Who is My Audience

By Timothy Fish

01/28/2005

When developing a church website, one of the most important questions you can ask is “who is my audience.”  Many churches will say that they want to use it to bring new people into the church.  Some will say that they want to provide information to their members.  Some will say that they want to do both.  While these goals are good it is not always possible to accomplish these goals.  Also, these goals may not sufficiently address the question.

Let’s consider the first goal.  Every pastor’s dream is to develop a website on Monday and by the time Sunday rolls around again have so many people at church that people have to stand around the sides of the building.  While this may be possible it is very unlikely for many reasons.  Some people are currently saying that the search engines are so backlogged that new content will not show up for four to six weeks.  I can say that the new content for the South Park Baptist Church website showed up in three weeks.  No one will be brought to your church by a website that will not show up in the search engines.

Another problem with this dream is that your website is so far down in the search engines that no one sees it.  This is most common in areas with a lot of churches.  In the Dallas/Fort Worth area there are hundreds of churches.  The chances of a person finding your website when there are hundreds to choose from are very slim.  Most of the people who find a particular church website in the Dallas/Fort Worth area are looking for a particular church.  There are a handful of churches that have made their way to the top of the search engine lists.  One in particular, Wedgwood Baptist, paid a price that no church wants to pay to get part of the name recognition that it has today.

One method that some churches are using is to buy ad space on other web pages.  This can be an effective means of getting people to visit your site, but it may not translate into visitors to your church.  From the log files that are kept for the South Park Baptist Church website I was able to see that many of the visitors to the site were looking for information about marriage and information about Mormons.  Most of this information has been removed, but when it was available it was elevating the hit count of the church’s website.  Many if not all of these visitors will never visit South Park Baptist Church.  It is very likely that many of these visitors live in other cities, states and even countries.  An ad that you purchase on another website may be clicked on by someone who is looking for information other than where he would like to go to church on Sunday.

For churches with few other churches near them it will be a little easier to get their website to show up at the top of the list.  Many such churches can be found even without a website.  The advantage of a website in cases like this is that the church is able to have more control over what information the viewer gets about the church and it can help to make a good first impression.

If your church is in a prominent location, you may want to consider putting your web address on a banner for the traffic that drives by to see.  Some people will be more willing to visit your church if they can get to know you a little better by visiting your website.  A banner will be most effective if you have a memorable URL.  Christ Community Christian Church has what I would consider to be a memorable URL that would work well for displaying for passing traffic.  Their URL is http://www.greatchurch.org/.  They also have an attractive website, but it is difficult to determine even in what state they are located.

It is much easier to focus a website toward your own membership.  The URL can be printed on church bulletins, sent out to the membership in a letter or even passed by word of mouth.  There may still be problems that you will need to consider.  Some of your membership do not have a computer, do not have access to the internet or do not use what they have.  There is really nothing you can do about this.  If there are only a few people who will actually use your website to get information then you may not need a website.  There is also the problem of connection speed.  More and more people are getting faster connections to the internet, but you may still need to be careful about how much graphics you put on a site.  Most sites look better with some kind of graphics, but some users will not visit your site if it takes too long to load.  There must be a balance of the visual aspect and the load time.  For a membership only website you can afford to be a little sparser as long as you are providing accurate and timely information.  Your church members already have a good impression of the church and are more interested in getting the information they need when they need it.

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