A great reminder of the core values in marketing.

Adobe made an announcement today that will greatly impact the future of church bulletins.  The announce a new “Digital Viewer Technology” that will allow you to export full interactive digital magazines to iPad and other devices.  They used this technology to create the Wired digital magazine that was just released.  It’s not quite as cool as some of the other digital magazines available on iPad, but it’s certainly a great start, especially since it uses tools that most churches are already using (most of the features are already built into InDesign CS5).

Definitely look at the Adobe announcement for more details.  You can bet we’ll be looking at the interactivity tools built into InDesign CS5.  We just got it in for our department last week.

Here’s a quick video of what’s possible using this new tool…  The world… it is a changing….

We’ve been working on a scorecard concept for quite some time on our team. I’ve waited to share them until we had two quarters of real data so they could tell a full story. Here’s two scorecards we devised for the communications portion of our Creative Technologies Team.

Website Scorecard

Social Networking Scorecard

We left plenty of room to add future items, but I’m really happy with what we have to date, it’s a good start. If there’s one area that’s missing it’s some metrics on how fast we complete requests. The problem is that the nature of communications requests are typically longer in duration. Also, we definitely don’t want to punish people for planning ahead and giving us plenty of lead time. Something based on meeting deadlines may work.

So now on to the numbers:

Social Media – I’m really proud of the team in this area. We continue to create a dynamic environment for interacting with our community. We fell a bit in post quality. Some of that was due to the high bar we set in our first quarter. We also may have taken our eye of the ball a bit at the end of the quarter when we got busy with preparing for Easter and took some much needed time off. I can say this week has been off the hook on post quality (640 interactions and the week is still young). I’m expecting some great results this quarter!

We should also cross the 5,000 mark in fans this week. We just crossed the 5,000 fan mark as I write this post. Great milestone! Oh and there’s Twitter… surprise it’s still around. Would the last person please remember to turn off the light…?

Web – Our website traffic continues to grow despite being a very mature site (i.e. it’s been around for a long time and people are used to using it). The fact that traffic continues to grow tells me that our church is growing and our site remains an effective tool for communication. We’ve also found that our social networking wins spills over to the site through a high referral rate.

We have a new volunteer who is analyzing our site’s search engine logs and has turned up some interesting opportunities for improving some content areas. Looking forward to seeing her ideas get implemented.

Looking at these scorecards, can you suggest other items we should be measuring?

Coming soon… IT Scorecards…

I recently came across another great resource for creating signage. The book is called, “The Wayfinding Handbook” by David Gibson. What makes it a great resource is its full coverage of the topic of signage. It provides concise guidance on fonts, text sizes, colors, icons, materials, and project management. Since it’s a new book (2009) it also has a ton of relevant examples.

I did find the text of the book to be rather wordy. The book also covers the project planning side of a signage project. While this is valuable for large signage projects incorporating multiple vendors it seems a little grand for most church sized projects.

In my opinion though the design inspiration from the pictures alone is worth the price of the book.

An interesting video on branding in politics…

I continue to be amazed at the impact we’re having on Facebook.  For the last two weeks Cameron has been the social media editor (a role we pass around).  He’s achieved a significant increase in the Post Quality score recently.

Each page in Facebook has a related “Insights” (read metrics) page.  Below is a screenshot of our current page (click picture for full res.).

I couple of the key metric items we look at are:

• The Post Quality (upper right).  This is a measure of the level of interaction your content is getting.  Interactions would be people commenting, sharing, liking, etc.
• Active Fans: It represents the number of fans that are actually doing something.  Not only do we have a high number of interactions but we want those interactions coming from a large number of people (the flip side would be we have a lot of interactions but they’re all from the same ‘chatty’ few.)

So what what’s going well? Post Quality is through the roof!  We’re now 5 stars! The number of Active Fans is up in a big way also.  I think one thing that’s really raised our Post Quality score is Cameron’s responses to people’s comments.  That’s really upped community feel of our page.  In his words “we’re not only talking, we’re listening”.

Keep in mind that interactivity isn’t just limited to our CCV page it carries over to the person’s network via their wall.  As an example look at Cameron’s wall below.  You can see his activity on our page from his wall.

Dispite all of the success, there are some areas we really need to improve.  One is our gender gap.  As a church who tries to reach men our gap is something of a concern.  We need to keep looking for ways to get men interested in the on-line community.  If anyone has any tips we’re all ears.

I’m pleased to announce that Joel Lingenfelter is the winner of the “Less Clutter, Less Noise” book raffle.  Congrats Joel.  Book is in the mail… soon… gotta catch up from being out of town… and lost in Dallas…

For those of you who did not win, now is the time to head over to Amazon and buy it for yourself! 

Welcome to the Arizona stop of the Less Clutter. Less Noise. blog tour.  What am I talking about?  Kem Meyer, Director of Communications at Granger Community Church and author of the new book Less Clutter.  Less Noise, has chosen this humble incredible blog for her only Arizona blog tour stop.  What’s a blog tour?  Think book tour but digital.  As a part of the tour I was able to pick Kem’s brain and report back what I learned.  Read my report below:

Me: What’s been the most valuable lesson you’ve learned since working in ministry? (note: Kem, like myself, came to ministry from the corporate world)

KEM:

There are quite a few, but most of them center around the lessons I’ve learned about working with others. My most valuable lesson has been the discovery that people don’t hate change, they just hate how I was trying to change them.

In the marketplace, you tend to get results primarily through politics, position or policies. When I went into full-time ministry, God did a thing in me. I started to see how all of those methods were wrong on the outside and on the inside. I shifted my priority from performance to people and I am much more conscientious about the way I say (or don’t say) things to help express my pure intent of collaboration (not control).

So I create more time for conversations. To ask questions. To listen. And I’ve doubled my project timeline estimates to allow for real collaboration.

Wow good stuff!  Sadly, I’m guilty of saying many of the phrases from the “instead of” column.  Kem’s book, Less Clutter. Less Noise. is full of other bit’s of wisdom just like the one above.  I’m pleasantly surprised how relevant it is to all business leaders, not just those in the church.  Be sure to pick up a copy.  Or… one lucky reader can win a free copy for themselves… how… just post a comment below.  Here are the official rules for all of those who love details (for those that don’t you still have to follow them):

• Must be present to win
• Unlike any other contest, friends and family are eligible to win.  (Really… who else reads this blog)
• Must post a comment by the end of the next Wed (6/3)
• Comment can say whatever you want, but it must be in English (that’s all I can read)
• The winner will be selected at random by PriceWaterhouseCoopers me
• Please comment only once except on Tuesday when you can enter a second time but only if it’s not raining in your area (this gives the AZ crowd a little better odds)
• More rules can be created at anytime without further notification by myself

Thanks Kem for selecting this blog as one of your official stops!  Great work on the book.  You should be very proud!!!

We just got the latest signs up for our Campus Signage project.  The first sign below is for our nursery building.  The tree is made up of of two layers: the trunk and the canopy.  Matched with a fresh coat of paint on the building it makes for a huge improvement!

The next series of signs are the ones I’m most excited about.  These are our larger kiosk signs that are placed in four locations around the campus.  They feature an incredible campus map that Kyle on our team developed (very detailed) and some great environmental images done by Cameron.  I’m also partial to the custom designed metal work, but I guess I’m biased.  Southwest Fabrication did the manufacturing.  The prices are amazing.  The metalwork on this kiosk was only $1100.

Overall I’m really happy with how the signage project has progressed.  We’ve made some dramatic changes haven’t spent nearly what we budgeted.  Couldn’t have been done without a great team of creative individuals.