
Church In The Time of Coronavirus
9:30 a.m. Sunday Zoom and Facebook instructions here
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11 a.m. Sunday adult education Zoom instructions here.
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6:45 p.m. First Tuesday of each month Taizé Zoom instructions here.
Church In The Time of Coronavirus
9:30 a.m. Sunday Zoom and Facebook instructions here
​
11 a.m. Sunday adult education Zoom instructions here.
​
6:45 p.m. First Tuesday of each month Taizé Zoom instructions here.
July 19, 2020 Text Here
July 19, 2020 Text Here
July 19, 2020 Text Here
July 19, 2020 Text Here
July 19, 2020 Text Here
July 19, 2020 Text Here
Website redesign
10-28-24 worship times - michael gyura zoom interview
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Unknown Speaker 0:00
It is what it is.
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Jody Meacham 0:03
Well, I appreciate you taking this this call for me today, because I was not able to attend the meeting the other night. And I'm the guy that has been doing the website up to now, and was sort of the primary designer of it, but great work. I shouldn't do this forever. Nobody sure at
Unknown Speaker 0:27
some point we all have to step away and enjoy life. Yes,
Jody Meacham 0:31
and the reason that I couldn't participate in the meeting was because we're going through a pastor transition study at the same time that we're doing this red website change. And while I'm not a member of the membership and Communications Committee, that's who you talk to the other night as as the web guy for right now, I'm involved in it that way, but I'm on the I'm on the pastor mission study committee and and so we've got two things going on here simultaneously, both of which are related to each other, but they're not, they're not really coordinated. And so the the first question I wanted to ask this had to do with that about how flexible can worship times be while the church is working through both of these issues with separate groups, extremely
Speaker 1 1:32
flexible. So we so especially this niche, we work with non profits all day, every day. And I'm a lifelong PC USA or seminary grad, so I completely understand that the process and what is involved with the pastoral search committee, that's a lot of work. And you want to also have a website that puts your voice, your best foot forward for candidates that are looking while also at the same time needing to be flexible for when that new person arrives and changes need to be made to match their vision that you might need to do. No, so I fully understand the middle in which of the chaos that you are in.
Jody Meacham 2:07
Yeah, what my concern is that we can do so much on the the membership and communication side about determining audience and all of this kind of stuff, but then the mission study may come back and say we ought to, we ought to focus things a little bit differently, or have some knits to pick with that and and that would come while you're you're working with membership and communications.
Speaker 1 2:33
It's true, but what's your what you're referencing, though, is content, right? So really, what we're going to do is get in and build the system, and that system is going to be saying, no matter what kind of content you put out, right? So it's rebuilding that foundational element in which you lay your content on. So the timing is actually quite perfect, because we'll be able to get the foundational items in, like, no matter whom you hire, right? You're going to need a calendaring system. No matter who you hire, you're going to need a publication system to put videos or sermons bulletins up. I mean, so you're going to need all of these foundational items. And so we'll get that part done. And then as we start adding content, we'll just make sure you have plenty of room to add or edit any content to direct in the area in which this pastoral committee comes up with or this new it goes like that, this new pastor, yeah, wants you to do. So basically, my job will be to build a foundation for y'all to put your content on. So it's the timing is perfect, because that's going to take time, right? And we're gonna have to generate your new content or scrape content that you already have, and they'll give us a good base, but then as this committee and or the pastor learns or dictates more, we'll be able to make those edits and issues as we go on, it's actually a really smart time to do what you're doing.
Jody Meacham 3:55
Do you guys provide communications, consulting, advice that can help the church decide about its overall communication structure. One of the things we've got right now is, I mean, the website is basically me and the newsletter is somebody else, yes, and there's, there's not coordination about messaging, but there's also, you the big weakness that strikes me my career was in journalism, is I should not. I should not be sitting here as the webmaster and deciding a member of the congregation says we ought to have something about this on the website. Some of those things are easy and obvious, but yes, they're not always. And in the last few months, we had a situation where there was one group that had done some surveying of the Convert congregation about some issues that we were having with the previous pastor, search and stuff. Of and they wanted to put up all their findings on the website, and that was sensitive stuff, and I should not be the gatekeeper for that. I was the gatekeeper. What
Speaker 1 5:13
a dangerous place for you to be, yeah? Unless you're taking bribes, it could be quite lucrative.
