We talk a lot on Xpiritmental about communications from a web perspective. Topics like web development, web design, content development and organizational structure are often what our posts gravitate towards.
But it would be wrong to assume that just because we talk so much about web and online communications that we don’t also care very much about more traditional communications mediums such as print ads, radio ads, brochures and billboards. Those are still very much a part of the work that we do here.
I suppose that a big part of the reason that online communications get more face-time on this blog than traditional communications is because, well, traditional communications are already embedded in most of our minds as solid tools, whereas social media strategy such as blogging and Twitter are tools that many in the faith community still approach with skepticism.
That said, I wanted to take the opportunity with today’s post to highlight the fact that print is in fact not dead. While online methods of communicating do have their strengths that do give them a significant edge over traditional communications, it’s important that we continue to augment those initiatives with more traditional advertising. Why? Because there are still loads of people out there who don’t even know what blogging is. Additionally, having a multi-pronged approach to your communications will help reinforce your messaging. Just as I said in a previous post about social media, it’s still important to augment your online interactions with in-person interactions. Similarly, traditional mediums for communications are a great way to interact with your audience where they live.
It’s a number of years ago now, but one of our clients had us do a billboard, brochures and a website for his church – all of which were based on the same theme and targeted to a specific audience that he had identified in his area. The results of that integrated campaign were amazing. The churches attendance grew 277% and many individuals specifically cited that they ended up at the church by having seen the billboard, gotten home and headed to the website (the URL of which they got from the billboard) and then went and visited the church where brochures and even more importantly, a church congregation that supported the messaging could be found.
Perhaps the day is coming where it will be difficult, if not impossible to justify a television or a print ad for your ministry – kind of like direct mail pieces are impossible to justify today (given that they typically garner a less than 1% response rate). But for the time being, that’s not the case and so I’d encourage you to think about ways in which you could be helping to broaden the impact of your communications through traditional communications mediums like print.
This morning, Mark sent a link to our team that he had found which included a Q&A with a number of designers who specialize in church website design. The responses provided by the designers were all around very interesting. It's a longish article but if you get some time, well worth the read. Enjoy!
Note: We debated whether to post this video or not but we thought we'd take a risk because it's such a good ad - just be sure to wait until the end, we trust it will qualify any concerns you may have with the beginning few moments.
The reason I wanted to post this today was because there's actually a really good communications lesson inherent in this commercial. The company that made this video has done a wonderful job of creating a personality out of something we take for granted most every day. They've created a character that is sad and offputting and yet pathetic - someone we are sympathetic towards - and in the end, someone we can be happy for as he finds validation.
The lesson here is that using a personality to communicate an idea that people are indifferent to can be a powerful communications tool.
Due to popular demand we have converted a number of the Xpiritmental background wallpapers to AdvancedMinistry PowerPoint backgrounds. This will enable AdvancedMinistry users to use these slides in worship settings, ministry presentations, etc.
To download AdvancedMinistry PowerPoint backgrounds, login and click on Download Materials > PowerPoint Slides.
Today I have the happy opportunity to announce the launch of the new World Relief Canada (WRCanada) website at: http://www.wrcanada.org/.
The launch of this site is the culmination of a year of effort as we worked with World Relief Canada to define, design and develop the site in such a way that it would represent and facilitate the important work they do.
And although we deeply value each of our clients, it’s always incredibly inspiring to us to be able to be of service to an organization that has Mission and Vision statements like this:
Mission – World Relief Canada’s Mission is to respond to the relief and development needs of the world’s poor in the name of Jesus Christ, through our global network of Christian organizations, in partnership with Canadian and overseas Churches.
Vision - World Relief Canada’s Vision is to see people responding, with compassion and justice, to the needs of the poor, oppressed and suffering in ways that bring healing and transformation in the world’s poorest communities.
The inspiration that we derive from working with an organization like this has led to a site that we are extremely proud of and are confident will serve World Relief Canada well.
I’d encourage any readers of this blog to check the new website out - not just to see the design and development work that we’ve done – but to also take in some of the information about the great work that World Relief Canada is doing across the globe, and to be encouraged and challenged by content such as the Poverty Perspective and CEO, Laurie Cook’s own personal blog. I’m confident you will be impacted.
One of the things that makes alarm bells go off in our minds early in a project is when a client indicates that we can talk to so-and-so for technical questions and so-and-so for design/brand related issues and so-and-so for any and all billing requests...nightmare on the horizon.
