Where faith meets analytics

As a manager of a church denomination’s website, I often get asked how I measure success.

We don’t sell products on our site. We don’t take donations. We don’t consider other denominations “competitors.” So how do I tell whether or not our site is getting the job done? Or any job for the matter?

There’s no short answer but I can at least tell you where I start and break it down from there.

Figuring out an online identity

When I first joined the Communications team at Foursquare, we were lots of things and none of them were extremely clear from a visitor’s standpoint. We were a children’s department, a church planting department, a missions department and so many other things under this one banner that indicated we were some organization that believes in Christ.

Yeah, lots of things but nothing in particular. We were a conglomeration of departments moving in different directions with different ideas of what “success” means.

It’s taken a couple years, but Foursquare has been able to hammer down who it wants (and needs) to be online. I won’t bore you with the details but it boils down to this: one church with one voice.

What’s your niche?

Having your online identity pinned down is like your road map for the rest of the ride. Knowing who you are enables you to define what your objectives are which—wait for it—gives you something to measure!

And if you don’t think a church can have objectives outside of communicating service times (which is a good one) and increasing the tithe dollar (another decent, though self-serving one), think again.

Try considering:

• Plugging individuals into a small group
• Connecting people into a church ministry
• Centralizing information for multiple campuses
• Making sure all pastors have the resources they need to do the work of their ministry
• Telling stories of real-life people in the church making real differences in the community because of their faith

I mean, really, this list can go on and on. The point being that in order to exist online, a church should consider what they are adding to the Interwebs so it has a clear direction of what to do and how to measure it.

So, what are we doing?

Glad you asked. Knowing what you want to accomplish online tells you nothing about what to actually do online. So that’s where strategy comes in.

What’s the best way to motivate people to join a small group using your website (or some extension of it)?

Here’s a hint: there may be more than five correct answers and each one is just as good as the others. Or one may be better than the others. Maybe worse.

How do you know?

Measure, measure, measure!

Finally, where faith meets web analytics. Having come up with several ideas for communicating online, a church can safely put them to test.

And this is where I believe a lot of organizations (not just churches) can get analytics flat wrong. When no one opens those email newsletters or the Twitter account hasn’t immediately equaled Ashton Kutcher levels, companies tend to blow off the strategy as a #Fail.

Remember, an objective does not fail just because the method did.

So back to the original question that opened this little diatribe…how do I measure success for the website of a church denomination?

I have a set of key performance indicators (KPI) that tell me certain things.

For example, I care a lot about bounce rates on my site. But not the one I see when I first log into Google Analytics that has the word “Average” in front of it. I care about which pages bounce more than others and why people saw that one page then ditched me for someone else, so I look at which keywords and referring sites brought them in. If I know what brought them in, I can know what they’re looking for; and if they didn’t find what they were looking for, then I know how that page needs to be fixed.

Another thing I really care about is how many phone calls and emails we get into our office asking for a church recommendation in their area. Yes, phone calls and emails are KPIs because I want people to be able to find a local Foursquare church online, so if they call or email saying they could figure out our church locator, then I know something needs to be fixed.

Yeah, sure, the person calling could be the thing that needs fixing, but I can’t always blame it on that. :)

I also really care about the stories we tell online. We’re a pretty big denomination and keeping the Foursquare family feeling connected to another is an important objective for our website. We do that by telling the stories of people, church ministries and even world events as long as they are told through the lens of Foursquare.

So posting articles to our site and measuring pageviews is one thing, but we also see how social networking leverages our storytelling ability by stirring up conversation or how many people are referred to our site through our Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and Vimeo accounts.

Can’t think of how to measure the effectiveness of your social networking tool on your overall web strategy? That could be topic for another post, but there are a lot of tools out there.

Bloom where you’re planted

I got the chance to sit down with my friend Brent the other night. Our one-on-one visits are very few and very far between, but my brain would explode with all the magnificent goodies and knowledge I get from them if they were any more frequent.

Last Thursday was no exception. In fact, about halfway through our chat at Starbucks I realized I could (and should) have filled an entire notebook with the things we covered in just a couple of hours. Since I didn’t bother to even bring a pen, I promised myself to at least blog about one major take away from the time.

So here it is: Bloom where you are planted.

At first, I wasn’t sure where Brent was going with this. I mean, up until that point we had been talking mostly about our thoughts on Donald Miller’s (fantastic) new book, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years and how we appreciated Miller’s focus to live life through the lens of a story that’s being told. We’re all characters, Miller explains, and the story of a good character involves something he wants but must overcome something else in order to get it.

