Communications | Jeremy Scheller

Jan 25, 2010

Freebie Giveaway: Kem Meyer’s Less Clutter, Less Noise.

The first book giveaway isn’t even over but I’ve got another one to give away for all you church marketing peeps.

You all know about our great teacher Kem Meyer, and most of you probably have the book. For the rest of you, you need to read it. I’ve got an extra copy or two laying around, so somebody else might as well benefit.

Leave a comment on this post and I will choose a random number to give one away to on end of day Wednesday.

Read my review of the book here.

UPDATE: Mr. Chad Maag has won the thesis of our responsibility.

Dec 4, 2009

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Delivering builds trust.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/philipbitnar/ / CC BY 2.0

I dropped my car off this morning at the mechanic to get my brakes done. I’ve been there a handful of times. It’s a family-owned gas station, a couple of brothers working together. Every time I’ve picked up my car there, I’ve been surprised at how inexpensive they work and how truly honest they are.

When I was leaving, the owner asked me, “Do you want me to call you with an estimate after we get the wheels off or should we just go ahead and fix it?”

It took me about 2 seconds to think about it and respond, “No, just go ahead and do what you need to do.”

It came down to trust. I realized they’ve never given me a reason to second guess how much it’s going to cost or if they’re going to try to fix something that’s not broken, or if they do something wrong, I know they will own it. I don’t have much money, but I don’t have any reason to believe they’re going to break the budget. So what’s their marketing plan? They deliver what they promise.

Marketing is all about the story people hear when you’re being yourself.

Don’t promise what you CAN’T DELIVER.
Promise what you WILL DELIVER.
When you break your promise, figure out HOW TO DELIVER on it anyway.

Delivering builds trust. Trust builds relationships. Relationships build futures.

UPDATE: I picked up my car and was indeed shocked again to pay far less than I expected. Northsiders, please go to Fairchild’s Sinclair on 42nd Ave.

Sep 25, 2009

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Innovate09 Social Media 101 with Kem Meyer

Why in the world would you want to be immersed in Social Media?

Is it good for you? Is it good for your organization?

Social media is about discovering the potential of your hidden network. There are opportunities and value in discovering who you’re connected to.

Use tools like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Vimeo, YouTube, etc. to discover your links to

The World
Personal & Family
Team & Staff
Church & Professional
Tools & Resources

Wherever you jump in to social media, begin to think about these things:

Who is your primary audience? (Keep in mind your secondary audience)
Figure out what you want to do. (A journal, an expression of personality, to connect)

Then,

Get help
Take it one thing at a time
Watch for a while
Start interacting

Sep 24, 2009

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Innovate09 Kem Meyer

Kem always brings us back to the basics of communication.

Communication is not about sending the right message, it’s all about getting the right response.

How to clarify your message for the right response.

Check your ego
Get an image consultant
Keep it simple

Aug 31, 2009

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Bells & Whistles actually make your site too noisy to use.

This is insane. I’m not knocking these businesses, but these websites are enough to drive me batty. See for yourself and ask yourself you’re able to find what you’re looking for.

QUICK RULE OF THUMB: Any time your site navigation needs instructions, you have failed.

Mall of America

Qwest

Reduce the noise in your navigation. I’m not looking for some intensely dynamic visual adventure when I go to most websites. Especially those that need to be strictly informational. If you could please just help me get in and out with the information I need, I would be a much happier customer. Thank you.

Be Clear.

Be Precise.

Create easy pathways.

That’s all that matters.

Jul 20, 2009

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Diary of a Website Overhaul: 3 of 4

Extending Sanctuary Online. Not just building a website. Design, Tools, & Teams.

We are a beautiful church. What we’re doing here, isn’t common. If you subscribe to the words of Dr. King 40 some years ago, “Sunday morning at 11am is the most segregated hour in America.” But not at Sanctuary. The Sanctuary is beautiful place to worship because of the diversity of its people.

One of the biggest criticisms of our old website was that people couldn’t really see who we are. So when I thought about extending our church online, it wasn’t just about what we do, but it was to give people a “sneak preview of heaven” (as Pastor Efrem always says) and to see the faces that make up this multi-cultural community.

I’m a designer.
But there are few things that are harder for me than to feel settled about a design I’m creating for myself. So I knew I needed some outside help. A fresh perspective on the look and feel of Sanctuary. Over the past few years, I’ve participated in the Church Marketing Lab. It’s a place for design feedback and community support. I’d been impressed with the work of Elliott Munoz. He has a talent for web design that I’ve never had. I’m more of a print guy myself. I’d known for a while that I was going to connect with him about designing the Sanctuary site.

