Cross Pollinate Your Online and Offline Communication Strategy

by Randall Mains

One important mistake that many ministries make is to consider online communication to be separate from offline communication. But these days, savvy marketers put their web addresses on all printed materials and even in their radio and television ads. Likewise, your website should contain toll-free phone numbers and mailing addresses. Cross promote as much as possible. You should also put your web address in your catalogs, on your brochures, business cards, in your radio or television program. You get the idea.

Another good strategy is to cross-pollinate your monthly direct mail appeals with an online fund raising effort. Our typical email fundraising approach, when synergized to snail mail, is to start Split Testing 10 days AFTER the snail mail arrives in homes, then go to full blasting 3 days after that. The email will stand on its own results, plus give LIFT to your snail mail this way. After reblasting and remarketing for another week, you can have your email efundraising efforts done in 10-13 days total, and be out about 1 week before the next fundraising snail maill effort arrives.

The combination of the two channels – direct mail and email fundraising -- working in tandem with each other to promote the same initiative will raise the water table overall on your results. Combine telemarketing in this mix and you have a powerful one-two-three punch for your fundraising efforts.

This topic — maximizing your nonprofit fundraising efforts by combining traditional channels with online marketing tools — is quite detailed and I plan to expand on it in future blog entries. For now, I’ll wrap up this series by again leaving you with these words:

A strategic online communication plan will use integration to strengthen existing donor relationships while building new ones to enhance your ministry and expand its church outreach.

Church Outreach Ideas for the Internet: Email Fundraising

As nonprofits look for new ways to raise money in the digital age, email fundraising is beginning to stand out as a compelling option. Many of the larger and nationally active nonprofits are already using this approach to save money and reach broader constituencies. Your church should too.

There are many people out there who are willing to support various Christian causes through online giving. As long as you have a strategic e-fundraising campaign, your resources will continuously grow. This will contribute to the fulfillment your mission to share God´s glory and enlarge His territory.

Pathmaker Marketing has solid experience in assisting non-profits and churches raise funds via the Internet. An email campaign in June 2009 yielded over $30,000 in gifts from 375 donors. a 13-month campaign for another not for profit organizaton raised $192,000 in gifts through the email fundraising channel. We have a proven track record of increasing our clients´ funds multiple times over in proportion to what it costs our clients.

Schedule a meeting with Pathmaker Marketing to discuss and learn more about how you can make your church outreach on the internet grow even larger.

Tips Christian Blogging

Christian blogging can help your church or ministry with your church outreach. It is no doubt a powerful outreach tool. For church outreach purposes, you want to take a strategic approach to your Christian blogging.

Invest in a good blogging tool.

There are several free blogging tools available. These free tools might seem like a good deal, but they don’t compile each of your blogs into multiple blogs and then optimize them to secure page one listings on search results. You have to do that yourself and that takes a lot of work.

Compendium does the opposite. It makes Christian blogging easier, faster and more effective. For a free demo on how this tool can help you in your Christian blogging, call Pathmaker Marketing for a free demo at 623-322-3334.

Invest in keyword research.

Whenever Pathmaker Marketing sets up a blog, we gave Compendium a list of strategic keywords that people would search when looking for a service like ours. The Compendium tool automatically compiles our posts into multiple blogs under all appropriate keywords, not just the one into which we posted it. This work-leveraging feature also optimizes the posts to tell the search engines to, “Come find me.”

Pathmaker Marketing helps clients do keyword research that select keywords that are not only used by people searching for their services but also (a) get a lot of searches and (b) don’t have too much competition to break into. Pathmaker also helps clients evaluate where they currently stand in search results for those keywords and then develop strategies to improve those standings.

Develop ministry-oriented content that uses keywords.

Not only do you want people to find your blog entries, you want them to find the information useful enough to convince them to visit or contact your church and get the benefits you offer them. Christian blogging should be ministerial in nature, and you should provide contact information so people who need the ministries you offer can easily find you.

When you use the right kind of blogging tool, put adequate time into choosing the right targeting keywords and develop concise but helpful content using those keywords, your Christian blogging can become an effective online extension of your church outreach efforts.

Church Outreach Ideas for the Internet: eWelcome

Whenever you welcome someone to you church, it is likely that you have a team ready to make sure the new person feels welcome. They serve him coffee, exchange sincere pleasantries and ask for his contact details. Your church does this to make sure that the newcomer comes back to your church and becomes a regular attendee and active participant.

Using the same analogy, your church website can strategically welcome and interact with your first-time and returning visitors by offering them something "ministerial" in exchange for their basic contact information.

