Anthony Coppedge Blog 2.0 » Social Networks

5 of 7 Crucial Elements of Social Media ROI for Churches

Anthony D. Coppedge — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 04:03:18 +0000

After a hiatus from blogging, I’ve continued this series.

To get anyone up to speed on the series, here are the first four parts:

Part 1 - “Know How Social Media Integrates the Vision of Your Church”

Part 2 - “Decide What’s Measurable and What’s Not”

Part 3 - “What is ROM?“

Part 4 - “Which Metrics Matter?“

And now, on to part 5.

Knowing what to measure and how to measure social media are well and good, but you’ll need tools to both capture and make sense of the information.To help you with the tools available today, I’m covering the 5th of 7 crucial elements of social media return on investment for churches: “Empower Every Ministry With Tools and Training”. Before I share a list of tools for social media measurement, let the words of Australian writer and critic, Robert Hughes, give needed perspective:

“A determined soul will do more with a rusty monkey wrench than a loafer will accomplish with all the tools in a machine shop.” – Robert Hughes

Your determination and focused effort with even a few freely available tools will help you gain more insight than a casual use of the venerable juggernaut software tools for measuring social media ROI.

Free Social Media Measurement & Analytic Tools

For many churches, the two main social media platforms used are Facebook and Twitter, which both include some level of built-in tools for understanding your interaction with others and how/when your content is viewed and shared. Facebook includes Insights, a simple dashboard view that shows some surprisingly helpful information about Fan Pages.

Facebook Demographics from a Fan Page

As the example above demonstrates, it’s helpful to know which demographic groups are interacting with your site and which are not. From this, you can decide how you want to alter your content to reach the demographic user groups you desire. Facebook has a page about Insights (just type in Facebook Insights on the Facebook search) that helps get new users up-to-speed quickly, and is written in a conversational tone, making it easy to understand.

“When you create compelling content, people may choose to interact with the material by commenting, liking, or writing on your Wall. These people help to spread your content virally throughout Facebook, as their engagement leads to organic stories being published in their friends’ News Feed.”

In addition to demographics information, Facebook Insights also gives you:

Post views
Post feedback
Page content feedback
Daily story feedback
Page posts
Daily page activity
Page views
Tab views
External referrers
Media consumption stats

Similarly, Twitter provides some basic measurement tools right from the web browser interface.

However, the big Kahuna of metrics is Google, with their freely available Google Analytics. The data, trends, insight and helpful information about any website you own/manage is tremendous! The tricks that Facebook uses to provide up-to-date information and then offer to sell you ads that fit your likes is straight from the Google playbook. While there are many applications that track and look at data in unique and interesting ways from your websites, the obvious starting point should be Google Analytics.

Social Media Metrics & Helpful Tools

As good as Google, Facebook and Twitter are independently from each other, there have been a growing number of specialized apps and web tools built to tie social media analytics into a single interface. If you are serious about getting the best ROM out of Social Media for your church and/or ministries, then you will need to invest time (and probably at least some money) into a robust tool.

Right up front, I want to say that I think there are two broad categories for these social media tools: Social Media Engagement and Social Media Monitoring & Engagement.

Social Media Engagement Tools

Simple and free tools abound for helping users streamline their social media activities. I only have one recommendation here: TweetDeck. What started as a Twitter third-party app has greatly expanded to include multiple accounts across multiple social media networks, including Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Posting or scheduling posts and status updates across multiple networks and even from more than one account is a great value of TweetDeck, making all-in-one updates simple. Additionally, TweetDeck allows for multiple ways to organize the never-ending stream of information and updates. From viewing only replies to a specific account to simple searches for a term, name, tag or phrase, the desktop and mobile versions of this tool are very effective and easy to use. Even better, it’s possible to sync the user information between multiple devices, making for a much more useful tool than separate desktop and mobile installations.

I still use TweetDeck daily, even though I also use some of the tools below. It’s just that good.

Social Media Monitoring & Engagement Tools

From free programs like HootSuite to low-cost subscription services like SproutSocial to high-end, “you-complete-me” tools such as Radian6, there’s no shortage of options for taking a deeper dive into the metrics, analytics and measurement of your social media effort and networks.

Where TweetDeck stops at making it simple or organize and coordinate social media updates, these tools allow for the capture, display and analysis of your social media trends at or near real-time.

I’ve tried quite a few including SproutSocial, MeltWaterBuzz and, what I think is easily king-of-the-hill, Radian6.

