Quick break today from the week-long “selection-a-thon” discussion.  There’s been some excellent comments/discussion especially on “Do Ministry Thru Others“ and “Is Selection Unloving?”.  We’ll pick that topic back up next week with a couple more posts.
I wrote the following post for the CruPressGreen blog but since they’re lacking comments over there (they’re working on it!), I thought I’d repost it in it’s entirety on my blog so you can interact with it if you want and leave comments with questions, tech support, etc.
Â
What if instead of waiting for students to come to your website you could send your website to them?
And you could see exactly who (by name) was clicking — whether to investigate a relationship with God or checking out your Bible Studies. We send our “website” to 2500 students every week (most are contacts from spiritual interest surveys).
Now I’ll be the first to admit that technology is not the answer. Whether the question is: “how do I get more students to my weekly meeting?”, “how can I reach more lost students?”, or “will the iPhone4 fill the hole in my heart?” – Technology is not the answer (well, maybe on that last one).
I love technology and good design. And I find myself dreaming about how a new website or really slick publicity will draw in millions of college students to our Cru meeting. But the reality is that most come because of relationships.
BUT… in our increasingly spammy world, good design and technology can get your foot in the door (or inbox) and help you connect with students on their terms (online).
Our ministry just started using Mailchimp this fall and I love it. Mailchimp enables you to send e-mails that look and act like mini-websites. Here’s ours:
For us, I love that students can, at a glance, see when our meeting is, a map to Cru, and what we offer. And students can click on any of those links to easily get more info.
Why we decided to use Mailchimp:
- Relatively cheap/free (depending on usage)
- It’s really pretty
- Students can unsubscribe easily (again, avoiding spammy-ness)
- It has crazy-cool Analytics. You can see how many people are opening the e-mail AND who is opening them (you can even see that Joe Freshman clicked on “Bible Study info”). I’ll elaborate more below so I don’t bore those who are data-averse
A few tips on usage:
- Mailchimp has some nice templates so you don’t have to know HTML
- With that being said, you’ll get better results if you get a web savvy student to run it (especially one that knows HTML). A volunteer put ours together (using HTML — not the templates).
Here’s the pricing:
And now for their amazing analytics! Here’s just some of what they tell you.
It will tell you exactly how many people opened the e-mail (and who):
And, one of the coolest things it shows you is what part of your e-mail people clicked (and, again, it tells you by name (in a separate report not shown) who clicked what):
