1. Church Online has a long way to go in this area.  We do the Bring In part well. However, we’ve struggled for some time with how to do discipleship within Chruch Online.
2. It’s also the area that I oversee.  It’s easy to talk about what other people do but it’s harder to talk about what you do.
3. Lastly, I’ve been here for a little over three months and I’m still trying to define for myself how we effectively handle this area.

As you read this, you’ll see me say a lot, “we are still talking about this area” or “we will be changing focus this year, in this way”.  I am not someone who takes decisions lightly.  When I say this is the direction we are going, it’s typically because I’ve talked through all the options and, as a team, we’ve settled on the best option for achieving the goals we are trying to achieve.  I’m writing this section while those discussions are still going on.  As you read this, keep that in mind.  There are many methods for achieving a goal and not all are equally effective.  This section is fluid because of this.

Why Are Build Up and Train Together?

Before we really drill down in to the pieces of the Funnel for Build Up and Train, you’ll notice that I am talking about them together versus individual components like I did with Bring In.  The reason for this is I don’t think you can physically or logically separate the two.  While the image below separates them, it does so merely so we can discuss, measure, and make decisions about specific pieces within the whole.

When Does Someone “Enter” Build Up/Train?

That is a great question! I’m so glad you asked.  I didn’t really answer this question under Bring In.  Is there a definitive point in a guest’s relationship with Church Online that they move to the next step?  Yes and No.  For discussion purposes, let’s just say the most logical point is when someone accepts Christ.  Not all people accept Christ before they begin actions in Build Up/Train.

(I was just thinking it would be soo much easier to use an acronym instead of typing this out but I just can’t bring myself to call this part of the funnel BUT!)

Back on topic – There are instances where someone begins to engage with others or begins to read the Bible or any of the other “things” we do under Build Up/Train before they make the decision to really follow Christ.  On the other hand, there are times when someone finds Church Online and they are already a Christian who may or may not be involved in a local church.

Build Up/Train Boils Down to Discipleship

No matter where someone is when they come to Church Online, the reality is we aim to help a believer become a more fully devoted follower of Christ.  To do that, we must provide resources for them to experience life change.  The opportunities in this part of the Funnel are all about enabling that change.

We could group that change into a few different measurable categories:

1. Fellowship in a LifeGroup
2. Daily time in God’s Word
3. Commitment to tithing
4. Devoted prayer life
5. Understanding how God built us
6. Deepening our biblical understanding

Let’s Look From a Different Direction

Those six measurable items could be looked at another way.

The areas of a person’s life we want to see change are (the outer ring):

1. Relationship with Others
2. Relationship with God
3. Financial Life
4. Physical Life
5. Work/School Life

And in order to facilitate change in those areas, Church Online must be responsible for (the middle ring):

1. Developing Leaders
2. Connecting People
3. Mobilizing People
4. Resourcing Personal Growth

Which must be an extension of what happens in a worship experience.

Next time we’ll start to put these two differing paradigms together.

So yesterday we took a look at the action steps that we anticipate a visitor might take when they come to Church Online.  Before we shift to Build Up/Train, I’d like to show how all this information comes together to help us make decisions for the future.  I then will explain just a little more about that second column, Available Resources.

(Just for reference)

Putting It All Together

So we have all of these numbers, but by themselves they don’t give us a picture of what is going on.  Here is where some examples of how we use this data can really help.  So I want to give you a few “real world” discussions that our team has had, based on the data we are able to gather. (I’m making up data to protect the innocent!)

1. “I just realized the Tuesday 4 am experience has our highest google ad visits all week.” “Hmm, and that’s a No Chat Experience.  Maybe we should make it a Chat Experience.”  “They are primarily coming from Atlantis so we should try and match volunteers familiar with Atlantis culture to help relate.”
2. “Did you see that the 10 pm on Thursday has the highest percentage of salvations (attendees to salvations).  They also have a high rate of those accepting salvation taking a follow-up step (the believer form, LP, WNK).  I wonder what is going on in that experience. “  “The team is really intentional about being approachable and building personal connections.  Let’s see exactly what they are doing and see if the same type of approach would work well in a different experience.”
3. “The 10 am on Sunday has some great return visitor numbers.  Their salvations aren’t as high percentage wise as some of our other experiences.”  “Yeah, they get a lot of existing Christians that come and attend Church Online as their regular weekly experience.  Make sure you remove the direct clicks and redirects from other LifeChurch.tv sites.  This is one experience you really need to drill down to where people are coming from to get an idea of how many unchurched are attending.  Then compare to the salvation rate and follow-up.”