SproutSocial provides attractive, easy-to-understand, useful information for most churches to find valuable

A step up in complexity and deeper data mining is Meltwater Buzz (seen below). This is view of some screens taken from crunchbase.com to show the kind of visual data available for analysis.

Meltwater Buzz is a much deeper toolset with not only more data, but helpful tracking and engagement tools

The game changes when you step up to a tool like Meltwater Buzz (shown above) or Radian6 (shown below). Both are very robust tools that help share the workload between a team of social media specialists and have very helpful tools for aggregating and assigning follow-up engagement tasks.

Radian6 provides incredible detail about metrics, measurement, sentiment and analytics reporting

In my opinion, most churches will do just find with Facebook Insights and welcome the additional helpfulness of a tool like SproutSocial. For the minority of churches that are very, very proactive and responsive in their social media activities, the step up to enterprise-grade software is a wise investment. For those with a very wide reach and large influence, as well as the strategic and tactical needs to staff up a social media team, I simply must recommend the top-notch Radian6 software and team. From the top down, this is a very bright and classy group of people.

4 of 7 Crucial Elements of Social Media ROI for Churches

Anthony D. Coppedge — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 16:13:10 +0000

We’re half-way through this series! Today’s post is probably the most important of the bunch. Here’s the links to the three previous posts:

Part 1 - “Know How Social Media Integrates the Vision of Your Church”

Part 2 - “Decide What’s Measurable and What’s Not”

Part 3 – “What is ROM?“

Which Metrics Matter?

This is a long post because it encompasses so much. Therefore, I’m going to give you the answers now and then clarify them below. Ready?

Good metrics are measurements against your goals. Any other kind of measurement is potentially true, but irrelevant.

Build social media metrics from existing references of data. In other words, find a correlation & track it.

The metrics you gather are only as useful as the insights you can apply from them.

Metrics are indicators; over time, they reveal trends.

Here’s the truth: there is no “standard” set of measurement that everyone uses. Your metrics should only consist of that which you value and track.

Metrics Against Goals

Good metrics are measurements against your goals. Any other kind of measurement is potentially true, but irrelevant. Social media isn’t just about numbers, it’s more about reach. Having 5,000 followers on Twitter or 800 friends on Facebook isn’t all that hard to achieve; simply follow thousands and friend hundreds and a fair number of people will reciprocate.

That kind of numeric growth has little value because it doesn’t give you real influence over those people. In fact, since they don’t have a real relationship with you, any updates you make are simply more noise for them to filter out.

Numeric Growth vs. Relevant Reach

Numbers alone are a poor indicator of influence in social media. You must cut through the clutter, have targeted and purposeful content that’s delivered with consistency. Doing just these basic things nearly guarantees some level of growth and reach. However, there’s a difference between reach and relevant reach.

Amber Naslund is one of the brightest minds in social media. She is a renowned speaker, author and thought leader. Amber is the VP of Social Strategy for Radian6, which is in my opinion the ultimate social media monitoring and analytics tool. She has defined relevant reach as: having focus, efficiency and impact.

“You want to expend the effort of growing both the size of your audience as well as the density of its overall relevance to your work.” – Amber Naslund, VP of Social Strategy, Radian6

We’re not against growing your social media fans and followers. If you’re creating valuable content and engaging in meaningful dialogue, you will increase your reach numerically as a natural by-product. What people like Amber and myself are saying is that you must have great intentionality in order to grow a large network with relevant reach.

(Note: I’ll be talking about measurement tools, including Radian6, in my next post.)

Start with What You Know

Build social media metrics from existing references of data. In other words, find a correlation & track it.

What kind of data are you currently keeping track of? Web site visits? Number of emails opened/bounced/click-through rate? Number of event registrations? Any data that gives you helpful metrics about how people are communicating with your church and/or responding to those various forms of communication are potentially helpful because they’ll give you insights into the kind of content and which demographics respond to certain kinds of communications.

With social media, you do have another communications medium and, as such, you can make it part of your communications strategy. That includes measuring using tools in Facebook (such as Insights) as well as Google Analytics to track how links to/from Facebook and/or Twitter and/or Google+ perform. Over time, you’ll begin to understand what “gets traction” with certain demographics, at which times of day and through which channels.

Remember, social media is one of your channels of communications, but it surpasses more impersonal channels because of the relational nature of the toolset.