We had an initial conversation and I shared with him a bit about our culture, our community, our vibe, and I sent him this wireframe for what I was looking for.

After a few minor tweaks, we ended up with the look and feel we have now. He’s got talent.

Additional Design Element: Photography

Photos. Photos. Photos. To see who we really are, you have to see our faces. So now and moving ahead, I’ve made a bit of a switch in philosophy. I used to think we needed to create graphics for everything and try to limit the use of photos from our actual congregation. I think it was a mistake, especially when you see who Sanctuary is.

So this round, I relied on some awesome photography from Philip Hussong and Amy Mingo. Both are talented and offered up their services. Philip is a friend and has also worked with my company. Amy is a member at Sanctuary and awesome volunteer.

We still have some blank spots, but my plan is to use photography to show the face of Sanctuary on almost every area of the site. Real photos. Real people. A real place to get connected to.

Tools

The other major component was our content management system (CMS). Aaron Kardell and Cindy Schaller from Sanctuary forged the way as we analyzed a few CMS’s, Namely Drupal and Expression Engine. Our last site was built on an old version of Joomla. Joomla works, but I was really unhappy with a number of things about it:

I’m a visual guy and I thought the GUI was miserable. (At least the 1.2.x version we were on.)
Open source is great and free, but thousands of plug-ins and extensions built by “the community” meant most things didn’t work right out of the box. It was a pain to customize.
Joomla always left me frustrated because the layout and organization of the control panel didn’t seem to make much sense to non-programmer types. (I tried to teach it to a number of people over the years without much luck)

As we talked about the pros and cons of Drupal and Expression Engine, we could have gone either way. Both systems could do what we asked of it. So what it came down to was based on ease of use, non-open-source (I like the way the have extensions that are EE Certified), and a strong GUI. I’m also impressed with the developer roadmap for Expression Engine. I think it will be strong well into the future with 2.0 release coming soon.

Since we’ve started using Expression Engine, I can’t imagine using something else right now. It just works so well. I’m sure drupal could have worked well too, but I just love the organization of EE’s control panel.

Project Management

We used Basecamp to manage the entire web project after the design phase. Basecamp helped to:

manage to-do lists
keep track of deadlines
keep a record of the progress
keep track of bugs
have a unified meeting place

Next Up: Content is king, it’s all on the web, Feature highlights, Looking like “Us” not “It.”

Jul 16, 2009

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Diary of a Website Overhaul: 2 of 4

I know what I want, but how can we make it happen?
Prerequisites, Conversations, and tough decisions.

Based on an honest look in the mirror, I landed on 3 main issues that this website was going to tackle:

Connecting people to Sanctuary events
Connecting people at Sanctuary to each other
Streamline processes and eliminate paper

The process part is where I got hung up. We had internal process issues around:

Communications
Priorities
Database infrastructure
Team mentality

Communications, Priorities and Team issues are always in the hopper. We’ve been going through a year long staff development process that is helping us solidify a team mentality and opening up honest talking points around our goals and priorities as a church.

The database/church management system (CHMS) was another beast all together. For a few years we’ve been “using” a database that, in reality, nobody was “using.” It was complicated. It was clunky. It was hard for the average user to dive in and be comfortable without lots of training.

So, at the same time as I helped form a web team, I launched a database discovery team.
We started with a survey of several of the main players in the field.

We did a SWOT Analysis of our current tool. Then evaluated our options for these criteria:

Data Security
Data Capture
Vistior/Attendee/Member Management
Tracking Involvement
Network/Gifts/Skills/Strengths Tracking
Web/Database Integration
Event Management/Registration
Financial Tracking
Training and Facilitation
Education
Deployment

I’m happy to say we landed on Fellowship One as our CHMS.

The implementation of Fellowship One took precedence over the website. It didn’t put the website on the back burner, but I didn’t think there was much use in launching a website to connect people if we didn’t have processes in place to help keep them connected.

It took about 8 months to truly make the transition to F1 (8 months for us, more or less for you, this is a staff culture and timing thing). We’re not perfect. We make lots of mistakes, but as we increase our implementation of F1, we’re beginning to make the holes in the net a little smaller, so fewer people fall through. I highly recommend getting your CHMS in order before recreating your website.

We’re all about people, but processes help promote a healthy community.

Next up: Extending Sanctuary Online. Not just building a website. Design, Tools, & Teams.