What Brent was trying to get at was something we had casually discussed before about my career path and where I was headed. I had mentioned being interested in going back to school thinking it would be a good thing to accomplish.

“Man, that’s a staller,” said Brent.

“A staller? Since when is school a staller? It’s something that helps people move forward, not backward.”

Brent continued to make his case though the lens of story. A good story, he reminded me, is one that cuts out all the boring crap that has nothing to do with advancing the plot. So unless I plan on making a career out of my current position going back to school plays not part in my story and is uninteresting to anyone who reads it.

There’s a constant struggle between the person I am and the person I want to be. The person I am has certain strengths and talents that I just can’t help having and that just can’t help excelling in the places where they excel. The person I want to be, however, can change from week to week as I fall in love with and discover new things, whether it’s music, photography, architecture, activism, politics, or anything else my heart fancies. The problem is that our nature is already in the process of writing the story we’re living, even if we take lots of tangents to get there. Think about the career path and you’ll see a linear progression whether you like it or not—and how you thought it would be or not.

“So just bloom where you’re planted,” Brent continued. “Wherever you are and whatever you’re doing, you’ve to shine then and there.”

How much more sense could that make? As long as we plant ourselves into a good storyline and try to bloom in all the places where the plot takes us, we’ll be living a good story.

And that was just a sidebar to the conversation.

Why I’m being such an asshole today

A woman who works in another department practically hung up on me earlier this morning. I dug into another co-worker for something annoying he does, told another person how much her last email frustrated me and plan on telling my boss a thing or two before I leave for the day.

“So why are you being such an asshole today?” you ask.

“You mean, why am I building so many awesome friendships?” I reply.

I went to bed last night with a hot head full of frustration from a few bad encounters that occurred throughout the day. It could have been an email that was a little snappy or a passive aggressive comment said in passing, but everything put together made even the smallest thing a big deal by the end of the day.

Normally I would brood over everything while making my wife suffer through the many ways I wished I would have responded or what I would like to say to them in my own fantasy land. But last night was different.

And now today is much different than most other days.

What I’m learning is that conflict and confrontation are necessary for healthy relationships and sanity. Doing a quick Google search on the benefits that confrontation has on friendships and working relationships made me realize why I haven’t done it very much in my life. Most of the crap we’re fed by self-help articles and books advise us how to avoid confrontation like it’s something to hide from when it comes lurking in the dark. Not only is it unhealthy to bottle in your fears and frustrations because of the stress it causes (have you seen or read Fight Club?), but it is also creating a generation of cowards.

And I’m definitely one of those cowards. Taking the steps to let others know about my frustration has been a a big step out of my hard shell.

As I’m learning to own my feelings and make them known to others, I’m also recognizing there is a fine line between productive confrontation and complete asshole that can easily be crossed. Productive confrontation, for me, is determining the frustrations and hurt feelings that will keep me awake at night and making a point to deal with those and those only. The end goal of any confrontation should be the ability to move past an issue and strengthen the relationship that’s being tested. Anything less is complete asshole.

So yes, that’s why I may look like an ass today. But trust me, it’s an investment in my relationships with co-workers.

Time for yourself

If one thing has become abundantly clear to me over the past few months, it’s that taking time for yourself isn’t just a good idea; it’s necessary. My infrequent blogging during that span is proof in itself.

I just haven’t been giving myself enough time to live life the way I was meant to live it.

And that’s not entirely my fault. Life does happen and sometimes we have to react to the things happening around us. So I do as I do and that’s just how I roll, right?

Well, no. There is something to be said for living flexibly and being able to adapt and react to things on a whim, though I don’t believe that’s the recipe for the good life. Life has to be lived intentionally in order to maximize our time, energy and talents.

Part of living intentionally requires that we occasionally withdraw from the things that put our minds and hands to work. Said more plainly, we gotta take time off for ourselves in order to recharge ourselves.

Sure, go ahead and tape the “Hypocrite” sign to my back. I haven’t been very good at giving myself the luxury of time. I could talk about the new house, how we’ve spent more weekends hosting people in it that living in it, the amount of stuff that has to get done at work, the after-work meetings that seem to come in droves or anything else that seems to take up my time to make excuses for how short on time I’ve been lately.

Yes, we really have had guests stay at our new place more than we have on the weekends since we bought the place in October. My wife and I just looked at the calendar and gawked that we’re booked for the last three weeks in December and the first two weeks in January. I’m definitely not popular, but it sure does feel like it this holiday season.

