Setting Smart Goals for Your Church Website

I am writing a series of posts about setting goals for your church website. I’ve talked about goal setting before. In this post I want to introduce you to the idea of setting smart goals for your website. We all know that goals are important. In every aspect of our lives we must set goals. Your church website is no different. The big question is are you being smart with your goals?

I use the S.M.A.R.T. goal setting technique with clients and for the websites I develop. I am not usually a fan of acronyms, but for goal setting, I have yet to find something better.

What does S.M.A.R.T. stand for?

[dropcap color=”blue”]S[/dropcap] pecific – Your goal need to be extremely specific and concrete. Being able to clearly identify when the goal is achieved is key. It also cannot be a moving target, but a goal that is fixed. For instance, “Increase blog readership to 1,000 people.” is a fixed goal, while, “Write blog posts about our church.” is not.

[dropcap color=”blue”]M[/dropcap] easurable – Your goal needs to not only be specific but it needs to be able to be measured with empirical evidence. An easy test is to see if your goal is measurable or not is to explain to a friend how you know, with data, that you achieved it. If we look at our previous example: “Increase blog readership to 1,000 people.” Is a simple, but very measurable goal. Using analytics we can see how much traffic our blog received this month and compare to next month.

[dropcap color=”blue”]A[/dropcap] chievable – Your goal needs to be something you can reasonably reach. It does not mean you shouldn’t aim for a high reaching goal. It just needs to be something that is achievable based on the amount of work and effort you apply to the goal. In this case: “Increase blog readership to 1,000 people in 90 days.” Works for a goal if your church website has 500 users a month. But “Increase website visits to one million.” Would not be something that we can reasonably get to.

[dropcap color=”blue”]R[/dropcap] ealistic – Very similar to being achievable, your goal needs to be realistic. It needs to match up to what your vision is for your church, and your church website. For more on vision you can see my post about defining your website vision.

[dropcap color=”blue”]T[/dropcap] ime-bound – Your goal needs to be time based. In working with goals for websites, we need to develop a set of milestones that we can measure. For goals for my sites, I set one smaller monthly goal and then three larger ones for the quarter.

So? What are your goals? How are planning on reaching these?