Recently, our church had to make some cutbacks in the budget and also in the staff.  It sucks. The economy sucks. Almost 10% of the US population is out of work. So 1 out of 10 of your church members are unemployed.  Giving is severely down for churches by 29% (last year), even more for non-profits (48%).  This effects everyone.

The thing that bothers me is that I have noticed many christians have the tendency to look at spiritual success from a financial standpoint. If there is a wealthy person in the church, it must mean they are doing something right. I have even seen people follow the views of those individuals based on financial success as the litmus test.  The problem is that this is completely wrong.  Sure the Lord can bless us financially. Heck, my family has be blessed many times that way. But that is in no way a means to measure spiritualness. Financial success is a worldly measurement and should not be used in the church.

Our church has some amazing things happening that are only by the hand of God. I personally have witnesses miracles, people getting saved, and personal spiritual growth in members over the past few months. It’s an exciting time for us as God pours his spirit in our lives! The fruits of what God is doing in the church are to be the measurement, not how they are doing financially.

I recently had a meeting with a local pastor who oversees the college and young adults in his church. They have a great size building with a concert/coffee shop and very active local youth. I will be working with him on ways to grow his ministry and thought of Foursquare and Gowalla. I though I would share with everyone what I am sharing with him.

Traditionally, the internet has been for the conquest of global brands and national businesses. It’s focus has been almost non-existant for the local business or ministry. But now there is a move towards the local businesses that is changing the shape of the internet.  Finally, local businesses have a new reach using local search, location based services and geotagging.  Leading the march for geotagging is Foursquare, a newer startup that rewards users for exploring their neighborhoods.

What Is Geotagging?

Geotagging is basically a mixture of social networking with whatever local community you are in using GPS technology. Geotagging allows live real-time sharing of your activities which could allow you to receive promos and special offers based on location and activity.

Geotagging also is used by google, twitter, Facebook, and other social networks for identifying your current location and activities. It allows you to attach photos, videos, status, reviews,etc to any location you are present at.

How Foursquare Works

Foursquare is a location based social networking site fused with a game that anyone can play.

It’s Sunday and people are out and about in the city. You can advertise or suggest your church service to those in the area. Maybe reward the first 5 new visitors who “Check In” using Foursquare with a small gift.

With Foursquare, users (or “players” since it’s more like a social game) are rewarded for their continued check-ins to your locations with “badges” and earning status ranks. For example, if you log into 10 different locations, you get the Adventurer badge. The player/person who logs into your location more than anyone else gets the location title of Mayor.

Why It Works

First of all, Foursquare is a game. It rewards users by checking into it’s system and gives them a feeling of accomplishments for every day tasks.  This fits right into Generation Y’s common need for reward and entitlement.  Also  as part of these accomplishments, it opens up perks and rewards only available to those who have achieved them. Venues are encouraged to reward users based on accomplishments. For example, you could give a free coffee or brownie to whoever is mayor of the moment.  This encourages players to visit your venue in order to receive a reward.

Getting Started With Foursquare

Ok, getting your church in foursquare is easy. It might even already be in foursquare from one of your church members using it.

1. Start off by heading over to http://foursquare.com/businesses/ and follow directions. Or you can do a search for your venue and either “Claim it” or “add it” if it is not already in Foursquare. You will need to be able to answer the phone number listed at the business for it to verify you as the owner.
2. Put up promotional material at your church. You want to inform your members on a regular basis to use it. You can print posters from Foursquare or add yourself to the request list for wall stickers from Foursquare.
3. Promote use of Foursquare on your blog, website, twitter account, and Facebook page.
4. Maybe post the weekly mayor on the church announcements, posters, etc. Maybe even from the pulpit!

Using Foursquare To Your Advantage

Offering rewards to players who use Foursquare is important to the success of this type of campaign.  Successfully using Foursquare will result in more people coming to your church and learning about the Kingdom of God.  Give mayors something non-churchy as a reward. Why non-church related prizes?  While Foursquare could help attendance for current members, ultimately you want to use it for outreach.  Your goal is to encourage those who are not necessarily interested in coming to church, to stop by and check in.   You could reward “first time” check-ins. This will help you connect to a person who has never been to your church before, and potentially never experienced who Christ is.  Have a “Check in” table with trained members who will give out the rewards and assess those who stop by. They may need just a friendly greeting, prayer, or help in some way.