The first reason that this is a challenge is that having multiple points of contact basically ensures that communications will be lost throughout the process. We communicate something to one person and the message never gets passed along. This often leads to duplicated messages or conversations which is time consuming for both parties.
The second concern with this is that having multiple points of contact often leads to contrary requests being placed. While we do consider part of our job to help our clients distill information down and filter it through their brand platform, at the end of the day, our hope is to teach the principals of brand-minded decision-making so that the client becomes self sufficient in this area to a greater degree and can manage their own communication and decision flow without day-to-day involvement on our part.
Giving your vendor multiple points of contact is a sure-fire way to ensure that communications will be lost or confused and that directives given to the vendor will start to conflict. Just as with the management of your brand, having one person set up as the single point of communication flow will only help to ensure that your relationship with your vendor works smoothly.
Today we're going to throw out a recommendation for a solid video conversion utility that we have used here. It's called Total Video Converter and you can download it here. Despite the fact that their website looks awful, the software is something that we definitely recommend for any church or ministry that's looking for a good utility to help with video conversion. Enjoy!
I think it’s fair to say that you will probably never find a line item in your accounting records indicating that your blog or Twitter account resulted in a specific number of sales or donor dollars – it just doesn’t work that way.
This fact is reinforced by the research cited in this article based on the question: “How often do you refer to social media websites or features as a resource for information, reviews, or recommendations when in the market for [category]?”
What I love most about this article though, is a comment posted on June 3 that reads:
Isn't asking the question "do you turn to Social Media when making purchasing decisions?" to determine the effectiveness of "marketing" on social network sites akin to asking "do you get in your car and drive when making purchasing decisions?" in order to determine the effectiveness of billboards and other on-road advertising?
Just because users don't go to social networking sites to help them make purchasing decisions doesn't mean that their purchasing decisions aren't influenced by marketing on social networking sites.
Or that a company presence on a social network site doesn't lead to direct sales (i.e. through product announcements than can be tracked directly to specific sales).
This comment get’s to the heart of the misunderstanding and misuse of social media in corporate and organizational contexts. It’s not just about a direct tie to a bottom-line on your spreadsheet. It’s about branding. It’s about creating a relationship with a person outside of the confines of a sale or a donor pitch that does translate into an awareness which impacts decision-making later on.
For those of you that rely on donor dollars to do the work that you do; it’s hard…if not impossible to walk into a room of people and in one pitch, build enough of a rapport to ask them for money in any effective way. But if the people you were engaging were already engaged and primed for your message via your blog or Twitter account – you could skip the basics get on with the business of telling the compelling story about your work.
This is the bottom line of social media – hard to measure and well worth the effort.
Over the next few weeks we are going to be launching a number of online video tutorials in AdvancedMinistry. Tutorials will range from “How-To Guides” to “Time-Saving Tips”.
To give you a taste of what you can expect, we’ve created a tutorial on customizing your own template (using the new AM 3.0 features) in combination with "My Beta Template".
Recently, we added the ability for users to customize their template in AdvancedMinistry. It’s something that many of you have asked for on numerous occasions in the past and we added it because we are sure that some of you could really benefit from this kind of tool. However, since we added this new feature, we also added the following warning message when you attempt to build your own customized template:
“Those with very little or no design experience should proceed with caution. This is a powerful tool that can do damage to your brand if not used properly.”
I wanted to take the opportunity to use today’s post to both highlight and explain that message.
The biggest reason that we didn’t integrate the ability to customize templates a long time ago was because of the mission and vision of AdvancedMinistry (AM). AM was never just about giving churches and ministries a way to have a website, it’s about providing smaller-budget churches and ministries with a tool to improve their communications – to do better.
Historically, churches and ministries do an awful job of creating well-designed, functional websites that contain frequently updated content. But not every church can afford the investment of having a custom website developed for them with the proper design and content management constraints put in place to maintain a high-quality website. In fact, the vast majority can’t - so we created AM to fill the gap.
But by opening up the door to allow for customization of templates, we’ve done more than just give all AM users a great new tool to play with. We’ve also opened the door for users to do things to their sites that will look awful and completely undermine the whole purpose of the platform. This is the dark side of a tool like this that many don’t (or won’t) talk about – in some cases because they are more concerned with getting more clients than they are with caring about the quality of their customers websites.