I normally use this blog to talk about work and internet topics (and the occasional riff on Starbucks) so I promise to tie all that in. Besides, staying on topic is one of the strategies for a successful blog—or unsuccessful in my case.

Creating time for yourself is just as effective in your work like as it is in your personal life. We can easily get caught up with any task that is thrown our way or jump at the opportunity to own a project. Just ask anyone with Responsibility as their number one strength. I don’t have it, but my wife suffers with that curse, err blessing.

So with that, here are a few ways to know if you are not taking enough time for yourself:

1) You think about work at home

This is a no-brainer. If you’re away from work, you should be able to take it off your mind for a while. Yes, we all love what we do but you’d even have to take a break from relaxing in Hawaii in order to spend some quality time with the wife and kids. Since my wife and I work together, this is really hard for us, but we’re working on it.

2) Everyday things start to annoy you

Does going to the gym, taking a shower, shaving heading to church or grocery shopping sound like a drag? These should be as easy as breathing and you’re in a bad place if they stress you out.

3) Your fingernails are too long

This is something I’ve noticed in my own life. If I was to make a list of most important things to do an any given day, clipping my nails would have to be last on the list at all times. It’s unimportant. But if you never get to it and start to walk around like Edward Scissorhands, you’ve got a problem.

4) You hold off going to the bathroom

We’ve all been guilty of trying to finish just one more thing before we make a BM. Then we look up at the clock and see you’ve been holding it for two hours and have to run like a mad man to the bathroom. Nothing pretty about that. If you don’t have enough time to drop a deuce, you’re not giving yourself enough liberty.

5) Your RSS reader has accumulated 300 or more unread items.

Give yourself some time to catch up on your blogs. For some of us, it’s the only continuing education we get so taking time to read them should be top on your list.

6) You can’t remember the last walk you took around the block.

Not sure what your neighborhood looks like anymore? You guessed it, that’s a problem. Get out and be at one with your community.

How to take criticism on a first draft

The first draft of any work is the most important step of the project life cycle. When creating one, it can be one of the most daunting tasks of a project. When looking at one, it’s probably the easiest things to criticize.

I don’t know what it is about my job, but I’m constantly in the position of starting from scratch. A big part of what I do requires me to come up with new ideas which inevitably means that I’m working with a blank slate and trying to get others to buy off on how I color it in.

Call it low self-esteem or caring too much, but I often disappointed when my ideas get cut or mangled so badly that they hardly resemble what they were intended to be. Last year, I came up with what I thought was a pretty solid set of wireframes for a website redesign. I spent two weeks putting it together, drawing inspiration from hours of research and relentless effort defining the purpose of each page and how users should interact with them. I remember presenting it to my boss, who pretty much tore it to shreds and shifted many of my well-thought out ideas much like a rubik’s cube.

Instead of feeling enlightened by needed criticism and feedback, I felt pretty dejected. At the same time, I felt an odd sense of admiration for my boss being able to point out all my flaws in one sitting. In fact, I’ve always thought the people who criticize the most are the smartest ones in the room.

But I’m coming to learn that its the exact opposite and, in fact, those who are criticized the most are really the smartest people around. They’re often the ones sticking their necks out and taking the first stab at something. Without them and their initial work, there really would be nothing to talk about in the first place and therefore nothing to tear apart.

It’s easier to criticize a piece of work than to get the idea started. That’s why the rough draft is so important and should really not be taken to heart. If I had to offer any advice, it would be to limit the amount of heartache and headache that goes into creating a first draft and use it as a pinata in a critical meeting to get the conversation started. Dream big and put everything out there with the expectation that it will get scaled down closer to reality as the HiPPOs in your organization try to knock it down for the lowest common denominator.

We hear it a lot, but the worst thing that anyone can say is no, right? There’s no harm in that.

And even if that’s the answer you get in return, at least you were the one smart enough to get the conversation started in the first place. You win.

When going rogue is wrong

If you’re working on a big project, sometimes it can be to your benefit to go under the radar and handle most of the details yourself. It’s easy to manage ourselves and who doesn’t love getting all the credit at the end, right?

Hording responsibility, however, is always the way to go for accomplishing tasks. With apologies to Sarah Palin, going rogue is actually a very bad idea, especially if you need to depend on the talents of others to get the job done.

Just look around. Nothing that gets done well in a workplace happens without a few simple things that promote good teamwork and communication.

Determining needs
Before you starting running around trying to make something happen, you might want to figure out what you’re trying to do first. Every time I go grocery shopping without a list, I end up buying way more than I need and nothing that ever goes well together. The same is true of project management. The less you know about what needs to get done, the more you end up doing when you could have done a lot less with often greater results.