One church I know of gave “Free Chick-Fil-A Sandwiches” to first time players, which Chick-Fil-A donated for this purpose to the church. Businesses will give you free stuff to give away because its a good way they can support your church and get business too! It’s a win win situation for both.

Remember, players using Foursquare in the area, will see what is going on at your venue and could be enticed to come join in!

Got Any Ideas?

Did I miss something? What are ways you can use Foursquare for your church.

So a few weeks ago Google announced that they have updated the indexing ability for flash.  While this is seemingly good news for flash users on church websites like clover, it still doesn’t offer a complete fix.  Google now can follow page links inside the flash. But even though they say its working, they want developers to check all the links inside the flash and make sure they are in the sitemap file.  This tells me they haven’t worked out all the bugs yet.  And with all Google’s good effort, you still get comments like this:

Adam said…
Why is it that with all the indexing flash and content within flash, are pages with flash still ranking very low? This of course doesn’t apply to nationally recognized brands but to smaller sites that utilize flash. Too many perspective clients have come to me asking why their flash site is ranking terribly low and they have great content that’s useful but still low rankings. I can’t help but notice that flash offers lower rankings compared to HTML and Javascript offerings…

I understand why site ranking is still low. Flash is not programmed like HTML where you put individual links to individual separated pages. Most sites using full flash, have a CMS (content management system) running them. Now the difference between a CMS running on a server using a web-based programming language like PHP, Ruby on Rails, C#, etc. and a Flash CMS is that the CMS running on the server, creates the pages on the server side and pushes it to the client. The client gets a “Static” page and therefor google indexes the static content because it can follow it easier. A flash CMS file holds the programming logic in the same file that is pushed to the client and therefor google would have to interpret the programming to find all the possible content to index.

HTML has the same problem when it’s content is dynamically produced by Client Side Javascript. Google still can’t index that correctly.  Content dynamically generated on the client side, has to be interpreted via the programming language, thus making it too hard to index (think of computing time also). Whereas, Server Side generated content is not left up for the spider to interprete, just index.

Here’s another problem; Google can index any text content that the user can see, but I have a feeling that it has a hard time associating that content with individual pages and relevancy inside the page. In a HTML page, Google indexes based on all sorts of factors like keyword density, placement of keywords in association of all the content of page, and also how the content is outlined (i.e. H1, H2, p). With flash, dynamic content is harder to associate those in relevance to the page. Sure you can have correct HTML in the flash file, but how is flash going to know where that content is placed. With one html block, there should be no problem, but what if there is multiple blocks. How will the spider know what is more relevant than another. Also, what if some content is hidden by a layer covering it or for some animation affect.

When Google started indexing Flash 2 years ago, I decided to test it’s indexing ability to see how possible it would be to cloak keywords in content. The purpose was not to see if I could beat google by cloaking for higher SEO, but to see if I could raise some quality scores in Google Adwords. I never used it on any real campaigns but did it for testing.  It worked for a few months, then google started watering down the results.  Knowing the spam industry (via having to compete with them), they would abuse this to no extent.

With all these factors in flash, I believe Google has no choice but the water down the potential of a Flash based website.

So what do you think?

I recently was reviewing a design company that specializes in websites for churches, in particular church plants. I was impressed with the designs they produce and can say they are top notch when it comes to design.  They offered wonderful features that every church needs like Sermon Brodcasting online, editable pages, blogs, calendars, etc.  They build beautiful private islands for churches.

Wait, I thought you said they build websites?

Let me explain. You see, a website without online marketing is just like a secluded island that nobody knows about.  Now this particular company does offer SEO to each their designs.  While SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a required step to having people find your site, it will not get you listed in the search engines.  SEO is basicly making the code in your website search engine friendly so that IF you are visited by a search engine bot, the bot will be able to categorize and index your site in their database. SEO is like adding a dock to your island.

What the church needs to be is not an island but more of a Port. To achieve this you church needs at the minimum some basic search engine marketing. This used to be pretty easy; as all it required was submitting your website to the search engine inclusion forms. But things have changed.  Just getting submitted to the search engines will not guarantee you will show up in the search engines. 97% of the time your not going to show up unless someone types the name of your church.  Now you have to have an entire online presence to succeed in online marketing. This includes online news articles, twitter feeds, facebook, google map listings, and tons of inbound links to your website.

While I can appreciate what this particular design shop is doing for the church. It”s missing something I feel is vital. Because a beautiful design does you no good if nobody knows your their.

Is your church or ministry have an active online marketing plan?