You should already have an editorial calendar to determine which ministries are communicating to various groups of members and visitors. Too much information or unregulated communications from multiple ministries isn’t information; it’s spam. In the same way, abusing social media as a massive megaphone is like vomiting on your audience. Build a social media calendar and make it part of your information & communication strategy.

Metrics for Insights

The metrics you gather are only as useful as the insights you can apply from them.

Data is just data unless it can prove or reveal useful information and trends. Too much data = information paralysis. While it may be interesting to track the number of times a quote from the pastors’ message was re-tweeted, what insight does that provide? If you’re looking to find how many of the followers are re-tweeting the pastor, it might be helpful to know how relevant their reach is (number of followers who re-tweet their re-tweet). That’s basic measurement to gain some insight. However, I want you to think past the obvious.

Thinking Ahead

What if the weekend message had life application points spread throughout the talk that referenced how the pastor will be expanding on each of those Monday through Friday on the church Facebook Fan page? For example, if the message is about having a teachable spirit (based on Proverbs 12:1) and there are 5 Characteristics of a Teachable Spirit (hat tip to pastor Jimmy Evans), then leave people wanting a bit more by saying you’re going expand on each of those through a Facebook note or a blog post with some life application people easily try each day. Then, prepare ahead of time how you’re going to promote and share the content. For example:

In the message, mention the church Facebook page.
Add a link and reminder in the bulletin.
Put a link to the Facebook page on the church website; add a link by the sermon audio, video & PDF files.
Tweet the link (using a shortening service like Bit.ly to track the click-throughs) from the church & pastors’ accounts.
Send an email out on Monday early in the morning to land in the congregants email with a reminder (and a link). On Friday’s email, promote the upcoming sermon and provide an invite link to send to their friends.

These proactive planning creates trackable data. This, in turn, provides a set of metrics to begin tracking over time (establishing a baseline). The insights from these metrics help you in the creation, content and targeting for future campaigns.

Rinse, Repeat, Look for Trends

Metrics are indicators; over time, they reveal trends.

If you’ve not realized it yet, I want to point out that this is work and probably requires more time than you’ve ever considered giving towards social media. It’s lots of consistent work, over a long period of time, with tweaking and testing, that will yield the kind of results that make measuring social media ROI worthwhile. It’s hard. It takes time. It requires consistency. It makes you define your objective, tweak your goals, modify your strategies and change your tactics for realistic expectations. Most of all, it requires a commitment.

“You must inspect what you expect. If you, or your manager, is not willing to define expectations clearly, you will in no way be able to determine your ROI for social media.”

One last quote from my friend Amber Naslund. She has a word about measuring social media ROI that is worthy of capturing & memorizing:

“Measuring success can be different than ROI. You can have successful outcomes that are not measurable in terms of dollars.” – Amber Naslund, VP of Social Strategy, Radian6

How is your church defining the role, goals and metrics of social media? What insights, learning and surprises have you found about using social media for yourself and your church?

3 of 7 Crucial Elements of Social Media ROI for Churches

Anthony D. Coppedge — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 01:31:12 +0000

This is the third part of the series, so if you’ve missed Part 1 (“Know How Social Media Integrates the Vision of Your Church”) or Part 2 (“Decide What’s Measurable and What’s Not”), you can get up to speed quickly. Part 3 is about defining your Return On Ministry (ROM).

What Is ROM (Return On Ministry)?

In business, any money spent toward making a profit is calculated as Return On Investment (ROI). It’s s a simple formula:

In churches, we’re not looking to make a profit, but we are interested in knowing if we’re being good stewards of our resources.

Good financial stewardship has less to do with how much money you save and more to do with how much money isn’t wasted.

That’s the beginning of a good Return On Ministry (ROM), but it’s only the financial part of the equation. ROM is unique for every local congregation because it is measured against the progress towards meeting the vision of each church. No two churches should have exactly the same vision since each are called by God to be distinct in their communities.

ROM Is A Reflection Of Your Vision

When your ministry objectives are filtered against the unique vision for your church, you can more readily measure your effort and efficiencies (Return On Ministry).

In the previous post (Part 2) I defined this process:

Your objective shouldn’t change, as this is your main purpose. Your goals may shift slightly over time. Your strategies will require tweaking as you learn the most effective methods. Your actions are always in flux, based on the time, manpower and technology (systems) you commit.

