenger hunt in the future. Stay tuned for details.

I have read about several churches that broadcast their twitter feed onto the wall in the sanctuary so that people can interact with the service in real time across the church. These tools can used to build community with your church or small group. It would be great to have a twitter prayer group for your church that sends a text to your prayer warrior followers who get the update in real time and can respond with other requests or say that they are praying.

How often do you text? How important has texting become to you and/or your kids?

New Sermon Series

We are getting ready to start a new sermon series in a couple of weeks and I wanted to let you look at some shots for the bulletin covers for the series. The series deals with spiritual gifts and urges people to “Get In The Game.” We are borrowing some are from Granger Community Church, but I designed our bulletin cover to look like an XBOX 360 video game case using the NCAA Football 08 cover as my guide. We will have 3-4 different covers per week. Check them out.

Lunch at The Brook

      I had lunch today with Brian Hoover from RunnersWorld Tulsa at The Brook. We discussed the upcoming ArrowHeights.org 5K Race on August 9th. RunnersWorld is going to help get the word out about the race and help with registration. This race is really coming together quite nice and Brian was excited about the fact that we are the only race around that day, which should help us draw a larger crowd and more money for the Broken Arrow Cross Country Team. If you haven’t registered for the race you can get your ArrowHeights.org 5K Race Registration here.

The Caesar salad at The Brook was great. I can’t wait to go there at another time and try something else.