Often we find the AdvancedMinistry name on sites that rank church or ministry-based website platforms and most often we rank around the middle of the pack largely on the basis that we haven’t offered template customization. And on one hand, this feature can sound like it should be a default part of a system like AdvancedMinistry nowadays, but if you stop and think about it, it actually has great potential to allow the users of the system to shoot themselves in the foot and sure enough, this is already happening on AM.
So, in highlighting this warning message my hope is that you will come to understand where our heart is at. We know from experience that good quality design and a well-maintained site will only serve to help your ministry.
So please take the time to consider that if you don’t know what you’re doing from a design perspective, you’ll be better off with a pre-designed template. Alternatively, spend the time and money to have a good designer look at your customizations and evaluate your site, making suggestions on how to improve it.
About three months ago I set out to go from "guy who has never distance-run in his life" to guy that runs for 30-minutes solid. The process took 10 weeks and a few weeks back when I finally achieved the end goal, the sense of accomplishment was awesome. It's something that I'm now taking into further running and fitness goals including the crazy idea of cutting my coffee consumption cold-turkey starting today and hopefully by the end of the summer, running 5k in 25 minutes. I tell you all that though not to highlight my achievements but to reinforce how important goal-setting is - I'm sure that without a goal, I would still be nowhere near running 30 minutes solid which I can do with ease now.
And I'm also sure that when I start to talk about how important goal-setting is for an organization, that many of you will mentally check-out thinking "yeah, yeah, I know...that's so obvious". But the problem is that it's so often the obvious things that get lost in our day-to-day work.
Last week, Seth Godin had a great post about setting goals. Have a read...it's worth it.
What is/are your goals? Just as importantly, if you have them written out somewhere, when was the last time to referred to them?
In an age where many people update their Facebook / Twitter status’ more than they brush their teeth, one has to wonder about the dangers of social media, beyond the obvious one – addiction.
I remember the first time that I signed up to use Facebook, I thought to myself, “Do I really want people knowing what I’m doing all the time?” After getting over my hesitation, I decided that it was worth the shot; I have been a Facebook user ever since. One of the reasons that I enjoy Facebook is that I can control who sees what – status updates, photos, wall posts, etc. Even so, I am typically very careful what I say and what I post, remembering that everything I say is “on record”.
Then there’s Twitter, another popular tool used by many people and organizations throughout the world. Twitter is a simple way to keep people up-to-date with all of life’s happenings. On the Twitter.com front page, they define their site as the answer to one simple question: “What are you doing?” Most people that use Twitter allow anyone to “follow them” (their status updates), whereas Facebook is reserved for “friends” (although many would question how many of your Facebook friends are actually your “real friends”) :).
I’ll cut to the point. Most of us agree that there are great reasons to use social media tools like Twitter and Facebook (especially from a “ministry/business marketing front”), but do we ever consider the personal dangers of using such tools to let people know what we’re doing? What if someone was waiting for us to leave our house so that they could rob it? What if someone was following us on Twitter so that they could stalk us? What if someone was watching you upload pictures of your children that you didn’t want them to see?
At the end of the day, I recognize that God is control and that we should not live in fear or worry (Luke 12:22-24). I also believe that we have a responsibility to use common sense. If you’ve ever been on an overseas mission trip to a second/third world country, you would probably agree that the last thing you want to do when you get off the plane is start flashing around money or giving people opportunities to take advantage of you.
In the same way, the next time you login to Facebook or Twitter I would simply challenge you to consider the potential ramifications of your post. “Does what I’m posting have the potential to cause me/my organization harm?” If the answer to that question is, “Yes”, then you may want to take a step back and reconsider what you say.
So this is what happens around here if you take a day off...you're planned blog post gets pre-empted :)
It will be interesting to see what the adoption will be like of this new search engine from Microsoft. In any case, I don't imagine we'll be "Binging" anytime soon like we've been "Googling" for a while now.
On a related note, does anyone remember if "googling" as a verb sounded as funny about 8-10 years ago as the concept of "binging" does now?
Ever wondered what your site would look like in a different template, but didn't want it to affect your live site? Introducing MY BETA TEMPLATE. Now you can choose a different template to preview/edit without having to worry about your public users seeing it. This will be particularly helpful for those who wish to use the AM 3.0 Custom Template features; now you can customize your design, and when you're ready to launch it, simply make it your CURRENT TEMPLATE.
To test out this new feature, login to your AdvancedMinistry account and click on “Choose My Template”.
There's been a few big announcements regarding new web products/services in recent weeks. One of them is something coming out of Google called Wave. Some are calling it a game-changer and so I thought it might be good to bring it all to your attention by way of an article at Mashable.