When defining the Return On Ministry, you’re saying you want to put “X” amount of effort (time, people, resources) into an objective and desire to see a certain, defined outcome.

For example, your church vision might be about connecting with young families and single parents through community projects and kid-oriented activities.

The objective may be to see 50 kids come to faith in Jesus.

Your goals could be to coordinate three fun mini-camps for kids throughout the summer, with 20 new families included in each of the three events (remember, it’s not a goal unless it’s measurable and time-based).

Your strategies might include using Facebook and Twitter to post promotional videos, Facebook slideshows; direct parents to online registrations with discount codes; and even include your congregation in sharing a specific link on their Facebook wall or with their Twitter or Google+ circles.

The actions would be tasks for creating the promotional videos, having multiple event information and registration web pages built, creating special (trackable) links through bit.ly (a URL shortening service) and a coordinated phone and email campaign to engage congregants in the outreach effort.

Objective. Goals. Strategies. Actions. In that order, they provide you with the planning and accountability to measure your progress towards tasks and goals of your vision. (Note: I realize that some people teach “Goals, Objectives, Strategies & Actions”, placing Goals before Objectives. However, I don’t subscribe to the SMART mnemonic. I prefer the MT methodology because Goals are always measurable and time based, which fit within the context of an objective. But I digress…)

Measuring ROM

What you value determines what you measure. You’ll find that measuring the ROM of social media is inexorably linked to that which is important to your ministries.

Really, this makes sense. On one hand, social media is a communication channel, just like email, snail mail and phone calls. But social media is more than a way to communicate. On the other hand, social media is also relational.

Social media extends conversations & relationships.

You cannot measure what you do not inspect, so you’ll have to determine your metrics for social media ROM as it lines up with accomplishing the vision for your church. When you do, you’ll find measuring is both practical and helpful, as it gives weight to your actions, activities and efforts.

2 of 7 Crucial Elements of Social Media ROI for Churches

Anthony D. Coppedge — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 00:38:03 +0000

In the last post, I described the 1st of 7 crucial elements of social media ROI: “Know How Social Media Integrates the Vision of Your Church”. Today, I’m tackling the 2nd of 7 crucial elements: “Decide What’s Measurable and What’s Not”.

Last week I hinted at this with the quote from the famous philosopher, Galileo:

“Measure what can be measured, and make measurable what cannot be measured.”

— Galileo Galilei

One last recap from last week before diving into the 2nd Crucial Element: You can measure anything, to a point. Some measurements can be measured precisely. Other measures, such as spiritual growth, are measured along the lines of “more like this” or “less like that” and have indicators (such as ‘spiritual fruit’).

The Exponential Reach of Social Media

Social media is a blurry interchange of personal, professional, private and public lines. Once something is on the internet, it’s permanent in one fashion or another, so social media is a new type of engagement that has a kind of permanency unlike previous communications. History that was recorded prior to the internet was managed and owned by few people, relative to humanity.

Social media is history being recorded and shared in real-time, all the time.

The volume of content has increased at a near incalculable, exponential rate. Whereas the few were publishers of content in the past, today everyone can be a publisher and, simultaneously, a distributor of content.

This paradigm shift is consequential in our context of the local church, because the ability to find, connect, engage and disciple people has, literally, no limits. Here in our Western culture, the local church movement has changed over the years from a few vocational pastors discipling some portion of their community, to many non-vocational pastors (those of us not working at a local church) having the reach and visibility to disciple groups of people (Facebook friends, Twitter followers, etc.).

Decide What’s Measurable

The exponential reach of social media (it’s not just who I know, but they people they know and the people they know, on and on…) has given voice to everyone. The problem is that if everyone’s talking, it’s hard to cut through the clutter. That’s why we must be listening more than we talk on social media.

Active listening is the first step of deciding what to measure for your social media ROI.

Define Your Demographics & Channels

Generally speaking, local churches have two basic groups of people to measure and two distinct kinds of social media avenues to explore:

TWO BASIC GROUPS:
- Those who are active “members” or “attendees” in the life of your church
- Those who are not yet plugged into the life of your church (your communities)
TWO SOCIAL MEDIA AVENUES:
- Personal staff/lay leadership social media accounts
- Ministry/Group social media accounts

Measuring the reach and effectiveness of your social media efforts starts with identifying the target audience and the quantifiable goals for engaging them. Therefore, it’s easy to start with your church/ministry accounts and get the low-hanging fruit of your existing members and attendees. After all, they’re the most likely to ‘like’ your Fan Pages and follow church and ministry-specific Twitter accounts.