Jody Meacham 5:18
Well, yeah, and maybe that's the way I should have worked through the thing.
Speaker 1 5:26
The highest bidder gets placement. Yes, this is corporate, yes,
Jody Meacham 5:29
but we've already got a political campaign going on this, like that. And you know, as much as I'd like to be richer, I do think that there's more to the website than than what we need to be doing here. And I don't know if you guys are the guys to help with that, or what in my in my dream world, I think there would be somebody on staff who has some experience in this that's that's getting paid, and even if they're not, they're not bizarre, but at least they know the right questions to be asking of people who come and say, we need to put this up, or we not, ought not to have that.
Speaker 1 6:17
So yeah. So the the short answer to question is, is yes. So we have two different approaches, so one which is included in everything, and then one that is an additional so the first thing we lead you through is a process called user stories, and this is where it is so helpful for the issue you just raised. So what we do is we work with your key players, the people who are on this committee or whomever is in charge of this, and we task y'all with with a process called create some user stories. No user story. It's very basic, right? Like, just a couple sentences, but, like, here's the idea, let's say you're trying to reach this individual. So you say, Okay, I am a single mother with two middle school age boys. I am looking for, oh, sorry for, forgive me for the thumbs up for a place to worship with my children that has an active youth group, in a which, in a place in which I can come that is judgment free, and that will help support me raise my child. That's one user story like you think of the personas in which you're trying to reach, and so you get you task each member of the committee to come up with, like, three or four of these, right? Very simple. I mean, just a couple sentences. Who is it that we're trying to reach? Then when you combine everything together, you come up with this persona of like, okay, this is what's important to us, and this is who we're trying to reach. And what that'll help you do is, in the future, when people say, No, this needs to be on the home page, you can say, Wait a minute. This doesn't fit any of the personas in which we identified No, it does not right, like shove it to the side. So it gives you some ammunition to say no with right, but then also to say okay, because a website for a 24 year old single mother is very different than a website for a 70 year old retired Male Yeah right.
Jody Meacham 7:58
Completely to me, approaches
Speaker 1 8:00
Yeah right, you know, or a 50 something year old, you know, married man, completely different, you know. So we first need to identify who that person is. And it doesn't have to just be one, but like a group of individuals that you're trying to reach, and that will help you in those conversations where it's like, no, this needs to be on the website, you could easily say, No, it doesn't beyond that, we also offer copywriting services where we would essentially sit on staff for a couple hours a week to hear like, like a lot of places have a sit at, actually, actually sit in their staff meeting. We take those notes, we take those agendas, and we apply it to the website for you. Now, obviously that's a above and beyond cost, where you're actually paying us by the hour to do X, Y or Z, but that's another helpful thing. There were. We become the gatekeepers of your website for you, so no one else has to do that, and we can be the bad guys that say no, that has actually no place on your websites, and help you keep your content clean. So we offer both and just depending on how involved you want to get. I
Jody Meacham 9:00
have no idea of what the budget membership and communications is working with, but I see this as an issue that needs to be dealt with
Speaker 1 9:09
100% and really post COVID, it's been a very popular service, just unfortunately, because staff assess to get less and less. And you know, it's hard to find a quality person for two hours a week, whereas you can contract us for two hours a week and get high quality where you couldn't just find a w2 employee to do that, because, you know, who's able to take on a job for that little So, yeah, yeah, yeah. So those are the we so I'll just say we do have services to either directly assess what you're talking about, or we have processes in place to help you address those situations.
Jody Meacham 9:46
Last week, identified, I think, 13 Presbyterian churches on your website that are your current clients. And I called a half. I called eight of them. I got you. Conversations with six and basically what I was trying to do is, I think we all want to be able to connect with whatever we define as our audience, correct. And from my perspective with my background, I want to know that we're improving. And when I talk to the to the your clients, everybody was very complimentary, just full of praise about working relationship with their churches, and the time that they get and fast response. I mean, that's that's all critical stuff, yeah. But other than some anecdotal evidence, they don't use the available data like you get from Google or that you guys would get from the site to measure their site's performance against the previous site they had, or whether they're achieving the goals that they want to achieve in their new site. There's it. It's entirely anecdotal, and I'm wondering you. There you go, you guys, you get that data because you're you're hosting all these these websites. Do you ever use it proactively to report to your clients, like you see things going on a certain way, and you know that this client is they wanted to reach this audience, and your data is telling, hey, we're doing a great job, or we're not doing such a great job.
