Category: live event blogging

We are in Ohio!

3 hours to angies house.

As much as I love to travel, I hate leaving home when it is just me leaving. I already miss them.

As Patti noted yesterday, at this point there isn’t anything left we can do… we have to go with what we have. At 3 PM today Todd and I begin the journey to Atlanta. We’ll be spending the night at Chris and Angie’s house tonight and completing the drive Thursday morning. At this point there just isn’t much left to do.

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m a little nervous about vending at YS for the first time. It’s a huge deal! And since I’m the one in charge of designing, training, and otherwise making our booth happen… I’m feeling the heat. I feel great about putting Youth Ministry Exchange in the exhibit hall for the first time, but I am definitely nervous.

From a leadership perspective I’ve got all the doubts running through my head. Do we have enough handouts? Did I spell something wrong and 3,000 people are going to tell me about it? Is the booth going to look good? Who are our booth neighbors? Is this too soon to vend or is it too late? Am I forgetting anything? Will anyone show up to my seminar? (I’m at 10:00 PM Saturday) How are we going to deal with people who are mean? Do I have the booth scheduled right? Will I regret giving away an iPod? Am I leading too much or am I taking charge or am I just a knucklehead that no one likes anyway? Will I say anything stupid? Will I be myself? How much money will we lose? What if no one has heard of us and they all think we’re a waste of time? Is this all a waste of money? Am I investing my time in Atlanta right?

On top of that, there is all the personal stuff. Because I’m going to the convention not just to be a vendor… I’m also going as an attendee. I am looking forward to sitting in on a couple of seminars that will help us in Light Force. I can’t wait to see all my favorite worship artists. I am looking to hanging out with friends. I am pumped about meeting blog/YMX friends for the first time. I can’t wait to see Angie and Chris tonight. I hope I don’t get a ticket driving 750 miles each way. I’m going to miss Kristen and the kids. I hope I don’t spend too much money on food and stuff like that. I hope that I am open to God leading and teaching me stuff that I need.

This conference always comes at a good moment for me. Despite all the work and planning that has gone into our booth in the exhibit hall, I also really need the encouragement that comes from being around people like me. I’ll find myself getting into so many conversations about youth ministry stuff. And typically, in church life, you have to explain everything about everything because not very many people "get" youth ministry. But when I’m at this conference, when I talk to people, they say "Yeah, I get that. That happens to me too." What a pleasure to be around people who get you!

My prayers for the convention. I pray that I am an encouragement to people at the conference. I pray that I receive the blessings and well wishing of others with grace. I pray that I am a giver of blessings. I pray that I go to learn more than teach. Listen more than talk and watch my mouth. I really want nothing negative to come out of my mouth. Amen.

What about you? For those who are going? How are you feeling?

I could use your help… I’ve started live blogging events and my life more and I am interested to know what my readers think. There are just two questions to this survey but they would help me greatly.

Looking at this from a internet ministry perspective.

Criteria for evaluating websites…

• Don’t care about data architecture
• Content
• Design
• Usability
• SEO
• Something else you want looked at…

Victim #1 Center for Student Missions

• Conversion goal isn’t all that clear.
• Probably too much navigation
• Replace all that navigation with a paragraph explaining your conversion
• Nice use of text link navigation at the bottom
• Need a cue for the rollover map

Victim #2 Intervarsity Corporate site

• Small text is nuts
• Calls it "one of the worst sites I’ve ever seen"
• Limit the choices
• Make the "find a chapter" thing bigger
• Think about building a site map into the navigation

Victim #3 Sports Spectrum

• UNC colors is a nice touch, popular team colors
• Nice design
• Some of the boxes are tough on the eye, not offset enough
• Great use of red for navigation

Victim #4 Act of Grace Radio

• Move logo and text under it to the footer
• Swoosh design is 1995 look
• Microphone icons are tough, maybe a little sloppy
• Top navigation is simple, easy
• Remove the white "welcome to actofgraceradio.net."
• It does look, overall, very good.
• Needs Podcast, RSS feeds, player on home page, etc

Victim #5 Destino Community

• Looks like a porn site
• Red/black is "like 1984"
• Serif fonts are bad
• All the font sizes should match
• Nice use of YouTube… just make sure you link back to your site from YouTube
• Stick with colors in fonts… adding yellow/orange is a weird addition in about page

Victim #6 Prophecy Today

• Looks like a news site
• Ditch the scrolling text
• Text is packed a little too tightly
• Create a little more white space
• No "who is Jimmy" link even though he’s mentioned a lot

This was actually a lot of fun. The folks who volunteered their sites were quite brave.

