TL;DR: Digital Evangelism (Part 1)

Church websites provide Churches with an evangelism opportunity that’s “hidden in plain sight” via Plan-A-Visit solutions. In this post, we explore opportunities, examples, and challenges for Churches considering implementing a Plan-A-Visit solution. In a future post, we explore implementation. Finally, in subsequent posts, we explore digital ministry opportunities in areas ranging from evangelism to discipleship and worship in a digital world that spans geography, time, generations, and ethnicities. NOTE: Updated Jan 17, 2024 (corrections).

Digital Evangelism (Part 1)

The Opportunity

While Churches encourage and exhort their members to evangelize, there’s an evangelism opportunity for many Churches that’s “hidden in plain sight”. Every week, typical Church websites have handfuls to scores of visitors, some of whom are deciding whether to attend the Church’s “in-person” worship service for the first time.

Prospective first-time visitors can typically browse the Church website to find service times, location(s), and perhaps driving directions. They may even see “what to expect” at the worship service, but we believe there’s so much more that Church websites can do to tip the scales in favor of a decision to visit.

The passive Church website experience just described is in stark contrast to what visitors experience at many secular organizations’ websites, where they are greeted by a virtual or human assistant who will help visitors find product and service information, engage with the appropriate team within the organization, and ultimately help visitors purchase or obtain support for the organization’s products and services.

Thankfully, affordable and relatively easy-to-implement “Plan-A-Visit” solutions have emerged that enable Church websites to:

• Greet prospective first-time visitors when they arrive at the website

• Interactively answer visitors’ key questions, and finally

• Invite prospective first-time visitors to attend the next worship service and capture contact information to enable the Church’s Welcome Team to extend a personalized greeting to them when they arrive

This is one of several digital evangelism use cases. Future posts will explore digital evangelism use cases ranging from leveraging social media discovery algorithms to targeted online advertising.

Examples

Here are some examples of “Plan-A-Visit” solutions in action:

Church on a Mission (Live site)

Church on a Mission’s Plan-A-Visit solution is built on Birdseed’s engagement platform and consists of:

• Showing an explainer video

• Capturing contact information

• Pre-registering children

• Selecting date of visit

Nucleus (Demo)

Nucleus’ Plan-A-Visit solution is built on their Launcher platform. The demo showcases:

• Capturing contact information

• Capturing family information

• Capturing vehicle information

• Enabling website visitor to request contact from the Church

• Enabling website visitor to ask a question

• Enabling website visitor to review and revise information before submission

Text In Church (Demo)

Text In Church’s Plan-A-Visit solution is built on their Plan-A-Visit (Connect Card) platform. The demo showcases:

• Showing an explainer video with service times, service styles

• Capturing contact information

• Capturing child information

• Selecting a campus to attend

Digital Ministry Labs (Demo)

Digital Ministry Labs’ has created a Plan-A-Visit prototype built on the Continually chatbot platform. The demo showcases:

• Worship service times and duration

• Showing an explainer video showcasing worship service style

• Providing driving directions

• Capturing contact information

• Capturing contact family information

• Selecting which service they plan to attend

• Providing parking directions

The Challenges

Why don’t more Churches have Plan-A-Visit capabilities? Common challenges that may deter Churches from adopting a Plan-A-Visit solution include:

Website Visitor Volumes

The lack of sufficient numbers of website visitors in general, and new website visitors in particular, are show stoppers for making a Plan-A-Visit solution worthwhile. Churches in this situation should consider actions like improving Search Engine Optimization (SEO) so that the Church will appear on the first page of search results for people in the Church’s locale before adopting a Plan-A-Visit solution. There are numerous resources available regarding Church website SEO (see “Five SEO Improvements You Can Make to Your Church’s Website” from Pro Church Tools, for example).

A variant of this theme is the lack of visibility to Church website traffic data. Engage your Church’s Web Team or website provider to provide readily available website traffic data like the number of website visitors per week and the number of new website visitors per week. If your website averages at least 10 new visitors per week, a Plan-A-Visit solution could be worthwhile.

Welcome Team/Welcome Process

Lack of an existing Welcome Team and process is another challenge that should be addressed prior to adopting a Plan-A-Visit solution. Churches in this situation should get proficient at executing welcome and follow-up processes for existing first time visitors before implementing a Plan-A-Visit solution, which will heighten visitors’ expectations of a well-executed welcome experience. Our next post on this topic will include examples of visitor welcome and follow-up practices.

Churches might also be concerned that their Welcome Team isn’t sufficiently “tech savvy” to use a Plan-A-Visit solution. In the next post on this topic, we’ll provide insights into Plan-A-Visit solution user-friendliness.

Web Team

Churches, especially those lacking full-time IT staff might be concerned that they lack the technical skills to implement and support a Plan-A-Visit solution. Today’s Plan-A-Visit solutions are often “low code” solutions, not requiring deep front-end or back-end web development skills.

Closing

Experiences like Plan-A-Visit will likely become a cost of doing ministry as the digital native demographic increases. Our next post on this topic will “deep-dive” Plan-A-Visit implementation considerations (including integration with Church Management Systems and data privacy considerations).

Finally, there are many areas that Digital Ministry can impact, including discipleship, stewardship of time, talent, and treasure, and of course, worship in a digital world that spans geography, time, generations, and ethnicities. We will explore more of the “Digital Ministry” landscape in future posts.

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Disclosures

In the interest of “shunning the appearance of evil” resulting from undisclosed relationships and/or potential conflicts of interest, we disclose our relationship(s) with the providers mentioned.