Okay. So that is just three made up examples but they are pretty realistic as far as the types of conversations we have around experiences.  And that is just the beginning.  There are a lot of factors that go into making an experience the best environment we can so that unbelievers come, stay, accept Christ, and then begin to act on their faith.

Our staff, coaches, and captains work hard to recognize excellence, learn from it, and then apply it in another experience to see if it gets the same results.  Sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t.  The reality is that God is the one working through us and sometimes we are just along for the ride.  But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to understand what He’s doing and adjust our efforts where we see Him working.  This is where our value of “We always bring our best” impacts every decision we make.

Available Resources

You’ll notice that at the Bring In stage, we have only one or two targeted means of interaction.  That’s intentional.

Experience

The experience is the best place for a non-believer to hear the Gospel for the first time.  Craig brings it every week and he’s got an amazing gift to do that.  Our experience volunteers establish a warm, welcoming environment where people can feel safe to ask questions and to be open about where they are in their lives.  Our live prayer people can engage with someone one-on-one as they struggle with the tough questions and can act as that arm of support.  Captains understand the riverbanks of LifeChurch.tv culture…the things that we all seek to do based on our defined values…and help the team to establish their own personality as they navigate within the riverbanks.  For example, “we will laugh hard, loud, and often” is one defined aspect of our culture.  It makes up part of our “riverbanks”.  How your team does that is determined by the personalities and cultures represented in both the volunteers and the people that attend.  And since 80% of our attendees are typically unchurched, we strive to do it in a way that makes them feel included so they’ll want to stay, so they’ll hear the Gospel message, so they’ll accept Christ, so they’ll want to develop a relationship with Him and His Church.

WhatsNextKit.tv

This site is a great next step for those that accept Christ.  It provides a straight forward introduction to the “Christian basics” or community, Bible, prayer, and baptism.  It’s also a place to get a free physical Bible or to download the Bible App so that a new believer can quickly get into God’s word.

Did you know that every new believer, everyone that requests a Bible, and everyone who requests prayer has a chance to interact with a real person?  Every time someone gives us their contact information we reach out to them ONCE to let them know we are here for them if and when they need direction, prayer, or encouragement, as well as, providing them with relevant resources for where they are in The Funnel?

You made it! Starting Monday we’ll take a deeper look at Build Up/Train!

Before we get started on how we look at action steps people take, I want to take a second to explain how the rest of our Funnel is divided up. Understanding the three columns helps us to look at the big picture while focusing on a single piece in relation to the rest.

Action Steps

If you take a closer look at the Bring In image (or the big picture funnel from yesterday), you’ll notice that from this point on we can divide the bulk of our information into two “flows”, if you will.  The first column is Action Step.  In my mind, this is the part of the diagram that provides measurable data that we can look at to determine if we are being successful as we track a single individual through The Funnel.  At the same time, evaluating how many people overall move through each step allows us to get a general idea of our effectiveness.

Available Resources

The second column is Available Resources.  This is simply identifying how Church Online interacts with an individual at each step in The Funnel.  You’ll notice that some Action Steps have more Resources than others.

Additional Opportunities

This last column seeks to answer the “what other resources might a person engage in at each Action Step.  Some of these are LifeChurch.tv specific; some of them are not.

Action Steps in Bring In

I’ll admit it – I’m a data person.  I can improve what I can measure.  When I can’t measure it, I struggle to figure out if what I’m doing is right.  When I can measure, I can tweak something here or something there to see if the numbers go up or go down.  As they go up, I can evaluate if the fluctuation is real or just perceived by looking at how it affects the data around it.  So let’s get started!

