Welcome to November's issue of The Decapolis Review.

All Saints’: An International Church - Achieving the Impossible in the 21^st Century

Communication. The Christian Church has been in the business of communication for almost 2,000 years and in that time we have witnessed a variety of communication methods employed to spread the Good News. Just imagine how many more ‘letters’ St Paul would have written if he’d had access to a laptop and 24 hour internet access – his emails would have zoomed around the world in seconds, spreading light into the darkest corners of the globe and hope into the hearts of millions.

On November 1^st 2007, All Saints’ Church’s new website took its first tentative steps onto the World Wide Web. What an amazing first month it has been! One of the tools that we have at our disposal is the ability to evaluate the website’s success from a comprehensive statistical reporting tool that tracks the movements and habits of visitors to the website. 

I have spent over 18 months researching and evaluating the effectiveness of various methods for internet based communication and I can honestly say that what All Saints’ Church website has managed to achieve in its first 30 days is remarkable. One of the reasons why websites don’t do so well in their first few months is down to one particular search engine: Google. To do well on Google, as with most other search engines, you must first pass their stringent tests to determine whether your website is appropriate and more importantly, worthy of being placed high in their search results. We know exactly how to put a smile on Google's face and we use our industry leading skills and knowledge in online marketing to support churches like All Saints'. 

Everyone wants to be on the first page of Google. Well, guess what? All Saints’ has done just that! Within the first week, Google had picked up over 41 of the 112 pages on the website and was listing them higher in the search results than websites that have been online for years. The average website will receive around 40-100 visitors in its first month, providing a small amount of effort is put into marketing and promoting it within the local community. In its first month, All Saints’ Church attracted 1593 visitors to its pages, an INCREDIBLE achievement for a church website, or indeed ANY website in its first few weeks of infancy.

But attracting visitors isn’t the be all and end all of the mark of success of a website. Once you have attracted them to your pages, you must lure them in further by making them WANT to read on and explore the information within its pages. Since the website first went online over 13,987 pages have been viewed by the visitors to the site – that means, on average, each visitor to the site is viewing 8 pages before clicking off. This may not sound much to you, but in the world of the frantically busy information super highway that is the internet, where people’s expectations are higher now than they were 5 years ago, where a decision on a website’s suitability is made within the first 3 seconds of opening a page, this singular statistic demonstrates just how effective All Saints’ is being in retaining visitor interest.

Being used to evaluating the statistical reports that I receive on a daily basis, I can quickly ‘read’ a great deal from the information on the page. Would it surprise you to learn that the average website on the internet today retains about 10% of its visitors after the first 30 seconds? Let’s just reverse that to a more negative slant… the average website LOSES 90% of its visitors in the first 30 seconds. This is the average statistic reported by billions of different websites from across the globe. I almost fell of my chair when I noticed the statistic for All Saints’ retention:  we retain 60% of our website visitors in the first 30 seconds! It gets better: 350 visitors last month spent over 30 minutes on the website, browsing their way around the 121 pages that currently comprise the site’s full complement of pages.

The question you may be asking is ‘why’? Why are All Saints' so lucky to have such glowing statistics? Luck has nothing to do with it, I can assure you! The first job of a website is to grab the visitors' attention in those crucial first 3 seconds when a visitor is deciding whether they have found what they are looking for – we have done that through providing a contemporary and more importantly a representative ‘image’ of the church’s style of worship and ministry: colourful, vibrant, alive and accessible. This was achieved through spending time with the Rector and immersing ourselves in the ministry and life of the church, gaining a good understanding of what makes this church unique from all the others in the area. The second part to this equation is the content. If the content isn’t interesting, colourful, vibrant, alive and accessible, then you have no chance of keeping people’s interest. The fact that we manage to retain not only 60% of our visitors in the first 30 seconds, when most websites retain 10%, this and more tells us that the content is spot on, too!

10 years ago church websites were traditionally places to display service times, directions on how to find the church, contact details and basic information on forthcoming events. People now want more from their church website: indeed, they are demanding more. As with all things in today’s hectic lifestyle, people vote with their feet – if they don’t like something, they go elsewhere. Visitor expectations are higher than they have ever been – research shows us that what people want most from their websites is imaginative content, interactivity and most importantly, regular and relevant updates. Of the 1593 visitors that visited All Saints’ website last month, 669 added the site’s address to their bookmark list, sometimes known as your ‘favourites’. This means that 669 people want to return to All Saints' website again; 669 people think it is worthwhile having in their ‘favourites’ list because they have found something in the site that is worth revisiting.

Traditionally, a church’s ministry has always been kept strictly within the boundaries of its parish border, a geographical line on a map that tells local clergy where their responsibilities for the care of the souls within their parish lie. As of November 1^st, these boundaries dissolved for the parish of South Lynn with the launch of the church’s website. All Saints’ website is impacting on the lives of people from across the globe – below is a brief list of where visitors have come from:

United Kingdom; USA; Romania; USA Educational (Universities); Canada; USA Government; Israel; Brazil; Czech Republic; Argentina; Australia; Italy; Germany; United Arab Emirates; Bosnia-Herzegovina; Switzerland; Russian Federation; Thailand; New Zealand; China; Netherlands; Japan and the Ivory Coast.

All Saints’ Church is no longer bound by parish borders – it has now become an ‘international church’! If you are reading this and haven’t already done so, why not visit the website and see for yourself first hand the difference they are making to the lives of those in communities both and home and throughout the world. 

   
Daniel T. Gibbins
Operations Manager & Senior Project Leader