Top 10 Church Website Activities… Maybe

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

1. Find service information (times, directions, etc).
2. Listen to/download Sermons (audio recordings).
3. Learn about the church’s Beliefs/Mission/Values
4. Connect with other members.
5. Read/download Sermons (text transcripts).
6. Join and/or interact with a home/bible study group.
7. View weekly information/calendar/news/events.
8. Find serving opportunities at the church.
9. Post prayer requests or needs.
10. 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:

1. Service Information- times, directions
2. Pastors/elders/leadership
3. Blog
4. Visitors/ I’m New Here
5. Beliefs/Mission/Values/About Us
6. Our History/Story
7. Weekly information/calendar/news/events
8. Photos
9. Sermon podcasts
10. What To Expect
11. Small group/bible studies
12. 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?