You finally have a great church website, but now what? The next step is to decide what you want to accomplish with it.
Setting goals for your church website helps you keep your content and marketing strategy focused. While getting more members may be a goal, you have to be more specific.
By creating goals, you’ll quickly discover your church’s website is far more effective than you originally thought. While every church’s goals may vary, start with these seven if you need some inspiration.
Goal Setting Tips
Before you start setting goals for your church website, it’s important to learn how to set goals you’ll actually achieve. General goals aren’t enough. They’re easy to forget about since there isn’t any way to measure success. This is why specific goals are more effective than a general idea.
For best results, think about what your church can realistically do and what it needs. Next, follow the SMART goal setting guidelines to refine the goals into something that’s measurable and easier to achieve. Now, on to those goals!
1. Provide Worship Resources
One of the main goals for your church website should be to provide worship resources to visitors. While you want to market your church, the goal here should be to just help visitors explore their faith. Worship resources is kind of general, so to be more specific, consider providing any of the following:
- Sermon scripts and/or videos/audio
- Blog based on scripture and issues facing members
- Upload study guides
- Offer a Q&A forum
Just by providing resources, you turn your website into a place that safe for anyone to worship on their own time.
2. Motivate And Inspire Visitors
If you want new members, use your church’s site to help motivate and inspire visitors. If your site is inspiring enough, it could help them choose your church over another. But how do you use your site to do this? Simple. Showcase your church’s personality through inspiring blog posts, daily scripture, encouraging words for common struggles and an online prayer request form.
3. Boost Growth (Reasonably)
This one is important and odds are, it’s one of the main goals you want to focus on. While this is a great goal, you’ll fail instantly if you don’t rein in your expectations. If you’re a small church with 75 members, you can’t expect to triple your membership in a month. You might not even come close to those numbers in a year.
However, if you set a reasonable goal, you’ll reach it and be more likely to keep pushing yourself to reach more goals. For instance, set a goal to boost growth by a dozen members within six months.
4. Encourage Volunteering
Volunteer numbers a bit low? Set volunteering as one of the goals for your church website. Use your church’s site to help motivate people into volunteering. List upcoming opportunities and different ways people can get involved. Set a goal to just boost volunteer numbers by a realistic percentage and work until you meet that goal.
5. Reach Those Outside The Community
It’s great to use your church’s site to engage members and reach new members. However, a good goal to set is to reach people outside your community. While they may never physically attend, they may not have a church in their area that fits their needs. Use your site to give them an engaging community to worship with. Set up a welcome section that asks where visitors are from. This gives you a way to measure your website’s reach.
6. Increase Tithing
Online giving is an easier way for members and non-members to tithe. By working with online giving companies, you can set up online giving options that are one-time or recurring. Even people who don’t attend, but appreciate what you give them online, are more willing to give back.
7. Make Visitors Think
While this might not be one of the top goals for your church website, it’s one that’s worth your time. It’s not unusual for even the most faithful to question their faith during hard times. For those whose faith is borderline, set a goal to create content that makes visitors think.
This one is harder to measure, but comments on blog posts and even your site’s contact form will give you some insight into how this helps others. Set a schedule for creating more thought provoking content that looks in-depth into current events and issues that everyone is dealing with right now.
Of course, the first step to setting church goals is to ensure your church’s site is fully optimized to get more visitors. See more about REACHRIGHT or Try our free website analysis to learn more.
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