Drew Goodmanson serves as CEO of Monk Development and is co-founder/pastor at Kaleo Church.  Monk is an internet strategy and development company and Kaleo Church is a missional community, multi-site church planting movement in San Diego, CA. Drew spends much of his time thinking about church planting, web missiology and blogs about it at goodmanson.com.  He is teaching two breakout sessions at Echo that you won’t want to miss!

ECHO: Tell us a little bit about the State of the Church Online project.
DG: The State of the Church Online project was created to answer the question “What are the best practices for churches online?” In order to answer this question we are five months into our research and are beginning to document the findings. There are two areas of focus, the first is a church’s website and the second is the church’s social media engagement with sites such as Facebook or Tangle and private community providers such as MemberHubs, Church Community Builder, Unifyer or Cobblestone.
In the Church Website Study, we have over one hundred churches representing 20,000 members who have participated, over a thousand survey responses and 20 years worth of combined Google Analytics data to help us understand what is working, what people are doing, where they came from and what church members seek when they visit a church website.  At the end of the day we hope to share as much of this data to churches so that we all can benefit and the Kingdom advances.  I released some of this information in a series of webinars I did that are posted on Vimeo.  Articles will be published at Church Website Guide.
On the Social Media & Community Study we also have over a thousand survey responses and have numerous Christian social media sites and private communities participating.   We will look at analytic behavior on these sites as well as surveys and interviews of people and ministries using them.  We are excited to participate in this with several other leading companies who all desire to see the gospel shared.  We should have some initial results on this study in July in time for the Echo Conference.  This project is led by Kevin Ring of Unconventional Method. Kevin brings years of experience leading research projects – designing and executing strategic customer/competitive research and analysis across multiple industries, including work with companies such as Google, Yahoo!, Citibank, Hewitt Associates, Gallup, Bank of America and other Fortune 500 companies, ministries and non‐profits.

ECHO: So far, have you been surprised by any of the results from the research?
DG: Yes, but maybe surprised isn’t the right word.  On the church website study, based on the behaviors we are seeing, I believe most churches are designing their websites for the wrong primary audiences.  For example, many websites do a poor job of connecting new visitors and encouraging behaviors that are of value to the church.  We will seek to employ a triperspectival design process to quickly and effectively present the church’s vision (normative), impact the visitor toward sharing this vision (existential) and seek to encourage behaviors (situational) that the church desires.  These behaviors could include:

·        Low Value Behaviors: Subscribe to RSS, podcast, engage the church Twitter account.
·        Medium Value Behaviors: Sign-up for an Email, complete a Web Form or join the church’s Facebook group.
·        High Value Behaviors: Show up to a service, home group or other relational meeting.

The strategy will target new visitors but also seek to move the existing church community deeper into relationships and involvement.  We put together a Church Web Strategy Cooperative for early adopting churches who would like to participate and re-envision their web engagement based on this market research.
It is too early to say much on the Social Media & Community Study, there will be a much clearer picture in time for the Echo session.

ECHO: In what ways does Kaleo Church, where you’re a pastor, leverage media and technology?
DG: In many ways I have been waiting to learn from the studies so we have put a lot of things on hold until we could implement a new strategy.  The biggest thing we are doing is moving our community into Cobblestone, this private church community allows us to administrate our Missional Communities (groups of 10-20 people doing life together), classes, discipleship, connect people to serving opportunities and much more.  Secondly, we’ve always had a strong presence online so Kaleo Church has been an effective tool connecting people in San Diego to our community.   One sample of this was targeting people seeking a pastor to marry them (http://www.ekklesia360.com/church-assimilation-and-growth/) where we’ve seen people become Christians.

ECHO: Can you give us a preview of one of your Echo breakout sessions, Beyond the Web 2.0 Noise: How to use the Internet to Disciple & Create Real Community?
DG: Personally, I believe using technology to disciple and create community is where a lot of churches are wanting to move.  Technology can assist the local church so that people can spend more time on the relationships and rather than the facilitation of small groups or discipleship communities.  In this session we will look at what churches are doing, what is working and what may be a waste of time.  The session will include the data from several of the leading products used by churches, case studies and much more.  Again, while we have the data from congregational surveys I want to wait until we collect user data and do follow-up interviewing before I say too much.  I guess my encouragement would be if you want to know, attend the Echo Conference!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 17th, 2009 at 9:21 am and is filed under About ECHO, Keynotes & Breakouts, Speakers, While at ECHO.... You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.