For example, build a fan page for your church on Facebook and use your existing communications channels (from the stage, announcements, videos, website, church bulletin, etc.) to promote and request people to ‘like’ it on Facebook. This provides a baseline of both an audience and, over time, a way to calculate the adoption rate (growth) of your ‘fans’. You can then begin setting goals for the obvious numerical increase in fans per week/month and the less obvious things like trend data, such as:

Which kinds of posts get the most comments, re-tweets, wall-posts and mentions?
During which day of the week are people most active? What time of day?
What is the click-through rate from your other electronic communications to your social media properties?
How any people signed up for an activity or event via electronic registration through a social media page?
Based on the activity or event, are you reaching certain age groups/demographics more effectively?

In this example, Facebook provides every fan page with an “insights” page that gives you good, trackable data. Your website should also have measurable data (for free with Google Analytics), which you can compare and overlay against the data from Facebook. Over time, if you capture this externally and review it for trend analysis, you’ll begin to see what works and what doesn’t.

Decide What’s Not Measurable

Numbers alone are not enough data to declare success. With Twitter, many people and organizations subscribe to the model of “follow and be followed”, wherein they follow everyone they can in the hopes of getting a lot of reciprocal follows. It’s not terribly hard to have thousands (or tens of thousands) of followers on Twitter, but it’s not necessarily an indicator of real growth or, especially, effectiveness.

Organic growth (earned) is best, because it represents people choosing to seek out your social media channels (both ministry accounts and personal staff and lay leader accounts). These are higher quality and are weighted as being more valuable than thousands of people that follow but never bother to engage.

Deciding on what’s not measurable (or easily measured), such as the sentiment of your followers, means you’re looking for other indicators (what can be easily measured) like re-tweets, lots of comments or plenty of back-and-forth conversation. These indicators, especially as they increase in both the number of fans/follower and the frequency of their engagement, are the kinds of intuitive signs of growth and effectiveness.

Determine a Strategy and Tweak Frequently

Once you understand your baseline and basic measurements, you can develop a strategy for increasing your effectiveness (and efficiency, too). It’s important to make sure you do this in the right order:

What is your Objective for Social Media?
What Goals have you put in place? (A goal isn’t a goal if it’s not measurable and time-based. “X” happening by “Y” date).
What Strategies will help you accomplish each goal?
What are the Actions (tasks) that make up each of your strategies?

Your objective shouldn’t change, as this is your main purpose. Your goals may shift slightly over time. Your strategies will require tweaking as you learn the most effective methods. Your actions are always in flux, based on the time, manpower and technology (systems) you commit.

In case you haven’t noticed, this is a lot of work over an extended period of time (with no end date, I might add).

It’s easy to have a Facebook page or Twitter account that you use as a bully pulpit. It’s far more difficult to increase your true reach and increase engagement through these very relational channels without a good deal of planning, effort and consistency.

Are you ready to decide what you will and will not measure? Will you commit the time and be consistent in your efforts to leverage this unprecedented set of tools to reach more people than ever before? Are you prepared to sow and reap a digital harvest with actual souls attached to those names?

This task is not insignificant, but it’s the most far-reaching medium we’ve ever had to fulfill the Great Commission.

1 of 7 Crucial Elements of Social Media ROI for Churches

Anthony D. Coppedge — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 18:48:31 +0000

When your pastor prepares for each week’s message, 20-40 hours of his time are spent for about 30 minutes worth of content. That’s a ratio of anywhere between 40:1 to 80:1, meaning that the results should be pretty great to justify the effort expended. Of course, we don’t look at it this way because the Word of God never returns void (Isaiah 55:11) and we know that the message must be applied by the listener (James 1:23). Nevertheless, understanding how to better prepare and deliver a message, along with the methods and techniques to improve are all part of a teaching pastor’s arsenal. Over time, the pastor understands how to become a better communicator and how to share the Bible in practical and revelatory ways.

They key is to always be learning, ready to apply the insights for more effective life-application. In the same way, we should evaluate all of our significant communication methods and be diligent about improving in whatever message or activity we share with our communities.

With social media, churches must learn to transition from simply using it as a shiny electronic bullhorn to measuring the results of planning, feedback and effectiveness. To be successful, we must:

“Measure what can be measured, and make measurable what cannot be measured.”

