Guiding Principles

Creating an effective online communication strategy requires thinking past the current industry buzz words. It requires recognizing your online activities as an entirely new communication channel needing to be integrated across your entire organization.

At Silas Partners, we are committed to helping ministries, churches and other organizations navigate through the buzzwords and jargon, and create effective online communication plans to better fulfill their missions.

To help organizations get their bearing when it comes to the web, Silas Partners has used its experience working with hundreds of ministries and churches since 1999 to develop a simple set of Guiding Principles for Effective Online Communication. These principles emerge from a solid core of Strategy, Creative, Technology and Implementation expertise, all working together in a seamless way.

The following eight Principles are not meant to be a linear path – you may already have a clear mission and vision on your site, but you need help with your overall user experience. Maybe you just need a three page micro-site for a specific campaign. Or, you need some assistance in understanding new technologies and whether or not you have the right staff to implement new ideas. Maybe your site is getting great traffic and visitors are signing up for your weekly newsletter, but nobody opens them when they are sent. What do you do next?
Silas Partners encourages you to evaluate your current online communications activity against these eight principles to identify any areas of weakness that you may need to strengthen or recalibrate. To help you in this process, we have created an easy-to-use, self-evaluation report card. Grade your online communication efforts on an annual, or even a quarterly basis and compare notes internally. Ask an outside third party to perform a quick evaluation using the same criteria, and see how this matches up with your own evaluation.

Remember, that these principles aren’t ends in themselves, but they are principles for developing an online communication effort that supports your overall goals and objectives. What are your goals as an organization? How are your web efforts serving to support these goals?

While a long white paper could be written about each of these eight principles, this paper quickly touches on each one. The next step will be for you to apply these general principles to your particular organization.

PRINCIPLE 1: Clearly State your Mission and Vision

The starting point for every organization is to know who you are and what your purpose is. This isn’t just stating your mission statement on your website, or creating a page that talks about your mission and vision. Rather, your mission and purpose need to permeate all your communications, including your website. This will help to validate that you stand behind what you believe.

Ministries, in particular, need to think carefully about how they position themselves in a crowded marketplace of ideas, and with a limited universe of prospective constituents and donors. Ministries and other non-profit organizations must realize that people today are more likely than ever to go online for information. A recent study found that 65% of people will visit an organization’s website as the first place they go to learn more about them. When a new visitor comes to your website, do they know who you are and what you’re all about within a few seconds?

Clearly communicating your mission and vision, not only on your home page, but in all your digital communications, will help you quickly connect with new audiences, while building loyalty and commitment among existing constituents.

PRINCIPLE 2: Create a meaningful User Experience

Many times, the first exposure a person will have to your organization is through your website or through other digital communications. Every new visitor will spend time on your site to identify whether the mission of your organization aligns well with his or her interests or passions. Having a well-designed and usable website is very important to helping a person find what they’re looking for, making it more likely that they will form a quick and lasting bond with your organization.

There are three vital elements that will help you to establish a meaningful user experience. The first is a user centric and visually attractive design which will communicate to a visitor that you not only care about the people your ministry serves, but that you know and understand them as well. It should be immediately clear to your primary audience that your site is there to serve them with the information and functionality they’re looking for. Second, a clear navigation structure, or site architecture, will logically guide to an action or information that meets the expectations of the user. You’ve taken the time to identify your primary audience, who your other audiences might be, and you’ve given each audience a path to help them find what they’re looking for. Lastly the functionality of your website is the invisible element that supports interactivity and creates a meaningful user experience. If the site doesn’t work, people won’t come back.

Create a site that works for your users. Don’t showcase a large amount of unnecessary features that will only confuse a visitor, but highlight the content and features that are most relevant to your audience.

PRINCIPLE 3: Generate Content Based on User Needs

A nice site design and an intuitive navigation structure won’t make up for a lack of quality content. Likewise, good content can carry a site, even if the design leaves something to be desired. High-quality content is important to a visitor, whether it’s the first visit or the 100th. Each time someone comes to your site, they are looking for something new. Site content can, and should, be changing on a regular basis to create a reason for people to return for more. Many churches and ministries already have a wealth of content and information that should be utilized. How many sermon tapes are gathering dust on a shelf? Is there other old media content that can be repurposed for the web? You want your site to reflect the depth of information you have, while avoiding stale or static information.