Take a few minutes to write down what you’re trying to accomplish along with a grocery list of things you need to pick up to make it happen.

Identifying (and using) your resources
If you’re project is to dig a hole, it’s totally possible to finish up and realize you wasted a lot more money and effort than you needed to by hiring a construction crew and digging with your own bare hands when a shovel was in the tool shed next door.

If you’re lucky enough to have talented designers, web specialists, editors, video producers and strategists, use them. There’s no need hording all the work for yourself or paying a premium to go outside if you have the luxury of raw talent under your own roof.

If you’re not lucky enough to have amazing talent oozing all over the office, then find it elsewhere. Run down the shopping list of needs you created and figure out the best store to find them.

And don’t discount the value of free work. Our office at Foursquare is lucky enough to have a team of freelance writers who regularly contribute most of the content that we post to our website. Yes, we are a non-profit organization, but there must be a few souls out there who are passionate about your product, right? If not, find your biggest HiPPOs and tell them you have a branding issue.

Defining roles
Once you’ve hammered down your needs and matched up to the resources needed to make them happen, you’ve created your own scenario to be Mickey Mouse in Fantasia. Figure who does what with which tools then wave your wand to orchestrate the dance.

I’m being dramatic, of course, but it really is that simple and underscores the importance of clearly defining the roles that people play in your project. People output more quality and do it efficiently when they know what their expectations are.

Setting hard deadlines
Going along with letting people know what expected of them, setting expectations for timeliness is equally important to getting a project completed.

Don’t believe me? Just let people set their own deadlines and see if you ever get something back. Yes, there are go-getters out there that get off on being responsible but that has to be a small percentage of the entire population. Most of us require deadlines imposed by others in order to have any incentive to finish something up.

Be that person. Set up a group calendar in Google with all the deadlines so everyone knows when tasks are due and who did and did not complete them. Nothing like public humiliation, right?

Regular check-ins
Your hope though is that no one skips out on their responsibilities. A project starts with good communication and ends with it as well, so make sure you schedule regular check-ins with your project team to make sure everything stays on course.

And, yes. My wife does have to call and check in with me at the grocery store to make sure I haven’t run into any unforeseen obstacles.

Fix Outlook

I’ve been slow to write about it, but something that happened today made me remember how much I like the campaign to Fix Outlook.

I’m working with my favorite freelancer to design and build a new template for an email newsletter that Foursquare will start sending on a monthly basis. His design is awesome and, best of all, compliant with every email application worth checking…except Outlook. Apparently, Outlook does not support background images in CSS code.

Yes, the most widely used desktop email client this side of the hemisphere does not support one of the most widely used tags in online code. I’ve written about the unremarkable Internet Explorer 6, but now Microsoft is just plain looking ridiculous at this point.

Thankfully, I’m far from being the only one who feels this way. In fact, the geniuses behind Campaign Monitor have teamed up with a few other partners to send Microsoft a clear message: Fix Outlook. The message and ensuing website is a response to Microsoft’s plan to base the next upgrade of Outlook on Microsoft Word to render its HTML.

Yes, using a word processor to drive HTML. And there’s no CSS support of any kind.

Within hours of launching the Fix Outlook website, the topic became a trending topic on Twitter and got the attention of the Microsoft Office team responsible for Outlook.

Microsoft has already been built a reputation for being behind the curve of innovation. I’m looking at Windows Vista, Internet Explorer 6, Zune and Bing specifically, but I’ll stop there to avoid pouring salt in an already big wound. The last thing they need to do is make a giant leap backwards and further support this reputation.

Unfortunately, that’s exactly what they’ll do by ignoring the standards that everyone else is already adopting.

Failing faster

I’m currently working on a project to put all of Foursquare’s district offices on a Ning platform. The idea is actually pretty simple: facilitate communication from the district to church leaders and from church leaders to the district while increasing web presence and functionality.

As it often is, politics is the main challenge in the way of making this simple vision a reality. The Foursquare Church is made up of 14 districts, each one overseen by a supervisor. My team is responsible for getting each supervisor to sign on to the plan and develop each website.

Most supervisors are on board, but two are still on the fence. Not bad for a new online tool being introduced to an otherwise technologically deficient industry.

What I’m noticing about the remaining two is that they are afraid to make a decision. They have asked (and re-asked) the same 100 questions over the past few weeks as they try to figure out what Ning is and whether or not they want to be a part of it.