1)   Attend Church Online – This one is actually more complex than it sounds.  We look at several numbers when we look at attendance.

1. Unique Visits – how many different people came to Church Online in a given week (we can do this by experience but typically I look at week).  Amanda spends more time in the experience details.  This is a good indicator of how affective our social media, google ads, and invite culture is.  With very exceptions, we can tell you EXACTLY how and why a person attended an experience.  By changing the wording, the timing, the graphic associated with, the duration, or any other number of factors, we are able to get a good idea of what works and what doesn’t.  The more unchurched and dechurched that show up, the more people that hear the gospel message.
2. Attendance – This is akin to what a physical campus would measure.  It’s the “most people watching at one time” within a single experience that is then rolled up for a weekly total.  In unique visits, no one is counted twice but in attendance someone could attend three experiences and be counted all three times.  Unique visits counts everyone who shows up, attendance is more like a slice of the pie at a given point in time.
3. Time on Site – This answers the question “how long did they stay?”  Did someone click on the site and immediately leave?  Did they stay for five minutes? Ten?  One of the things I would love to know is what part of the experience they stayed for.  If they come in for worship, do they stay longer?  What about if they come in just at the start of Craig preaching?  Or at the end when Craig is asking them to take that next step?  We can’t measure that right now, but we are actively talking about it.  Why?  The longer they stay, the more apt they are to hear and internalize the Gospel.

2)   Return Visitor – So it’s great that we can see how many people showed up, but without understanding what happens after they show up, attendance is JUST a number.  This is really where measuring an Action Step takes on some meaning.  This number tells a story about how our experience culture affects those who come.

1. How many times an individual came back – we can look at this as detailed as we want.  Did they come back once more, twice more…. five more times?  Over the course of a week, a month, a year?
2. How did they come back – was it through another google ad? Through a different social media method? Directly (Invite Culture)?
3. How long did they stay the ________ time – did the time increase, stay the same, or get smaller?  Did they come back to hear more, maybe they found it inviting the first time? Did they leave at the same point in the message – worship, message, call to salvation?  Did they come back on accident and leave right away again?

3)    Accept Christ – This number is pretty straightforward.  How many people clicked the slide to raise their hand and accept Christ.  It’s a great number, but did someone mean to push the button? Did they do something afterwards?

1. What percentage of our unchurched people clicked the button?
2. What percentage that clicked the button requested follow-up in some way (LP, the new believer form, offline prayer), spent time on WhatsNextKit.tv, or requested a free Bible?

Phew!  Now imagine looking at that every week to see how you can improve?  That is exactly what we do!  We want to see more people accept Christ, but equally important is that we want to see a higher percentage of visitors accept Christ, come back, and take a “next step” after they accept Christ.  We don’t just want someone to click and leave.   This means that we tweak things a little bit here, a little bit there, to see if we can increase the percentage of people committing to the next step.  The longer they stay, the more times they come, the more interaction they have with us, the more likely it is that they will hear, accept, and internalize the Gospel message.

Tomorrow I’ll focus on how we put all this data together to look at the people behind it.  And how understanding what people are doing impacts our discussions, our decisions, and the direction we take for future ministry vision.

Bring In can be divided into two areas.  First, is the actually act of bringing someone to Church Online.  Second, is what happens once they arrive at Church Online.  Today, we’ll talk about the first area – Social Media.

Social Media

Before we go down this path, let me just say I’m not an expert in Social Media.  I get by.  I use Facebook. I watch tweets more than tweet myself.  And I have been known to look at Google + (notice the look not DO).  Fortunately for those of us at Church Online, we recently added to the team someone focused on and passionate about our Social Media Strategy.  She knows what works and what doesn’t.  More importantly, she knows how to tell if our social media is effective or not.

So here is what I do know about Social Media: The more people who respond to social media the better.  Particularly when the people who respond match your target audience.  And I guess that is we start.

What is Church Online’s Target Audience?