Paul Kulp
Online Communities

Is anyone tired about talking about "Community" online?

We are tired about it because we don’t have a clear definition of what it is?

Community is a good thing:

• People helping people
• Connections
• Belonging

Every day miracles
Online community is a miracle! God makes it happen.

Community is all about people

• groups, gaggles, schools, cabals, swarms, throngs & mobs
• If you build it… installing a forum + ? = COMMUNITY
• Phase 1 (Collect people)
• Phase 2 (?)
• Phase 3 (Profit)
   

Offline community example:

• Phase 1: build perfect worship center
• Phase 2: ?
• Phase 3: Filled with people!

Easy, right?

Soul Bucks

• Stories are the currency of online ministry.
• You need "soul bucks" to justify your ministry
• How else do you know you’re doing it right?
• Provide great info from users
• In order to get this… practice good story collection
• People like to tell stories…
• Can you have too many?
• Use it as an "umph" to launch a new feature.
• Are you actively soliciting stories?
• Are you keeping them?
• Do you keep a story book?

Show us your web face

• How do people look at your site?
• Is it a storefront?
• Is it a billboard?
• Is it a bullhorn?
• Is it a pulpit?
• Is it a line-up… people backed up to be served?
• What would a community site really look like? (People helping people)
• What would it look like as a community center? (People coming together to get fed)
• If you want to see community on your website, start seeing your website as a community.

A group of another kind
Your website hosts dozens of people groups… common place… common interests…. common interaction.

• Faces- Joe, Frank, Sally are regulars. The 37 different people subscribed to your podcast. 3500 people on your email list. 15 blogs that link to your site.
• Outlines- 30-35 yo’s that look at your site. Mac visitors. Spanish visitors.
• Shadows– People searching "weird terms" Show me something interesting!

You gotta look around
Offline we are good at this. Online we stink at it.

Use tools

• Stats analysis
• Feedback
• Questionnaires
• Polls
• Stories

What is the shape of your web community?
Who is visiting?

• Repeat visitors
• Search engines
• Forum users
• RSS readers
• Mailing lists
• IBLs (in-bound link)

Do you know your peeps?

• Little plastic people to play with (really! he gave us toys!

Run with the herd

• What do groups do? Faces go where they are served.
• Where do they go? Where do people in a demographic go?
• When people leave… you’ve stopped providing the thing they liked… they don’t fit. So poof they are gone.
• Where do they go from here? (Shadows go where they are seeking)

Keep reminders

• Figure out a way to keep faces in front of you…

Think with your community

• Suppose: You are www.discipleship101.com
• New game plan… you became www.find-jesus.com
• Do we just forward users?
• Do we turn it off?
• Do we "strangle" it?

People don’t expect an organization to just disappear.

Describe the person you wish were finding your website…. build some content/design for that.

I don’t want to be critical… but there is something that hasn’t jived well with me. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of "brand new" stuff. I don’t know if I’m just way ahead of the typical Gospelcom folks… but man, I’m not getting a ton of new ideas.

What I am getting, and the reason this is a good thing to come to for me… it’s a great networking opportunity.

Kent Shaffer
Bombay Creative

If people don’t know you, the only thing they can go off of is your design.

Bob vs. Tim (Which is which in the picture to the left?)
These types of effects of category labels on lower-level perception are becoming a concern for researchers in cognitive and social psychology because their existence suggest that we may not ever be able to see what’s actually there but will always be influenced by what we expect to see.

Potential users have perceptions about who you are based on things that you can’t control. And they way you can change perceptions is to begin a relationship. But you can’t get a relationship (with a website) without a great first impression. In comes design.

The reason people "buy" a product is 60% color. Aesthetics matter greatly. Make sure that your "product" is marketable. Make sure your site solves the question they are asking… "I have this problem, how can this church/service/ministry/product help me?"

Judging Websites
If you can snare people with attractive design, they are more likely to overlook minor faults. People enjoy being right…. so people will continue to use a website that gave them a good first impression. It helps "prove" that they are right.

Potential readers decide whether or not to stay on your site in 50 milliseconds. (Holy cow, this is crazy!)

Yesterday’s best is today’s bad. That’s how quickly our perceptions of things change.

90% of sales are for an emotional reason. How does that effect your web design?

#1 Who am I?
Your design should be a reflection of your brand.

1. why was your ministry created
2. what is your ministries mission
3. who are you called to reach?
4. rank your taget audience in order of importance…
5. Dang, he went too fast!

If you could communicate a single message about your ministry, what would it be?