There are many ways to do this. For example, you can offer free Christian e-books, spiritual gifts tests, MP3 files of your best sermons, invite them to read your ministry blog, or install a prayer wall where they can leave their prayer request. In exchange, the website visitor would simply have to provide basic contact information: First Name and Email Address.

Typically, once they have requested your special free offers, your system will have a triggered set of email messages that automatically go out at pre-established intervals: one week later, two weeks later, etc. Each email is designed to get those newcomers further acquainted with your church and encourage them to return, possible even get further involved.

Each autoresponder email message is designed to welcome the newcomer to a different aspect or your church or ministry, and of course, encourage them to get involved. Why not collect email and snail mail addresses on church visitors in exchange for a Welcome Kit about your church, then place those emails into your electronic welcome series?

Some good real-time examples of this practice can be found in Gregory Dickow Store and in the Jewish Voice Ministries.

By developing an incentive-based e-welcome series, you can be assured that you will remain in contact with people who have shown in interest in your church outreach inperson or on your website. This may not yield instant results in increased church membership, but you are establishing relationships with newcomers, who as long as they remain on your email list, are indicating that their interest remains. Plus, typical results show that for every 100 emails you acquire, 63% of those will also give you their full name and mailing address in exchange for a Welcome Kit from your ministry!

For a Free Demo on how this process works, contact Pathmaker Marketing at 623-322-3334.

Church Outreach Ideas for the Internet: SEO

Wouldn't it be great to be able to just go out and tell thousands about the Gospel, and see hundreds of souls saved? Better still, why not do it from your home?

The internet provides an excellent method to evangelize. But in order to use the internet effectively for your church outreach, you must make sure that people know your church exists in the first place. One of the best ways to do that is to search engine optimize your website. These steps include modifying your site content and code to be optimized for your targeting keywords. It also includes link building to establish your website firmly within local searches on the internet. Since SEO requires some technical expertise, it would be good stewardship to invest in hiring a search engine optimization agency who can perform the necessary keyword research, copy and HTML code modifications, and submit your website to the search engines.

Hopefully, with search engine optimization, your church website will show up in the list of Top 10 results where people can find you.

Targeting Keywords that are Winnable

A blogger needs to be targeting keywords that they want to win a Page One ranking on in Google, Yahoo or Bing. Once these target terms are determined, a blogger needs to pursue these top page rankings by creating best in class content surrounding those targeting keywords, and, as a result, they also establish themselves as an expert in their field.

While it may seem easy to identify keywords you want to write about, the real trick is to isolate the “winnable” words or phrases, since what's most important is picking terms to blog about that both relate to your expertise, and have some capacity to win you a Page One Ranking. Page One rankings will get your blog qualified visitors, who may convert into names to your email list, qualified leads, product or service buyers, donors, etc.

To determine the keyword marketing terms to pursue, you can either hire a Premier Blogging Service firm such as Randall Mains company Pathmaker Marketing, or you need to invest hours, days, or possibly weeks to research them yourself, using Google’s Keyword Tool or something similar.

Church Outreach Ideas for the Internet: Twitter

After two weeks on Twitter, my friend´s personal account has had over 100 followers. This means 100 people have been receiving updates about her activities, beliefs, thoughts and anything that she wants to inform her followers about.

Having a church social media account in sites like Twitter is an efficient use of your resources to reach out to your target audience. People who have personal accounts in these social network sites usually visit them at least once a day -- many have their "tweets" sent right to their cell phones. Instead of finding out whether their acquaintances have started dating or broken up, wouldn’t it be more spiritually constructive if you communicated the new spiritual insights you are having as a pastor?

The beauty of using social media marketing for church outreach is that it takes minimal effort on your part to use their built-in features meant for virally spreading information. However, before signing on to just any social network, you should develop a strategy on what would be the most useful content to provide and how to leverage these opportunities wisely.

Since Twitter opens up an international audience for you, of which most of your followers will not be able to visit your church, you need to develop an appropriate strategy to use this tool. One strategic way Pathmaker uses Twitter is that we autoflow our blog content into our Twitter networks. This way, since we are committed to creating fresh content on our blog, that content is also populated across the internet via Twitter every time we update our blog. The bulk of our content is developed on our blog, while Twitter posts allow us to drive interested traffic to our blogsite for further reading.

Churches should have a members site on Twitter for generating news of interest to current churchgoers, while opening up a second site with is specifically geared to be more "evangelistic" in its outreach, dealing with subjects of general interest to everyone, anywhere in the world.

For help in this regard, reach Pathmaker Marketing online, or for more assitance, cal 1-623-322-3334.