Recently Drew Goodmanson of Monk Development published some survey results concerning how people use their church websites. The goals of the survey are laudable. Most church web administrators just guess at the information and functionality they think the people in their congregations want and use. So, knowing what people say are the most important features/activities they would like to engage on a church website would be an important step forward, but we need to take the results with a grain of salt.
Here are the reported top 10 church website activities, and why you should be skeptical.
Top 10 Church Website Activities
- Find service information (times, directions, etc).
- Listen to/download Sermons (audio recordings).
- Learn about the church’s Beliefs/Mission/Values
- Connect with other members.
- Read/download Sermons (text transcripts).
- Join and/or interact with a home/bible study group.
- View weekly information/calendar/news/events.
- Find serving opportunities at the church.
- Post prayer requests or needs.
- Read articles or other content.
Online Surveys Lack Credibility
I really don’t want this to come off sounding critical of Drew or the work he’s doing. I don’t know Drew well, but he seems like a great guy full of passion for God, for the local church, and for seeing churches use technology to help build community. But since this point hasn’t made along with the results and others are reposting these results as gospel truth, I feel compelled to say something.
The list above is not the result of scientific polling done with random samples of church members. It’s the result of a voluntary online survey. Any time you survey people in this way, you end up with an unintended bias in the results because the demographics of the people who take the survey don’t match the demographics of the overall population.
I think it’s a fairly safe assumption that the people who completed this survey
- Tend to be younger than your average church-attender
- Tend to be more tech-savvy than your average church-attender
- Tend to be more engaged in church activities than your average church-attender
As a result, the survey results may not accurately match the sentiments of the church-attenders in general.
This is the nature of all online surveys. If Fox News and MSNBC both posted surveys on their websites asking people to rate President Obama’s performance so far, we all know the survey results would be strikingly different from each other and neither would reflect the views of the general public.
Analyzing Real Data
Now what would be awesome is if someone analyzed the website traffic statistics for a bunch of churches and reported on what pages ACTUALLY get the most use. And that is the second part of the research Drew and company have done. Woohoo!
Top 12 Page Destinations:
- Service Information- times, directions
- Pastors/elders/leadership
- Blog
- Visitors/ I’m New Here
- Beliefs/Mission/Values/About Us
- Our History/Story
- Weekly information/calendar/news/events
- Photos
- Sermon podcasts
- What To Expect
- Small group/bible studies
- Donate
Now there still could be some issues with these results. There’s no information published concerning how the data was analyzed.
- Is the list above based on unique visitors, unique visits, or pageviews?
- If, for example, only 10% of the churches whose data was analyzed have a donate page on their site, but 95% have service times how does that impact the results?
The good thing is that this list is based real data of all users of the church websites analyzed.
Notice how listening to sermons was #2 in the survey results by #9 in the analytics results? Notice how pastors/elders/leadership did not appear in survey results but was #2 in the analytics results? This illustrates the inherent problems with online surveys.
So, props to Drew and company for doing the analytics research. I just wish those results were the ones emphasized in the blog and thus spread around the blogosphere rather than the survey results.
What say you?
Co-founder & CEO, OurChurch.Com
Paul has been the CEO of OurChurch.Com since its founding in 1996, combining his passion for faith and technology to lead the organization.
An accomplished writer, Paul has authored over 2,000 articles on faith and technology, featured on platforms like ChurchLeaders.com, The JoyFM, and his personal blog, LiveIntentionally.org.
Beyond his professional achievements, Paul serves as an elder at Journey Community Church and is deeply engaged in his community through his involvement with the Florida Sheriffs Youth Ranch and the Safety Harbor Chamber of Commerce. He is a contributing author of the book Outspoken! Conversations on Church Communication.
12 Comments
We should be releasing ALL the data over time so both the analytics and the survey results. One challenge is that with 100 church web anaylitcs to go through it takes a LONG time to sift through to find the trends and valuable data where survey’s are very easy and quick.
Hey Drew, thanks for the comment. Not trying to call you out or anything here, but do you share my skepticism of the results of the online survey because of the inherent bias in online surveys? If so, don’t you think that would be something important to note along side the survey results?
I love what you’re doing with the analytics research. Looking forward to reading more of your findings from that.
Paul, yes as we spoke about on the phone I recognize the limitations of of surveys. I think David Kinnaman (President of Barna Group) calls these types of surveys “Info Porn”.
I’m a fan of metrics over statistics. With a metric you have a goal and then you track that goal and how well you are doing at it. Every church website should have a goal. What is the goal of yours? To tell people about you and where you’re at? To be a place people go when they find you on google maps? To be a place that helps coordinate and communicate with your congregation? Some combination of these? Something else?
If you have a goal you can see what’s going on. For example, if you have a goal of helping people locally find your church you can see how many people locally are looking at your site vs. people out of the area. You can look to see how many people are looking up your site locally before an event or Sunday morning.
Surveys can come in handy but need to be carefully done. They can help you capture information about the people visiting your site. The do not tell you about people in general. The questions have to be carefully asked to get useful answers.
Analyzing stats on a website and a survey run there isn’t going to provide enough useful information. Without a goal you don’t know how to analyze your data. Without specifics you don’t know the points to measure.
I would start with goals and work them into metrics. Then look to where and how to analyze that. It will be more useful in the end.
Matt, good point. Yes we have and are identifying goals that we are using to create metrics. So we measure goals we believe churches should have, evaluate their analytics and survey their people to reflect these.
Hey Matt, thanks for your comment. I agree. I’d say metrics answer the question “Are we meeting our goals?” While a general review of site statistics/analytics can answer the question “What’s going on here?” Reviewing metrics consistently is a must. But a periodic review of statistics/analyics can be very revealing too.
Thanks for this conversation, guys. It sure helps me when thinking about goals for my site and how well we are meeting them.
Looking at the stats of where people go on your site is one thing. But, learning about your users is something else.
Where are they? Are they locally looking at you site? I know a church that got a lot of international traffic because of a podcast they did. It wasn’t expected. Knowing it was international let them not assess it’s local success too hastily.
What kind of system are they on? What’s the OS? What’s the screen resolution? This can tell you a bit about the users. If you have a heavy concentration of mac users that’s something to note. That’s a specific demographic.
Where does your traffic come from? Is there a link sending them there? Are they going there directly? This can tell you about their browsing habits and what else is going on.
I don’t actually know my churches goals with the website at the moment. But, I do wonder what the goals of your church websites are and how that relates to the great commission.
Great questions, Matt. In addition to be relevant to the research Drew is doing they could make for a good blog and podcast topics. 😉
It just shows that experience in writing brings such depth and meaning to readers. Thanks for sharing.
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