One of the most powerful aspects of online communication is the ability to combine text, images, audio, and video content in creative ways to reinforce the same message. Furthermore, the web allows for your users’ to interact with your content, and even contribute their own thoughts and ideas. Ideally, your site content would fully utilize emerging technologies such as audio and video streaming and podcasts, multi-media flash elements, blogging capability, personalized content and customization, user-created content, and any other content that will engage your audience in meaningful ways. Well crafted, interactive content is a central element of an effective online communication effort.

Remember, content is king, whether it’s for an offline newsletter or a website. Don’t get so focused on your website design that you fail to invest the time required to generate high-quality content.

PRINCIPLE 4: Drive traffic by extending your reach

Effective communication, either online or offline, begins with knowing your audience and understanding how to most effectively reach them. Once you’ve invested in building a great site, how are people going to know about it? In February 2007, the Netcraft Web Server survey estimated that there are close to 110 million websites on the Net today. How are people going to find yours?

Start with the people who already know your ministry. Do they know about your website? Use your existing offline communications to drive them to your site. What about new audiences? Think about the audience you’re trying to reach. Where are they most likely to congregate online? Your own site is the hub of your online communication efforts, but your presence on the web needs to be broader.

Take the time to understand other sites that already connect with your desired audience. Think about the terms and keywords that people might be searching for. Are there bloggers out there, passionate about the issues you care about, who may drive people to your site if they knew about you? Test these channels, and then invest in the channels that show the greatest return.

Finally, your existing audience can be your best tool for finding new audiences. Are you creating emails and web pages that people are likely to forward to their friends? If you’re providing your members with content that is helpful for them, they will share it with their friends. Think strategically about including information that will excite and inspire your members or visitors to share with friends and others with similar interests. Use technology that is being used by your audience. By leveraging these technologies you are reaching a broader and more diverse audience and reaching them where they are most likely to be. By communicating with a member in a manner that is most comfortable to them, you will quickly create a stronger bond that will produce loyalty and word of mouth across your entire constituent base.

Having a great website is only the first step to effective online communication. How are you strategically getting your message out to audiences who have never visited your site before, but who might stay awhile if they happened to find it?

PRINCIPLE 5: Engage constituents with intentional communications

As you see traffic to your site increase, or visitors converting to online members, you should begin to identify a clear member communication strategy. Personalized, one-to-one communications to distinct audience segments are beginning to take the place of the standard blast emails as a means to create strong and lasting constituent relationships. Online members want to feel like a part of the organization they support, so you need to communicate with them like they’re part of the team. You also need to communicate with intentional goals and objectives for what you want them to do on your site.

Discover a compelling reason for the casual visitor to become a member, or a member to become a donor by testing different approaches for each group. Test and retest until you have the proper elements in your communications. By creating an intentional communication plan, you can identify different entry points, and then guide constituents down a path towards deeper involvement and engagement.

Planning this kind of intentional communication strategy is second nature for seasoned offline communication professionals. Many of the same principles can be applied to your online communication, as you develop a member-centric communication plan.

PRINCIPLE 6: Align technology and processes behind business goals

One organization may have grand visions for what its website should do, but then its technology infrastructure can’t support this vision. Another organization might invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in sophisticated technology, and then fail to take advantage of its capabilities. In both cases, there is a failure to align technology infrastructure behind business goals.

The web is the one realm where communication professionals and technologists must work together. Getting the technology right is still somewhat complicated. There is a complex interplay between desired functionality and what is possible under cost and resource constraints. You need to have the communication visionary and the technology expert in the same room together, communicating well and working collaboratively.

Take the time to clearly define your requirements. What are the non-negotiables, the elements that have to be place no matter what? What functionalities are important, but can be dropped if they can’t be accomplished with the resources available? What are the nice to have’s? What is your blue sky vision if cost wasn’t a factor?

Once requirements are defined, investigate different approaches for meeting these requirements? Are there out-of-the-box solutions that meet all or most of the requirements? Are your needs so specialized that a custom solution needs to be developed? Are there open source products that can serve as a starting point and then customized to meet your unique requirements? Compare the different approaches and understand the tradeoffs. Understand that this exercise might cause you to recalibrate your requirements.