— Galileo Galilei

You can measure anything, to a point. Some measurements, such as click-through rates & re-tweets, can be measured precisely. Other measures, such as spiritual growth, are measured along the lines of “more like this” or “less like that” and have evidence in spiritual fruitfulness. Regardless of the kind of measurement, we can, over time, learn how effective we are in reaching, engaging & discipling our communities.

A Quick Recap

I’ll be diving into each of the following 7 Crucial Elements one at a time. To recap, here’s the entire list:

1) Know How Social Media Integrates the Vision of Your Church

2) Decide What’s Measureable – and What’s Not

3) Define ROM (Return On Ministry)

4) Which Metrics Matter?

5) Empower Every Ministry with Tools & Training

6) Drive People to Decisions

7) Share Success Stories

My goal of quantifying and categorizing these 7 Crucial Elements is to help give a framework for church leaders to truly leverage the exponential reach and influence of social media.

1) Know How Social Media Integrates the Vision of Your Church

“What’s the unique God-sized vision for your church?” is a question I frequently ask pastors. They’re quick to give me a line, a statement or a story that usually gives a strong indication of what and how their local church is up to. “Why are you on Twitter?” is my follow-up question. Ironically, these same pastors who were so quick to give a detailed answer about vision fail to provide a vision-focused answer for their social media efforts (if they’re even using social media).

The reason, I believe, is because they’ve not thought about social media from the perspective of “Why?”, but only as another communication channel. Yes, it is a way to communicate, but unless you know why you’re doing something, you’ll likely not be getting the right kind of results from it. When filtered through the vision of the church, the purpose and methodology for using social media becomes clear.

First, know why you want to use social media. Only then will you be able to correctly identify when, how, what, where and who will be using it.

Your social media efforts should include all of the following:

Real people behind the account name. These people share with those in their social media sphere of influence and do more than provide another marketing channel of information about your church and ministries.

Helpful dialogue. Limiting any communication to talking “at” someone instead of talking “with” someone is ultimately meaningless (and fruitless).

Your value proposition. This isn’t a feature or a benefit of your organization, but the life-blood that answers exactly why you exists and what makes your church unique.

Any and all social media, from Facebook to Twitter to Google+, all rely on the same thing: relationships. Real relationships, not marketing speak, are an interactive set of communications across many mediums.

Here’s your exercise: apply the filter of “does how we use social media line up with the vision of our church?” What you’ll find is either a filter that reveals good intentions but limited results or a vision statement that needs to be refined. Look, a vision for your church is greater than “reach the greater metropolitan area where we live with the truth of Jesus Christ.” That’s the Great Commission, not a unique vision. When you can say “our church is different and set apart from every other church in our area because of ‘X’”, you’re looking squarely at the vision of your church.

Social media’s effectiveness for your church is directly proportional to how well it integrates with the vision of your church and the consistency with which you use it.

So, how is your church doing in meeting the first crucial element of social media ROI? What are you doing to filter your social media efforts against the question “Why?” and the measurement of life change?

Social Media & Churches: Stuck In Tactical

Anthony D. Coppedge — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 01:18:15 +0000

Facebook page? Check.

Twitter account? Check.

Doing more than posting status updates or re-tweeting the pastor? Uhhhhmm…

Those are all good actions and activities, but as checklists go, they’re simply tactical. That’s motion without progress; or, if there is progress, how can you know if it’s in the right direction or getting the right results?

The 30/50/20 Rule I outlined for pastors in my previous post is partially tactical, but it’s built around the idea that pastors will start to see value (ROtI – return on their time investment, which is minimal) through conversations. However, to fully take advantage of Social Media is to see beyond the actions and tasks and engage the individuals using these near real-time technologies.

7 Crucial Elements of Social Media ROI for Churches

I will briefly touch on these, as it’s too much information to put into a single blog post.

1) Know How Social Media Integrates the Vision of Your Church

2) Decide What’s Measureable – and What’s Not

3) Define ROM (Return On Ministry)

4) Which Metrics Matter?

5) Empower Every Ministry with Tools & Training

6) Drive People to Decisions

7) Share Success Stories

Having a strategy for your church’s social media efforts goes beyond the tactical and produces a plan to do something with the opportunity. Deciding to measure the return on investment (mostly, time, since churches are not selling product or service) will take time, effort and above all, consistency. However, the results can be very impressive when a strategy is employed.

