I recently ran a survey to find out how members of a church use their church’s website.
A note about the data…
Let me preface this by saying the sample size is nowhere near large (or diverse) enough to be incredibly meaningful, but it does provide some helpful data nonetheless. There were a total of 42 responses. I don’t know for sure, but I expect a vast majority of those responses came from people at my own church. Our existing website undoubtedly influenced their answers. I realized this when I had a conversation with one member about the survey. She was surprised to see that “online giving” was even an option people would look for. We don’t have that feature currently, so people don’t look for it. Therefore, a disproportionate number of people probably did not choose that. Similarly, our previous website was almost exclusively built around upcoming events and registrations for those events, which you will see reflected as a high priority from these results.
So for now, take the survey with a grain of salt. Nonetheless, here’s a breakdown of some of the more interesting things from the survey:
Frequency of Visits
I asked people how frequently they visited their church’s website in a given month. Here were the responses:
[table class=”table table-border” colalign=”center|center”]
Visits/Month,Responses
1-2,23
3-5,11
6-10,6
11+,1[/table]
As I mentioned earlier, our website didn’t have much to entice people back on a regular basis. I am considering some sort of more regular content in a traditional “blog” style as a way of getting people to interact with the website more and to double as a teaching opportunity.
Purpose of the Visits
Here are how the pre-configured options ranked in the survey for the question “What were you hoping to find/do on your church’s website?”
[table class=”table table-border” colalign=”center|center” colwidth=”65%|35%”]
Option,Responses
“Information about Upcoming Events”,40
“Sermon Recordings”,21
“Sign Up/Register for Event”,16
“News/Photos From Past Events”,13
“Prayer Requests”,10
“Leadership Information (Staff Bios, Contact Info, etc.)”,10
“Volunteer Opportunities at Church”,10
“Resources to Grow Closer to Jesus. (Devotions, Bible Reading Plans, Prayer Guides, etc.)”,9
“Participate in an Ongoing Ministry (Youth Group, Sunday School, etc.)”,8
“Online Giving Options”,5
“Resources to Help in Your Daily Living (Parenting Tips, How to Cope with Grief, etc.)”,5
“Join a Small Group/Life Group”,3
“Give Feedback to the Church Leadership”,2[/table]
Again, the results were not surprising considering the primary emphasis of our previous website. I was surprised to see a relatively large number of people who look for news and photos from past events. We don’t report these things much on our website, but we do post pictures and recaps of ministry on our Facebook page pretty regularly. Also not surprisingly, “Join a life group” was very low in our results. There is no easy way to even find life groups on our old site, let alone join one.
What Was Missing on the Church Website
This section asked people to share what they had hoped to find on their church’s website, but couldn’t. Some of the frequent responses:
- Current newsletter/calendar/announcements.
- Staff photos/bios/contact information.
- Service/Bible Study times.
- Address/Contact info.
Biggest Frustrations with Church Websites
This section asked people to share their greatest frustrations with their church’s website. Some of the key themes in the responses include:
- Navigation – People found the websites to be too difficult to navigate and find what they were looking for. This was one of the main goals of our new site–to simplify the navigation system so people can quickly find what they are looking for.
- Lack of new/updated contact – We’ve all seen that church website that lists a coming event prominently on the front page, only to see that it actually happened several months ago. This also includes sermons not getting posted for several weeks from a couple comments.
- Lack of online giving options – People are looking for convenient ways to give to a church and aren’t able to find it on their church’s website.
If you would like to contribute to the survey data, you can find it here. Feel free to share with friends who are members of a church.