Speaker 1 11:45
That's that's part of that ladder service where they where you actually bring us on to staff. So, yeah, unfortunately, like exactly what you found is most people don't care. And I wish they did. Gosh, I wish they did, because there's so much data. So all to say, every website we tie to Google Analytics, and you as an end user, will have direct access to those Google Analytics. You'll be able to see what pages are performing well, what pushes you've done, and you can dive as deep as you want. I mean, it's Google, right? I mean, there's all many analytic data, but
Jody Meacham 12:16
a lot of this data is you can decipher it and people who are in your business, but when you're dealing with churches, you're dealing mostly with lay people and and, and I've been watching some of this data for a while, but I would certainly be a half step above the ordinary lay person, but not much further in my understanding.
Speaker 1 12:38
That's a couple steps. Yeah, again, most people don't even know to ask that question, so the fact that you're asking that question, you're already ahead of the curve that we work with. We work with very non technical users, you know, all day, every day. I mean that just, just, just kind of our model, right? We work with pastors and volunteers and people who know that they need a better web presence, but truly just don't even understand what that is. So it's a rare gift. Every now and then when we get to work with someone like yourself who actually knows enough to ask those questions, of like, wait a minute, what's the data telling us? So we can certainly give you the tools to answer those questions, and we can also take it a step further and help you analyze that data to help you understand if that's working for you, it just for on our end, it's all based on hours, right? We don't charge you any more than we need to. We're not getting rich off this business. It's just, if you need extra hours, we'll just come up with a price point of what that looks like, and we'll give you the data that you need, or we'll get you access so that you can do it yourself.
Jody Meacham 13:34
I am it's all there. I was just surprised after, you know, this was the uniform reaction. Is that the people set these different client satisfaction was based on some very important things, which is their interaction with you, but their their satisfaction with the website, per se, is, does it look pretty in my estimation, and that's about as deep as it goes. And I
Speaker 1 14:07
wish I could tell you that it's more than that, but you're describing the majority of the people we work with, yes, and
Jody Meacham 14:13
that's certainly a factor. And why our website has the design that it does is, when we had a little this, the website is, I think it's nine years old. That's how long I've been working on we had a little test task force that came up with it, and we each had these different ideas that got blended together. And we talked with some, I think, the communications department at Santa Clara University, which is a local university here, and and so we, we knew that people, they took a lot of pride in the way the church looks. And it's architecture and different things about it, and we wanted to highlight that, because that made people feel good about themselves. But one of the important pieces of advice, I think, that we got from the communications department is you don't just want to have statues and stained glass windows and stuff, but people in those pictures who were do, who reflect what your church is doing, and so that guided a lot of the design. But that's an internally focused website. We're making work. Obviously, we're making the people who, in a sense, pay for the website happy, but we don't have a good idea of whether that appeals. We thought we had two audiences, the people who are in the church already that we wanted to serve with services and like, we're going through our pledge campaign lab right now. So can you pledge online and COVID made us begin zooming things, and we wanted to take advantage of that, so we put up a video of the service and the text of the sermon and things like that each week. But those are we have a fairly good idea of what works with our own congregation, but we've got no idea at all how much these things appeal to what we call the second part of our audience, which was church shoppers. That's what we call them, and
Speaker 1 16:36