I’m so glad you asked!  The reality is I still struggle to answer this question in a definitive way.  I believe the people we are primarily trying to reach are the unchurched (not already a believer) and the dechurched (someone who has accepted Christ but has turned away from organized religion for whatever reason).  I know what you are thinking – What about people who are already Christians? Don’t we want them?  The short answer is Christians are always welcome but they aren’t who we are targeting.

Here is why: (I hope you recognize these two(three) statements – they are part of LifeChurch.tv’s Vision & Values Statement)

1. We are all about the “Capital C” church!  We will honor Christ and His Church with integrity. To me, purposefully targeting other Christians is essentially saying, “I want to steal the believers other churches have invested in.”  It undermines the idea of the “capital C” Church.
   “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me” (John 10:27)  The reality is current Christians are already Christ’s sheep.  If they come to us because they see God at work in our ministry, okay.  But if we make that our goal, we’ve lost our first calling – which brings me to point two.
2. We will do anything short of sin to reach people who don’t know Christ.  In short, we are an evangelistic ministry.  Our primary purpose is to spread the gospel to people no one is reaching today.  That means we target people who don’t know Him with intention.

Right now that is where our target audience definition ends: the unchurched and the dechurched.  I wish I could say that we are targeting 18-35 year olds or people in Timbuktu or people with brown eyes, but that just doesn’t define it.  (I’ve now eliminated everyone reading this.)  What I’ve seen so far is that those finding Church Online come from all walks of life all over the world and all sorts of search patterns.

The 80/20

You may have noticed in the Funnel that we purposefully divide our audience in to two groups.  Approximately 80% of our audience is the Unchurched and the Dechurched.  The other 20% are already Christians, many of which have local church homes.  This is a pretty healthy mix.  It also matches with most “healthy” statistical data about groups.  (Have you ever heard the saying “20% do 80% of the work?”)

We reach the 80% through three different mediums.  First, by our social media efforts – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, targeted email campaigns.  Second, by running tailored Google ads during specific times of the day and week that line up with our live experience times.  Third, we stress the importance of a personal invite culture.  We want every person involved in Church Online to consider their own circle of influence and invite people they know that don’t know Christ.  We want them to be praying and asking God, “Where would you lead me today? Who needs to hear your Word? Know your Son? Give me the words to say and the discernment to know when to say them.”  That personal connection has a HUGE impact event when you don’t see direct or immediate results.

We reach the 20% through our social media presence, like Facebook and Twitter.  Through personal invite again – perhaps you know someone who is struggling in their faith where they are planted.  In addition, we reach people through our various resource sites -  archives.lifechurch.tv where we maintain past messages; resources.lifechurch.tv where we share PDFs, graphics, and other media files associated with messages; open.livechurch.tv where we give away everything that LifeChurch.tv creates; and whatsnextkit.tv where we walk new believers through the foundational steps of faith.

That’s it for today! Tomorrow we’ll move to the second area of Bring In – action steps and resources.

Church Online is About Life Change

Before I talk about change, I’d like to know how you define Church Online’s mission.  If you could sum it up in one or two words, what would those words be?  For me, and for the other staff at Church Online, that word is “Life Change”.  Everything that I do boils down to, “How is this action going to affect Life Change? Will what I’m about to do further Life Change or will it hinder it in some way?”  You may be asking, “What is Life Change?  I thought we were all about leading people to become fully devoted followers of Christ!” We are!  What happens inside someone as they grow closer to God? As they make the decision to accept Christ? As they begin to explore His word? As they become part of a community of believers that share the desire for growth and a passion for Him?  It is Life Change! Life Change is the result of “becoming a fully devoted follower of Christ”.

Are We Effective?

How do you know when you are being effective and seeing Life Change in those who come to Church Online?  The reality is there is no PERFECT way to measure Life Change.  It’s out there.  But Life Change is intangible.  We can’t count it like we do books on a shelf, students in a classroom, or dollars in the bank.  Instead, it is the little things that we see that may signify Life Change – a person returning a second time to hear the gospel, a person who makes a decision to accept Christ, a person who begins to read the Word, who learns and begins to deepen their own relationship with Christ, a person who begins to fellowship with other believers, a person who gives back some of their time to share what they’ve found with others.  These things by themselves are not Life Change, but they help us “paint a picture” of the Life Change that is happening in a person.

