Tech for the Local Church
Patrick Bradley
Patrick remembers hanging out in school gyms on Sunday mornings as a kid. His parents volunteered to help start more than one daughter church near Seattle, which turned out to be a foreshadow of things to come for him. After graduating from Pacific Christian College (now Hope Int’l University), he and his wife became heavily involved in church planting all over Northern California. Patrick & his wife were blessed with 3 children. They still live in Northern California where he serves full-time as a Project Manager for Stadia: New Church Strategies, helping get new churches started all over the US.
AIM: pbradleystadia
Posts by Patrick Bradley
Are You Using Online Surveys?
Aug 17th
Feedback is critical to leadership and making sound decisions. But most leaders don’t have the time to poll more than a few individuals for their take on an event or new idea. Keep reading for some great online survey tools! More >
Online Giving & Landing Pages
Jun 24th
Landing pages allow you to customize the content to the reader who has just clicked through from an ad or special offer kind of click. These pages don’t have to show up in your regular website menus/navigation.
If you have an online giving option on your website (you do have that, right?), have you thought about what the donor sees after successfully sending money to your church?
Enter the ‘Thank You’ page.
Here are some best practices based on Hubspot’s blog article Thank You, Come Again!: Best Practices for Thank You Pages:
- Thank Them. Well, duh! Put yourself in their shoes and ask yourself what you’d like to see if you had just given money. Be sincere but not cheesy.
- Set Great Expectations. Will you send them a tax receipt? A written thank you? What are you going to do with their money? Let them know what happens next.
- Suggest They Follow You. Are you on FaceBook or Twitter? Invite them to be more involved in your ministry/cause by joining your circle of friends
- Better Yet: Suggest They Tell Their Friends. They’ve already given you a vote of confidence by their donation. Suggest they invite you into their circle of friends. Get the word out!
Don’t miss the opportunity to involve your donors in the mission & ministry of your church. People love to be a part of something bigger than themselves, and especially love being part of a ‘winning team’.
What good ideas could you add to this?
New to Social Media for Church?
May 19th
There are a lot of considerations when deciding to get involved in social media on behalf of your church. The easy part is creating profiles at the various sites. But along with doing that, you should do the following:
- Come up with goals – how will you know if spending 20 hours a week on FaceBook is actually achieving anything?
- Come up with some kind of policies – how much time do you expect staff to spend on social media? Will you allow your staff to post disparaging remarks about your church?
- Create profiles at ALL of the social media sites (even if you don’t intend to use them) – this reserves your name for maybe using it the future, and prevents someone else from posting on your behalf
- Tie all the profiles you do want to use together so that one post syndicates across all the sites – try Ping or PixelPipe
- Set up a Google Alert to notify you whenever someone mentions the church name anywhere on the internet – remember, social media is a conversation, not a bullhorn
And as a primer, read through this short Top Ten List of do’s and dont’s.
Veterans – what else would you recommend?
Perfect Phone System for Office-less Church Plants
Apr 16th
A church planter turned me on to this and it seems like a great solution for church plants with office headquarters in Starbucks or their garage. RingCentral is a hosted phone service, which means it’s like a fancy office phone system (with extensions for everybody & stuff like that), but based entirely on the web.
Recent Comments