Jul 15, 2009

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Diary of a Website Overhaul 1 of 4

About a year ago, I began dreaming about a new website that would serve our people better than what we had. The last version of our website (which was actually sanctuaryweb_v3) was broken. So much about it was not functional, misinforming, and a pain to upgrade.

Anatomy of the old site:
Infrastructure: Built on Joomla
Designed By: Me
Concept: Get something up whether it’s right or not.
Launched: January 2007

Some of the significant issues with the old site:

It didn’t connect people well.
It required us to get people to it, rather than getting itself out to the people.
Most of the higher functionality I desired didn’t work.
Joomla. Joomla. Joomla. Left it and never going back.
Inflexible.

So I had this website, that everybody wanted some presence on, but it just didn’t work well. Not for me. Not for our staff. Not for our community. I started dreaming. I started asking myself some basic questions about purpose. To a point, I had to stop and wonder about what the website was really for.

I went to my friend Kem Meyer’s Blog and started digging through it for valuable insights into Web Strategy.

I came across these helpful links:

How do you “do” web strategy?

Using Discover, Define, Deliver as my guide, I immersed myself into a web process that soon became a much bigger project than just a website. It has become a communication and data overhaul of which the website is just one component.

After about 2 months of soul searching, I knew that there was work that needed to be done before building a website. When I made the old website, I mistakenly built it based on what I thought a website should do, rather than truly trying to extend the Sanctuary Church online. But to have the web presence I dreamt of, I needed to deal with other issues deep under the hood of Sanctuary or the web presence would continue to lag.

Next up: I know what I want, but how can we make it happen? Prerequisites, Conversations, and tough decisions.

Apr 28, 2009

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Quick Tips for Blogging Pastors

My boss is going to be launching his blog here pretty soon. I wrote these quick tips to help him get off the ground and into the blogosphere.
Quick tips for blogging Pastors—

Be yourself
Keep it Simple.
Keep it Brief
If you have a numerous thoughts on a topic, break it up into a series.
Add a supporting image when possible.
Comments are comments, not rabbit holes to follow

The expanded version:

You want to write because you think you have something to say. Don’t blog because “you think you’re supposed to.” Be yourself and share your passions.
People reading blogs tend to be information junkies. They are probably reading 25 other blogs. To reach a broad audience, you’ll want to communicate simply and to the point.
Shorter is better in the blog world. You get a few paragraphs to share what you think and bullet points or numbered lists will go a long way to help you keep your messages short and to the point.
To help keep your message short and sweet, if you have a topic that requires more words to really get out what you feel, consider breaking it up into a multi-part series. Swerve.LifeChurch.tv does this really well. Consider launching a 4-5 part series on Monday and title it…”Blog on this topic, 1 of 5.” This will help you organize your ideas, keep your posts short and also keep your readers engaged and wanting to come back for more.
Sometimes images speak louder than words. If you can link to an image or have one of your own, try to include it with your post.
Comments should not drive your content. You should. Do not feel the need to chase after each comment and create justifications based on what your community says. Don’t ignore all the comments, but don’t respond to everything either.

These simple tips will help get your blog off the ground and help you to jump start your online community.

Mar 31, 2009

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All up in arms about Seth Godin's post.

Today, Seth Godin took a pragmatic approach to design in a blog article that allowed him the opportunity to be accosted by designers all over the internet. Go ahead, have your opinions, I have mine.

He said,

“Why aren’t you (really) good at graphic design?

Ten years ago, you had a wide range of excuses for being a lousy visuals person. Starting with no talent, leading to no skill and going from there.

But now, in a world where it is expected that professionals will be able to make beautiful powerpoint slides, handsome business cards, clever bio photos and a decent website, it’s as important as driving. And easier to learn and do, and requiring less talent.”

And I agree. Design can be formulaic. Totally awesome design is not always formulaic. It requires sheer talent. But, the tools available these days make it easier than ever to make something that is not total crap. And really, isn’t the goal to always be a little better than you were before.

I’m not foolish enough to think as a designer that I’m a novelty act. Used to be, if you were a journalist, you worked at a newspaper. Now, there’s millions of people on the web with very useful things to say and stories to report that really can wow me with their precision at times. There’s still a lot of total crap out there, but there’s a ton of people doing great work. It’s the same with design. The days of boutique design aren’t over, but the door is wide open for real innovation to happen that makes it easy for non-designers to make life more beautiful and communicate better. We should be thankful that we all get to partake in something that makes life a little less crappy.

Realistically, you can find design on the same continuums that other industries use as indicated in the awesome scale below. The language may be different, but 10 points is still more than 0.
75 points is still more than 30.
And a big step in the right direction is better than being total crap.