The Church Online Funnel

I say all of this about our mission and how we “see” our mission play out online simply to say – We have to know if we are accomplishing that goal!  And for us, one of the best, albeit imperfect, methods is to track a person through “The Funnel”.  Whether we realize it or not, there is a path that all believers take as they mature.  How it manifests in a person’s life is different from person to person. The time it takes for each person is different. But, ultimately, as someone grows they move through The Funnel.  Each person that comes to Church Online is in a different place along The Funnel

Today, I’d like to leave you with The Funnel.  Take some time to really look at it. I want you to look at The Funnel through two lenses:

• First, look for yourself. Understand where you are in the funnel today.  Did you zoom through the funnel as a believer? Are you still at the top of the funnel?  Maybe you “rolled a three” and skipped a few steps?  Does that affect your spiritual growth?  If so, is there a point in the funnel that you need to go back to?
• Second, look for our guests.  Where do our guests typically start?  Do you see guests come from multiple places along the path?  If so, how do you know?  I mean, how do you REALLY know? What part of The Funnel are you facilitating in your role as a volunteer?  Is there more than one?  How do you measure your impact in that area or How do you know what you are doing is working?

Tomorrow, I’ll begin to share with you how we try to measure each of these steps when looking at the big picture.

*Disclaimer: This is just me talking.  I’m not the official voice of LifeChurch.tv.  So take it at face value – and that may not even be “my two cents worth”.

Up until just recently, it was also an IF we move.  We knew we wanted to sell, but we were still working to see about staying here for another tour.  We came close, but in the end, we’ve been called to elsewehre.  It’s been a bit of a struggle in this market to remain hopeful, but we knew that God would provide in the right time.

Last month, the military confirmed that Zac would be going to Scott AFB in Illinois at the end of May.  While it is not set in stone, the assignment now shows up.  This meant that besides just “wanting to be out of debt”, the pressure was on to get out of the house by then.

Since January of 2011, we’ve had 10 showings.  That’s it! In this real estate market houses in our price range and location are just not moving.  We live in the country on five acres.  People are moving closer to town to save on gas.  Two of those ten showings were Saturday.  One of those showings has made an offer that we accepted yesterday.  It could still fall through (let’s all pray it doesn’t), but now we need to look forward to what selling the house means.

First, it means we have to PACK!  I’m not sure if the military will pack us four months before our scheduled move date, let alone store our stuffs for four months. Zac and I will both be out of town a week this month so if we have to do it ourselves that will consume us for the next few weeks when we are home.

Second, it means that I really need to figure out what we need to have on hand to live in our fifth wheel through the end of winter, spring, and into the summer.  Fortunately, the trailer is stocked with most of the essentials, but still – we’ve never lived in it more than a week or two.  What do you do with two kids, a dog, and a husband in a “house” the size of a bedroom?  How do I set up a workspace that allows me to work from “home” successfully?  What do I do with ALL of the food we have?  No way I’m storing it for 4 months and I can’t fit it all in the trailer pantry.  More importantly, how do I entertain a 5 and a 10 year old in a trailer for 4 months?!?! How do I do laundry for a family of 4 without breaking the piggy bank ?  (The RV park machines take lots of quarters!)

Even with the stress and the questions, God is good and has provided this opportunity at the perfect time.  We’ve made it to within a few months of the move, past the majority of winter, and just before the pressure would have really started to mount.  Ohh, and since the trailer has been in the shop the last 2 ½ months, He’s waited until we had a chance to actually get it back in time!  Let’s pray they can actually deliver by the time we need it!

Soon I’ll be writing posts about the best way to clean out black tanks, cook in a kitchen w/ no countertops and a stove the size of an Easy Bake Oven, and how to manually adjust the satellite dish we’ll be throwing outside!  I’m REALLY looking forward to it!