having those services online does show the external viewer that you're active, which is huge. That shows that you're an active congregation. The general rule of thumb that we like to empower our end users with is think 6040 60% external, 40% internal. Now it varies congregation to congregation. Of course, there's no one, one all but an average. You do want to be thinking more externally and less internally, and again and again. This is where those user stories are so helpful. Who is that you want to see walking in this door? What does that new visitor persona look like? And you can't be all things to all people, because then you're just going to be nothing to know, right, right? Like you've got, like, if you're a congregation, old white haired dudes, be it, if you're a congregation with, you know, a thriving preschool, be it like just, just own who you like. Because, again, nothing is worse than selling something and then having that individual walk in the door to find something different, right? Like the story I share is when my son was an infant, crying baby. God, he was so colicky, right? We found a church that online that said, family, friendly, kids welcome. And I have never had more hard, disgusting stares at me when we came into worship with my crying baby, right? And we never went back, and would never go back, you know, because they sold one thing and something different, right? So that that's you know. So you want to make sure that you're representing either who you are or who you're willing to be, and then we can help track the analytic data on that. But at the end of the day, the real factors are who's walking in your door, right? Because they're finding you online. No one's going to the yellow pages anymore. Very few people are doing word of mouth. I mean, I wish word of mouth was a big thing, but unfortunately, people aren't talking about the churches they go to. We kind of them quiet, you know? So it's really what they find on Google and whether it lands with their beliefs and who they feel that they want to be they wanted to raise their children with. And then that's when you're gonna start seeing people come in the door, and that's your real litmus test about whether this is working or not. Yeah,
Jody Meacham 18:34
you're you're in Tennessee right now,
Speaker 1 18:36
so actually, I'm in Rochester, Minnesota, right? Well, so we're kind of spread throughout the country, okay, but I do. I split my time between Memphis, Tennessee and Rochester, Minnesota. So I handle the sent the Central Coast, Central Time Zone, gotcha, people on the West Coast and East Coast and central as well. The
Jody Meacham 18:53
reason I was asking that question, well, there are two reasons. One was, there's a, I think it was Germantown Presbyterian. But anyways, is that your church? That's my church. Okay, well, they're there. There one of the churches that I talked to. But I have a feeling that I'm from. You can tell that I'm not originally from the Bay Area, just by my hair is part of here. And when you talked about we don't do word of mouth the way we used to, it's probably easier to say I go to church in the southeast than it is in the San Francisco Bay Area 100
Unknown Speaker 19:45
yet, still that Bible Belt is still very real, yes.
Jody Meacham 19:48
And so some of the some of the problems that we have here are just that, in some ways, Christianity has gotten, or religion in general, has gotten a. Bad name by in in our area, the the most conservative aspects of whatever religion you're talking about, and and so we, we have to fight against that too. It's
Speaker 1 20:15
and I am very much we and as a staff, I mean, we're a business, so I can't hire for this particularly but people actually tend to us. We are bleeding heart liberals. We work in the mainline Protestant denominations, ELCA, PC, USA church. We're huge with that. We are not we will never give voice to hate. And a lot of those conservative denominations unfortunately do that, and so we turn away, I'd say 99% of the jobs that come to us from that area, just because we just, I just won't. We just won't. We will not give a voice to anyone who oppresses, who is against and so, and that's really how we found our niche, right? We're big with a piece USA, big with episcopals, big with the ELCA, because we, we,
Jody Meacham 21:02
I could, I could tell from when I went to the page with your clients to decide, good, who should I call that is that that came through to me, but that is
Speaker 1 21:12
not accidental, yeah, that is, that is highly intentional. Yeah, we don't, we don't want to waste our time because, because we just won't do it, yeah, won't do it away. It's the the money's not worth it. And this is a sister company of a of a larger corporation. Poke design, we do big business type stuff corporations. You know, we're actually a GSA contractor of the federal government. So this is, this is a ministry brands of a much larger organization.
Jody Meacham 21:36
So what's the, what's the name of your larger corporation?