Learning from the business world helps give context to this kind of dedication, consistency and effort. The folks over at MarketingSherpa polled 3,342 consumer and B2B (Business-to-Business) marketers, giving us valuable insights about how these firms are using social media to engage audience, build brand, generate leads and drive sales. Based on the survey results, the overall average ROI reported by those who are measuring it is 95 percent. One-quarter said they have achieved 100 percent ROI. Higher percentages were reported, too. Twelve percent said they have achieved 200 percent ROI; two percent reported 1,000 percent ROI.

While local churches aren’t looking to generate sales, they are interested in connecting with their communities (loosely translated as “leads” in the business world). The principle here is the point: a consistent social media strategy will yield results.

How is your church approaching social media? With a more tactical or strategic mindset? What have been your success stories and learnings?

Pastors & Twitter: My 30/50/20 Rule

Anthony D. Coppedge — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 15:57:51 +0000

If your pastor is new to Twitter or hasn’t found a good rhythm of how to use it, try my 30/50/20 rule for Pastors on Twitter:

30% message application: drop hints in your weekend message that you’ll be tweeting life application from the sermon topic every day for the upcoming week.

50% family/personal life: people want to feel like they know their pastors. Since you live in a glass-house anyway, offer them the view you want to share as you live life transparently.

20% inspiration/information (including ReTweets): You don’t have all the answers, and you’re learning, too. Be human and share what’s inspiring/challenging you and who you’re learning from.

Study: Mobile Makes Life Easier

Anthony D. Coppedge — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 23:04:21 +0000

More data continues to add to the pile of information that’s showing how mobile connections are shaping the lives and habits of Americans. According to the Performics 2011 Mobile Search Insights Study, conducted by ROI Research, 57% of us use the mobile Web more than once every day, with a whopping 77% of us using mobile search more than five times in the last month.

Overwhelmingly, satisfaction and adoption of mobile search holds true throughout the study:

75% said mobile search makes their lives easier
63% said access to mobile search has changed the way they gather information
32% said they use mobile search more than search engines on their computers

81% of respondents reported evening use of mobile search at home, 80% reported weekend use, and 59% reported use before work while 61% reported using mobile search at work.

Churches, the future is now and it’s on the mobile. I just can’t say this enough: rethink how people are finding your church, activities and resources and make it easy for them to do it while on-the-go. Chances are, you’ll need to do at least a few of the following:

Build out a mobile version of your church website
Integrate your Small Group finder tool (a part of your church management software) for mobile browsing
Conduct a poll and find out how many of your attendees use smart phones
Use mass email tools that have a mobile version output
Have people “check-in” to your church via Facebook or Foursquare when they arrive. Sharing this information creates free visibility to their friends who may not have a church home.

The future of mobile is wide open for churches. Think through how the life of your church can (and should) be anytime, anywhere for ministry.

Predicting Church Trends: Pastor of Social & Digital Communications

Anthony D. Coppedge — Sat, 05 Feb 2011 20:27:04 +0000

I don’t normally make predictions, but this is one I see coming like the light of a freight train in a tunnel. I believe that there will be a need (and eventually a demand) for a Pastor of Social & Digital Communications.

I’m not putting any bets on when churches will make this move, but when church leaders realize that social media isn’t a fad but instead a fundamental shift in interpersonal communications, the need for such a position will become apparent. Ironically, I believe that churches have a significant leg-up on just about every other social media market due to the fact that there have been the core makeup of social media segments in churches for thousands of years. Said another way, churches already have multiple small groups of people with similar or same affinities, needs and goals. The church social network existed long before it was made real-time anytime, anywhere by digital technologies.

What Defines A Pastor of Social & Digital Communications?

In my opinion, it’s more than a job description (though that’s helpful to a point), the position is a reflection of the unique DNA and needs of a church in context to their local and glocal (globally local; time and venue are almost entirely irrelevant on the Internet) communities.

Update: I don’t believe this will be the same as the current role of an Internet Pastor, which I believe is more similar to today’s multi-site campus pastor. Also, after additional consideration, I don’t think this will be a position at small or possibly even medium sized churches. To take a guess towards the future, I’d say this position might be more oriented towards the Communication team with a pastoral bent.

If a church is a focused on outreach through projects, social justice and equipping, I believe the role of an SDC pastor (Social & Digital Communications) will largely be around coordinating online event registration, making community connections and helping organizing logistics.

