Setting Goals for Your Church Website

By: Jesse Orndorff|Posted in: Web Design

Goal setting, whether it is for your job, or your website can be a difficult task. Often I find myself forgetting to set goals for my projects, which can be a disaster if you are launching a new website, or if your testing an idea. Today I want to go over setting goals for your church website using your vision statement as the foundation.

Now that you have a vision for your church website, we can now set a clear goal. This part of the development process is often overlooked by my clients and pastors I have worked with. So make sure you really take the time to think about why you have a church website.

Make Sure it’s Measurable

We need to take our vision for our church website and focus it down into a few measurable goals. Want to increase online giving? Do you want to increase the amount of new visitor emails? Be honest with your goals, look at your church vision, what does it tell you about how you want your website to function?

In my last article I covered the need to develop your church website vision. I recommend going back and reviewing your vision statement if you haven’t already.

This was the vision statement of our example Church X:

Church X’s vision is to communicate the gospel of Jesus Christ to young families in our community. Our website echos this vision by focusing on a message of community, small groups, and family friendly services.

Looking at this simple and fairly standard vision statement we can define three goals for our new church website. First, is our focus on community, we are going to want to target our first goal to building our community. Second, our church is building our vision around small groups. Third, our family friendly services need to be highlighted.

Setting The Goals

So let’s look at our newly defined focus areas:

1. Community focused
2. Connecting small group members
3. Child care for our family friendly services

Using these three areas we set our goals for our new website. Being community focused we want to set a goal to post two blog posts about our local community partnered events. This will be a nice way to help connect to our local community, as well help drive more local traffic to our website.

Since our church is focused on small groups, I would want to increase the amount of new sign-ups for small groups by 10%. We will cover a few ways to do this in my next post, planning your website to meet your goals.

Last, is our child care for family friendly services. I want to make sure that new parents can find information about our childcare services. I would like to increase the page views(number of times the page has been viewed) of our childcare page by 25%

Simple, easy, and measurable. These three goals will be our first steps in developing and launching our church website. We will look back to these often and make changes when needed. Make sure to have your goals ready, next post I will cover creating a plan to execute your goals.