A good logo is distinctive, memorable, timeless, aesthetically pleasing, scalable, simple, and looks good in color and grayscale.

Kent’s favorite logos…
See his list on his blog…all have a clean look, are 2D etc. Easy to work with.

#2 Who are they?
"Go out to your customers first and design from that." Scott Cook, founder of Intuit

#3 Am I serious?
Your design needs to be taken seriously. Goofy is no fun in ministry sites. Don’t try to be too humorous.

#4 Can I deliver?
You can’t be something you’re not.
Don’t project an image you can’t deliver.

Be careful how you use copy to build up your church, ministry, or event. Use descriptive terms and not circus quality descriptions. That negatively effects trust. It’s better to under-promise and over-deliver than visa versa.

#5 Am I professional?
People’s perceptions of your ministry are affected by the quality of your delivery. You need to stand out in your simplicity instead of trying to be something that you aren’t.

#6 Am I contemporary
Unless intentional, your design should never date you.

#7 Am I clear?
The only time it’s ok to be unclear in designing a site is to design for other graphic designers.

Referenced Designing Brand Identity. Check it out

Rich Tatum (Blog Rodent)
Consultant

Our ministry blogs are about relationships.

Example of evotional.com (Mark Batterson) Form’s community with a local church.
Example of Out of Ur (Christianity Today) Trying to turn a company into a relationship.
Example of Church Marketing Sucks– Creates relationship..

Relationship blogs are about:

• transparency (can’t be afraid of comments)
• authenticity
• conversation
• connecting
• personal
• intimate

Why are blogs different?

• Personally written, rarely edited
• Often raw, emotional, and assertive (gotta have the guts to write stuff people want to read)
• More like letters than articles
• Occasional and timely
• Controversy-friendly

Why do we blog?

• We do all things for Christ Jesus, who loves us.
• Therefore, we blog because we love Jesus

Conclusions

• A blog with a "why" trumps one with merely a "how."
• Transparency and authenticity matter more than traffic and subscribers.
• Don’t "leverage" your blog for evangelism, let it become an experience for relationship.

Brian Tol (Gospel Communications Staff member)
Stats and stuff…

I sat next to Josiah Ritchie for this session, check out his notes on the IMC blog.

How do you judge effectiveness of what you are doing?

How do you connect statistics to people?

Traditional statistics are optimized for selling ads, sales optimization, and other marketing data.

What about ministry though? How can you go beyond statistics and get to effect.

Types of statistical information collected
Hit = any individual file that goes from your web server to a users web browser. In the day of CSS, etc a hit is meaningless now.

Pageview = All the hits put together… when someone loads a page, it’s a pageview.

Visit = All of the pages a user look at in a session (each time on your site)

Unique visitor = How many times the same user goes to the site.

Visitor behavior = the action a user takes as a result of visiting your site.

Statistical analysis:
How is AJAX counted statistically? Every time someone takes an AJAX action, that counts as a pageview.

How does spiders/bots count? It’s logged, but not always as a pageview.

How do RSS/aggregators count? Right now that won’t show up on your stats… but it’s coming. (Google bought Feedburner, it’ll show up soon.)

How do "window shoppers" count? People who come to the site for 5 seconds or less. That will show up as a bounce rate.

Changing the length of a visit changes the number of visits
You can change the visit length to increase statistical response. (You need to ask that Q when looking at people’s stat packages)

With the influx of proxy’s, statistical information is getting harder to gather. Now one "household" can actually be 100 different people because of a proxy. So all of that traffic is actually seen as a single IP address.

Javascript collection: Historically 10% of people have Javascript disabled. (Christians are much higher as we are a suspicious tribe.)

There is always over/under reporting due to network errors. The internet has millions of redundancies because of the wild nature of the net.

Don’t give up on stats!

• We’re better off than radio and television
• Look at stats as estimates, not hard and fast numbers
• Try to put stats in the right context.

What are things more important than stats? What are techniques to get you important feedback.

• Feedback. web 2.0 stuff like comments. (more coming on this bigtime) email, publish it. (make a contest based on feedback)
• Customer service. Use a ticket system.
• Blog search. Technorati, Google Blog search, MyBlogLog
• Surveys. SurveyMonkey.com, SurveyGizmo.com,
• Chat. Having a regular chat session for feedback works great.
• Social Networking sites. Facebook, etc… don’t invest cash in it since it’s fickle, but is cool to have groups.
• Crowdsourcing. getsatisfaction.com (get customer service types of help from your community.)
• Meet-up with people. meetup.com or other utilities help get people together.