I also believe the same position at a church that’s more discipleship focused will most likely have more of their time coordinating between ministry leaders to ensure the left hand knows what the right hand is doing and working with a robust database of church members, attendees and community leaders & organizations to help raise awareness, make personal connections to the right leaders and managing multiple channels of information dissemination and communication.

Understanding Channels & Communication Mediums

Because this role has an emphasis on social media and Internet technologies, it most likely prove necessary for this staff position to have a strong communications background, leveraging social monitoring tools and clearly understanding demographics. Though the term “targeted demographics” sounds like pure marketing speak, what it represents is a truth in every church and organization:

The need to get the right information to the right people at the right time in the right way or ways.

Churches deal with this week in and week out today…

Making phone calls to senior adults
Sending postcards to first-time visitors
Sending HTML-rich emails to Gen X’ers
Sending SMS text messages to Gen Y’ers
Sending a combination of emails, postcards and personal phone calls for people who miss serving or attending (such as children’s classes)

The Matrix of Social & Digital

These channels of communication must be managed through a matrix of frequency, demographic, medium and priority.

Frequency is how often a need, activity, event or opportunity occurs. It also must represent the number of times the message is communicated across different mediums with different content.

Demographic is the target group, from church wide all the way down to an individual. Sub-demographics are the methods for slicing up a target group (young adults) into other, more specific parameters (single, married, attends X-often, has not attended since Y, has or has not served in a similar activity in the past or has signaled an interest that is saved to their profile (an attribute such as “like volunteering with other kids” or “wants to serve with other single mothers”).

Medium is the kind of content and the distribution channel for the medium. From video to email to text message to Facebook to Twitter to phone calls, defining the technology/vehicle options that best reach a certain people group(s), the content can be customized and delivered at the right time to the right people.

Priority defines the urgency of the information and the authority to remove, replace or reschedule other communication and/or engagement.

Is This Really A Dedicated Person?

Why I think this will become a common new position is the combination of talents, technology integration, leadership and interpersonal relationship capacity. While I do believe certain staff members may be able to “double up” on some of these roles today, I also believe that the velocity of change in technology combined with the need for near real-time communication will require a dedicated person who can meet the unique requirements of this role.

So, what do you think? Am I too early on this prediction? Are most churches so far behind the culture and technology curves to make this any kind of near-term need? Share your thoughts and speak into my prognostication.

What I Meant Was…

Anthony D. Coppedge — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 03:43:59 +0000

Sometimes, I wonder how what I’ve said can be misunderstood until I get a fresh perspective from someone else to re-read what I’ve said. And then it hits me: “Ooooh. What I meant was…”

I’ve learned that email is a poor communication medium for conveying emotion, sarcasm or subtlety. What I’m continuing to learn is that with social media – and the 140 characters of Twitter, in particular – it’s important to re-read what we say before we have it hit the web.

This happened to me tonight, and it took me a while to understand what the hub-bub was all about. Here’s what I tweeted:

“PASTORS: Please use Twitter & Facebook to share your life instead of spamming scripture. We’ve already got YouVersion.com.”

What I Meant Was…

I intended to help pastors understand that while tweeting scripture is OK, you’ve gotta do a lot more than send lots of verses our way if we are to get to know you. So, my intention was to help them think about sharing more personal stuff and less about multiple verses a day making up the bulk of their tweet stream. So, I used some humor (or, attempted to) to say that we’ve got lots of scripture opportunities online already with YouVersion.com (online Bible tool).

What Happened Was…

I had some people read what I wrote as making scripture look unimportant, or, worse, less important than sharing their personal insights. So, as a way to set the record straight, I then sent a second tweet out on the heels of the brewing controversial tweet:

“REVISED 4 clarification: Instead of spamming scripture, share life application & revelation, not recitation. Share the impact of the verse!”

From my perspective, one of the best benefits of Twitter/Facebook is the ability to gain insight into what you think and how you receive revelation. To me, a tweet that illustrates the application, truth and real-life moments of scripture are – usually – more insightful to me than seeing a litany of verses tweeted ad nauseum. Sure, the Word never returns void, so tweeting scripture is good, but it’s not the only thing you should tweet.

Step out from behind the pulpit and show me your sermon illustrated in how you live life. Help us understand how scripture comes alive in your life, your actions and your thinking!

So, we good? I hope so!