Electricurrent is pleased to announce a new Xpiritmental desktop wallpaper entitled, Words of the Savior, designed using the words proclaimed by Jesus Christ. Download the new wallpaper below or visit the Xpiritmental Archives for more wallpapers.
Xpiritmental No. 39 Words of the Savior As proclaimed by Christ.
The last few weeks at Electricurrent have been very exciting. A few weeks ago, we asked AdvancedMinistry users to complete an online survey letting us know what they liked and didn’t like about AdvancedMinistry. Last Thursday, the Task List was announced and our work began!
Well today, I am pleased to announce the first Beta of AdvancedMinistry 3.0, which enables you to customize your own template including site dimensions, number of columns, fonts, titles, colors, background images, headers and more. AM 3.0 is part of our continued effort to bring you a platform that is always advancing and improving.
To customize your template, login to your account and click on "Choose My Template". From there, choose "AM 3.0 (BETA) - My Customized Designs". Then just give your template a name and you're all set! You can save as many custom templates as you want so that you can switch between them at any time. As always, you can still go back to a predefined AdvancedMinistry template whenever you wish.
Over the next couple of weeks, we will be building on AM 3.0 Beta and adding even more features, including an online tutorial for the Customized Designs module.
Recently, Tim wrote a blog post about why he loves Twitter. Knowing that there are likely a number of you that are wrestling with understanding and seeing the value in a tool like Twitter, I thought that it would be good to share Tim's thoughts with you all. At times this post can be a bit technical (which makes sense given who Tim O'Reilly is and the audience he serves), but the second bullet point that he makes in particular carries some interesting implications from a ministry and non-profit perspective. Click here for his post.
This sign is an absolute disaster from a communication perspective. I shouldn't have to know BEDMAS in order to be impacted by your pitch.
It reminds me of the speech that Bilbo Baggins gives at his one hundred and eleventh birthday party near the beginning of the Fellowship of the Ring: "I don't know half of you half as well as I should like, and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve." The difference between Bilbo's speech and this sign though is that I'm guessing this sign isn't intentionally or strategically confusing.
Often this kind of an end result comes as a function of trying to say something that is really clear in your mind and simply doing an awful job of translating it into a message that your audience can appreciate or even understand. As such, it presents a great example of why getting an outsiders perspective on your communications is a good idea. But frequently we don't get that outside opinion for any of a number of different reasons. Here's a few:
Can't afford the time/money to get someone to look at it.
I don't know how much time and money was spent on this sign in design and production, but one thing I am sure of is that it's hours and dollars that could have been better spent and would have been had someone put the brakes on the project, or at the very least adjusted the steering wheel.
I don't need anyone to review my work.
Sadly, we do see this attitude from time-to-time and it's such a destructive approach. The best communicators realize that they come from a certain perspective, experience and bias and as a result, know that it's critical to make sure that when they speak or write that what they communicate can resonate with the audience. It's not an admission of weakness; in fact, it's an act of wisdom to accept that you're not all knowing.
Didn't think of it that way.
This is probably the most popular reason for a sign like this getting made and posted. And while neglect and oversight can be excusable to a degree, the challenge comes when nothing is learned from the experience.
So here we are, in the happy circumstance of having the opportunity to benefit from someone else's experience and hopefully the thoughts above can help each of us make sure that we don't fall into the same mistake ourselves.
And now, I feel the need to go purchase half a pair of glasses...or something like that.
Back in February I posted a tip that had to do with YouTube videos. It was a parameter that you can add to the code snippet from YouTube that keeps related videos from showing up at the end of the video when you've posted it on your blog/website. From the comments it seemed to be of some help to a few of our readers so I thought it would be a good idea to add another tip.
In a similar fashion to the previous tip, if you add &start=15 to the end of the URL that you copied and pasted from YouTube, when a user presses play to view the video on your site it will start the video at the 15 second mark. This is less an issue when the thing you want people to see in the video is actually only 15 seconds in, but when it's 2 minutes in, by just changing the 15 to a 120 (the start value is in seconds), you ensure that your site visitors get to the pertinent content right away.
Xpiritmental is a resource. It's a place to learn and to share thoughts on marketing, ministry, design, service, the Web, culture and more. We'll start the conversation, but we're looking forward to hearing what you've got to say.
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There's been a few big announcements regarding new web products/services in recent weeks. One of them is something coming out of 
This sign is an absolute disaster from a communication perspective. I shouldn't have to know 
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