Finally, understand the larger implications that will flow out of your technology decisions. How will your web technologies interact with other technologies you may already have in place, such as offline member databases and accounting systems? Will new technology necessitate changes in process? Which staff members will be affected? What training will need to occur and who needs to attend these training sessions? Remember to align not only your technology, but your processes as well.

Reliable and robust, back-end technologies aren’t always visible to your online constituents, but they are vital to your ongoing relationship with them. Make sure you have technologies in place that can support your vision for your online communication.

PRINCIPLE 7: Grow Your Expertise

Like anything worthwhile, an effective presence requires investment, not only in terms of direct technology expense (systems, hardware, etc), but more significantly in terms of time and expertise. Creating and maintaining multiple channels of communication requires a great deal of planning and hard work week in and week out.

Many organizations invest the time and resources to design and build a new site, but they fail to properly plan for its ongoing maintenance. How often will the site be updated? How many pages? How many emails are being sent out? How much new content is being generated on a monthly basis? How many new graphical images need to be created to support new content? Are there ongoing audio or video production needs? All of these activities require time. Where is this time coming from? You can’t just add a duty to someone who is already working a 40 hour week.

Other organizations budget time for their online communication efforts, but they aren’t able to bring together all the skills that are required for successful online communication. Online and offline communication share many of the same underlying principles, but there are significant differences in the skills required. Successful online communication involves complex interactions between strategic communication, marketing, creative design, and technology expertise, all working together seamlessly. A gap in one area, or the inability for this expertise to work together, can deal a fatal blow to an organization’s online communication efforts, even if the strategy, vision, and technology platform are all in place.

Identify what your realistic short and long term needs are and make sure your organization is staffed accordingly. Realistically forecast the time your web efforts will require and clearly assign responsibility to different team members. Invest in your staff and equip them with the training they need to be successful. Your staffing needs today will probably differ from your needs tomorrow – so be careful when you hire a new person that is a great fit for your current needs but may be overwhelmed as your needs grow more complex.

Consider partnering with a team of professionals that can assist with strategic thinking, creative design and ongoing consulting to maintain momentum while you find the right internal team. The approach we recommend is to find capable staff to manage your ongoing efforts, but consider working with outside parties to quickly drive forward new projects and new initiatives for growth.
Whether you invest more resources in hiring and developing staff, choose to work with an outside partner who specializes in online communication, or some combination of both, the principle is the same. Make sure you have the expertise in place to execute the strategy that you have developed.

PRINCIPLE 8: Continually fine-tune based on rigorous analysis

If it is worth doing, it is worth measuring. Industry averages really only apply to the big guys, so gather enough data to create your own ‘industry average.’ Every new initiative should have goals and objectives that are clearly defined and measurable and that provide the most impact to your effort – not the industry. Establishing realistic success criteria or benchmarks will help you to measure the effectiveness of your efforts and where some require refinement.

Stay on top of your open rates and response rates, page views and entry and exit pages – all these tell you what you are doing right and what you may need to test and fix. By testing and analyzing results on a continual basis, you will identify your own ‘industry average’ as it relates to your efforts and not that of Best Buy.com or a ministry ten times your size. Analyzing this information will help you to understand the full impact of your ROI and where you can spend more money to get better results.

Have the discipline to look at reports on a monthly, weekly, or even daily basis. Do more than look at reports. Take the next step and analyze your results and then think about how the numbers might drive your decision making. Does 60% of your traffic go to one section of your site? Then, in a world of limited resources, you should focus more resources on improving this section. Do 60% of your website visitors leave the site without clicking on anything? Then, maybe the home page needs some more work.

Eventually, you will want to base design decisions not on what you think the audience will respond to on your site, but what they actually respond to. Even though your President may love the fancy HTML email, you may find that a simple, short, text email drives more response. You may think your navigation is clear, but the data may suggest otherwise. Be open-minded and be willing to listen to what the numbers are telling you. The numbers never lie, so take the time to look at them and learn from past activity.

In many ways, this last principle is the foundation for improving all the others. By spending time analyzing how people interact with your website and your other online communications, you will be able to constantly recalibrate and fine-tune your approach across all the other areas.