My standard response to any one of their questions is that they do not have to do this if they don’t want it. The way I see it, if they can’t see the value of having an online strategy, chances are they have no use for a powerfu website right now. And in a world where social networking thrives with active participation, their community will never succeed if they don’t show any sort of commitment to it.

The response I have to hold myself back from saying is that they need to let go of the fear of failing. At $65 a month, the margin of trying out a new idea online is extremely small even by today’s poor economic standard. Plus, if things don’t feel right or don’t seem to be working out, pull the plug on it. Google might not forget what happened, but everyone else will.

The cost of failure is miniscule in the online world. We can try more tactics than ever before without the financial repercussions or logistical nightmares of the past, which offers a lot more incentive to give something a shot than ever before.

And if we fail fast, that’s great. Let’s move along to the next tactic. Failing faster is something we should actually encourage rather than fear.

The thing about taking freelance work

The thing about making a living or play money as a freelancer is that you have to know your limits. As someone who gives frequently gives projects out to freelancers and occasionally takes projects on the side, I’m starting to see a terrible trend develop as freelancers take projects that are way over their heads.

Blame it on pride, desperation or a crummy economy, but I’ve noticed freelancers are expanding the list of services they provide but without the experience to back it up or the time needed to get the job done.

A bad freelancer is someone who either embellishes his abilities or cannot properly manage his time. I recently hired a freelancer who fit both descriptions and accepted a major project that requires a healthy does of HTML and CSS coding and a tight turnaround. Challenging, yes, but as easy as breathing for someone with a working knowledge of code. This person just admitted to me that she is just getting her “feet wet” with CSS and needs to come in for some extra coaching.

A good freelancer isn’t necessarily someone who gets the job done under budget and early. A good freelancer is someone comfortable enough in his own skin to know what services he can and cannot do and makes no promises under or over that. It’s someone who might even see an opportunity to offer his services for the portion of the project he can manage and offer the names of people who trusts to complete the rest.

In other words, it’s the person who lets his strengths drive his work—not pride, desperation or a bad economy. In the end, that’s the person who earns loyalty and profits over the long-run.

UPDATE: I understand that freelancing is also a two-way street and the person freelancing work out has a responsibility to properly screen and manage the person he decides to hire. In this post, I’m talking specifically about the freelancer who conceals the truth about what they are capable of doing.

Foursquare Connected

I spent the last week in Anaheim for Foursquare Connection 2009, the annual convention of The Foursquare Church. After working for the Foursquare Communications team for the past year and a half, it was great to finally get some context for what everyone talks about and works so hard for each and every year.

Since I did not play a role in last year’s convention in Houston, I saw the invitation to this one as an opportunity to do things a little differently than they’ve been done before—at least in the way I was asked to contribute, which is online. Plus, with this year’s theme bileld as “Wide Open,” I really saw it as a perfect excuse to push a few more limits.

There’s nothing radical about social networking in and of itself. Everyone’s doing it. Many companies have Twitter accounts, Facebook fan pages and CEO blogs. What is radical is finding a way to bring these elements together into a seamless community that functions and breathes as a single place of interaction using many parts. A consistent plan between social platforms is what seems to be lacking from most communities I see.

And Foursquare is no exception. It creates a Foursquare Connection website to promote the event every year. That’s fine, but it doesn’t really “promote” anything, except the scheduled speakers and workshops with a few links to random resources for download.

A glorified business card. Static. Educational. One-dimensional.

And there’s nothing wrong with that…unless you still want to keep the word “promote” in your objective.

We hit the usual suspects to build our social networking communty: Twitter, Flickr, Ustream and Vimeo (sorry, Facebook). The difference was how well everything played together when we asked them to.

For example, when we uploaded a video to Vimeo, it was tagged with images we posted to Flickr which all feeds into a page on our Foursquare Connection website with live streaming video from the event that lets people chat live online and populate all Twitter updates that include the #Connect09 hashtag.

How about if you’re someone at the event? No problem. We handed out handy little Flip cameras for people to upload their videos directly to our Vimeo channel and opened up a Flickr group pool for people to post their own photos from the event. We also wired our live Ustream video to feed directly into the hotel rooms of guests so they could watch anything from the comfort of their own bed in the event they absolutely had to stay in for whatever reason.

A few snippets of free code is all it takes to turn your static website into a platform that leverages your online presence, connects people together and breaks conversations and interaction wide open.

Connection? Wide open? That sounds exactly like the name and theme of the event.

What a great excuse to get to build something a little different this time around.