Faith and Web

Last summer, at the eleventh hour, I had to become an “email marketing expert.” I’d decided to support a particular candidate at the exact moment his communications team needed someone to manage his email campaign. Kismet? Who knows.  They reasoned that my web experience fit their need, and while I’m not sure I ever fully qualified, I read everything I could find and learned even more on the fly.*

Fast forward to this spring. My congregation had an aging system for weekly emails, and it needed an overhaul. What an opportunity. Of course I leapt in, and the result will have to speak for itself.

Putting these various experiences together, here are the steps I’d advise for a congregation wanting to either launch or revamp its mass emails.

1. Get the Buy-In of Leadership.
This is a must. If your minister or senior church leadership is suggesting the church do this, jump at the chance. If not, persuasion will be the order of the day. Find allies in your congregation and explain the advantages. Given the recent economy, saving money is likely to be a compelling argument. Also, presenting a plan, with particulars of who can do what is likely to allay fears and get you a thumbs up.

2. Research Email Marketing.
This is probably overkill, but for those like me who enjoy reading up for their latest project, here are some of the best resources on the Web that I’ve happened across:

• Email Newsletter Design: Guidelines And Examples
• Design and Build Email Newsletters Without Losing Your Mind (and Soul)
• A Guide to Creating Email Newsletters
• E-mail Marketing: 13 Services To Help You Make Contact
• MailChimp’s Free Email Marketing Guide
• HTML Email best practices, resources and inspiration

3. Find a Free Email Marketing Service.
Our congregation opted to use VerticalResponse’s free for non-profits service, and we love it.

We tried doing doing mass emails on our own. The administrator kept a contact lists and sent emails as text, but the more people that signed up for it, the more unwieldy it became.

Now that we’ve moved over to VerticalResponse, not only can we do “pretty” HTML emails, but also a team of us can produce mass emails whenever needed. This is particularly important when emergencies come up.

4. Iron Out a Process.
It’s all well-and-good to want to produce a weekly church email or e-newsletter, but in the end what matters most is the content. That’s why step #1 is so important. If your ministers and other church leaders are itching for broadcast email, the content will almost write itself. It’s just a matter of figuring out how to get the right information to whom and when. (In an upcoming post I’ll explain my congregation’s process in more detail.)

5. Build a Template.
Most email marketing services have sets of templates you can adapt fairly easily. If you want to polish one up, perhaps customizing it to look like the website, find or hire someone in the congregation who is adept at HTML and explain the look-and-feel you are hoping for.

6. Put a Sign-Up Form on Your Home Page.
All good email marketing services include HTML that your webmasters can easily adapt for your site. Do be sure to double-check it once it’s live.

7. Import Pre-existing Lists of Email Addresses.
Again, all good email marketing services make it straight-forward to both export and import lists of email addresses. If you have a membership database, for example, those emails can be exported. Just be sure that everyone whose email you import has opted in to receive congregational emails.

8. Launch Some Tests.
At this point you’re almost ready. But be sure to send out some test emails and check them on a variety of platforms. That means not just Outlook and the usual suspects like Hotmail, but also a variety of mobile devices. Keep refining and testing until you and key leaders are comfortable. Then, drum roll….

9. In Email Marketing Speak, “Launch Your Campaign.”
In other words, take a deep breath and send our your congregation’s first blast email.

In a few days, you can view reports of how the email is doing. One of the more important, but deceptive, statistics is the “open” rate. A user has to display the embedded images to be counted as “opening” an email. Since many people don’t turn on images, the numbers will look lower than they actually are. That said, the reports have other potentially helpful data such as how many people clicked through on which links and if people forwarded the email.

* One aside about my first foray into email marketing: not only was it great fun to be in the trenches with this team, but our candidate won.  May you have fun with it too.

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I swear I have a life aside from building websites.  Not much, arguably.  But right now, even as I type this I’m cooking some seriously yummy-smelling Black Bean Espresso Chili for dinner with Mr. Web Diva.  The thing is….  much as I love to cook, etc., etc., it’s so much more fun when listening to geeky podcasts.  To share the love, here’s a list of my five favorites for webmasters building sites for their congregations and faith communities.

• Boagworld
  This one is a no-brainer.  Paul Boag and Marcus Lillington’s light-hearted weekly romp through the webmaster world is by far the most popular podcast for “all those involved in designing, developing and running websites.”
• WordPress Community Podcast
  Far less obvious….  Hopefully your website uses some kind of Content Management System — and there’s a good podcast to keep you up to date with the latest.  Thus, if you use Drupal, I’d suggest Geeks and God or the delightful Lullabots. My congregation uses WordPress and we love it.  I’ve looked around for WP podcasts and this one is the best I’ve found so far.  Its news section is particularly helpful, alerting you to security patches and plug-ins.
• WebAxe
  Web accessibility: it’s a subject near-and-dear to my heart, but more to the point, for a church webmaster it’s the right thing to do.  WebAxe is a great podcast devoted to all aspect of website accessibility.  Every episode I learn surprising and helpful tidbits.
• The Digital Marketer
  Part of the excellent Quick and Dirty Tips set of podcasts, The Digital Marketer is “a social media expert offer[ing] tech tips and tricks and information on the latest social media tools to help you market your business.”  As a webmaster, I’m actually wearing out with “social media experts,” many of whom seem to fancy themselves web experts too.  But Aliza Sherman is an exception.  She knows her stuff and keeps it mercifully short-and-to-the-point.
• This Week in Google
  Currently, this is my favorite podcast — period.  Google is infinitely fascinating and what a delight to have the wonderful outsider trio of Leo Laporte, Gina Trapani and Jeff Jarvis digging into the latest ups and downs with in hub of the web.

What other podcasts are there that would be helpful to webmasters serving their congregations or faiths? I’d love to know your favorites.

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My congregation needs a social media policy.    So this morning I set out on a little Web quest to look at such policies created by other churches.  I bet we’re far from alone, but to my surprise, I could find almost nothing.

That said, there are a few excellent general resources.  I pass them along for those who might have similar needs.

• Safe Church guidelines for social media from the Episcopal Diocese of Connecticut was the closest match to what I was looking for.  It has specific suggested language, and even a way to create a small booklet to distribute.  I’ll be doing just that with my congregation’s Communication Committee.
• One of my favorite church blogs, New Media for Unitarian Universalists by Shelby Meyerhoff, has Does the UUA have a sample “new media policy” for congregations? It’s a list of “some general principles that may help guide congregations in their new media use.”
• Finally, 12 Tips for Developing a Social Networking Policy and Usage Guidelines for Your Church has another helpful checklist of things to consider.

Do you know of other social media policy resources for churches — particularly sample policies? If so, please let me know.

P.S. A late addition:  ChurchCruch recommends PolicyTool for Social Media for quickly generating what we need.

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