Speaker 1 21:40
Poke, a yoke, a design, okay, P, O, K, a, space, y, O, k, e, space design, okay, on here we do, we do custom development. So a lot of applications, a lot of back end stuff. Our name is not on a lot of things, but it's almost like a Robin Hood situation where we make our money over there, and then we were able to do this stuff for half the price. So
Jody Meacham 22:00
one of the things that, again, I've got no data to back this up, but one of the things that I think I picked up along the way, while I was running the website, was that there is a subliminal aspect to it, and I think you touched on it when you you were talking about the site appearing to be dead. I try to do things on the home page as frequently as I can stay in with the basic graphic design, but that lets the visitor who's coming back for a second time see something different. Because I think if the thing stays static, the inference that you draw from that is that the organization behind it is static, amen. So that's we've got a little video on the front and stuff, and that part doesn't change. I mean, that's harder to change because you have to make new videos all the time, but other aspects of the page like this, you know, the weekly sermon and weekly broadcast and everything to try to make those visible so that people know that
Speaker 1 23:18
we're alive, yes, and so the lot of the tools that will build for you do that automatic. Okay,
Jody Meacham 23:27
so, and how do you describe how that work? So
Speaker 1 23:31
our like, for example, the event system is the biggest thing, right? We're able to make customized lists that will show the most recent date. So like, you have a list of upcoming Sunday services. And what we even encourage is, like, if you have multiple Sunday services, what are you preaching on? Like, give as many details. And so the system, like, Come Monday morning automatically gets rid of last Sunday's events and shows the next one's coming up. Okay, so that's that same thing. We can tie into YouTube. So if you're, if you're putting your videos up there, all you have to do is upload them to YouTube, and your website automatically updates. You don't have to do it in two different places. Yeah, so things like that. If you publish a brand new sermon on the website, you don't have to edit the homepage. The homepage will update itself. So just items like this. So for our congregations, especially that just are upfront that, like we're not going to touch this website ever again, like we just want it done. So we put in these systems that always they can pre populate dates up to two years in advance, and then it will just automatically rotate itself through on the homepage. So we literally have people who touch their websites once every two years. Don't be those people. No, I
Jody Meacham 24:32
have to. I can't imagine that our church would ever know what we're going to be doing in two years. That's
Speaker 1 24:38
what I mean. So it's just been a lot of these congregations that they work on the Sunday at 930 and that's it like that works for them, but but for an active congregation like you, we just basically make sure that we have tools in place so that you don't have to keep doing things redundantly. You update them once, and then it shows up in the different areas that it needs
Jody Meacham 24:56
to I do know that I take our Zoom video every Sunday. The ends, and Sunday, after I have lunch, I edit that video before I put it on YouTube, because I want there to be when there's somebody speaking on the screen, I want their name and why they're speaking to be up there. This is, this is the pastor. This is the liturgist or whatever. So putting those things, and I don't know how automatic that can become, but
Speaker 1 25:27
what we can have it do is we can have a page that feeds from your YouTube, and the second you upload a new video that becomes the feature, and anything beneath it comes as a sub item. You know, past Sundays, yeah. So that we do that same thing. We could tie into Facebook. We can tie into Twitter. We even have ways to tie into Tiktok, if you want, don't, but if you need to, you can, and really, any social media platform. And it's, this is a managed service. So that's, I think the big thing for what you're addressing is this is not a one and done. We don't three we don't throw things over the fence. Our goal is to be your tech partner for decades to come, right? So that we want whenever some new social media service comes out or something else that we need to do, these chips in our brain finally get installed. You know, we want to be there to help you navigate what that looks like and how to implement that into your ministry.
Jody Meacham 26:19
Well, I think I've eaten up my my half an hour, and I really appreciate you.
Unknown Speaker 26:23
You take whatever time you need wash cars after this.
Jody Meacham 26:33
Well, we've covered more questions than what I had originally written down, so that's good. But these, these were the kinds of concerns that I had, and I'm I just again, I apologize that I couldn't be part of the meeting the other night, but there's we were, we've got overlapping meetings, and that that's alright, and it doesn't ever happen to anybody else,
Unknown Speaker 26:54
but much more coherent right now than I would have Been then. So
Jody Meacham 27:00
okay, I'm gonna give a report back to the committee on what I've you know, what we've talked about, and everything, but I really appreciate your, your taking this time. And you know Matt Marcotte now, so he's the head of the committee, and he'll be back in touch with him. We'll be plunging forward. Feel free to email me
Speaker 1 27:19
if you think of anything. Just let me know if you want to do another round. Want to do another wrap up.
Jody Meacham 27:23
I'm happy to check okay. All right. All right. Thank you very much.
Unknown Speaker 27:26
Have a good one brother. Thank you too. Thank you.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai