 Okay, good morning, once again, everybody welcome back to our second lecture, BC314 on media and technology. We're just starting to talk a little bit about websites, websites for our church and ministry, how we can go about setting it up, just some thoughts, some guidance on it. So let's continue from where we paused and alright. So when you come to building the church website, what are some of the things you need to think about? So you think about what kind of website do you want to have and who are the people you're targeting? Do you want to have something that's very contemporary, that's very attractive, very fancy, do you want to stay with a classic look? What are you trying to do? So for us at APC, when we were thinking about this, and of course, our website's been there from, I think, I don't know, a long time ago, forget when, maybe from 2004 or something, it's been there. And then of course, it's gone through updates continuously. But anyway, our main motivation was we wanted, the way we are thinking about our website is actually a repository. That means we want people, when they think about our website, they say, hey, I need to go to their website because I'll find content that I'm looking for. So our website is not just a brochure for our church or ministry. We want our church website to be a repository for Christians all over the world. So that was our motivation that we're going to make it a website that provides content for believers all over the world. And we're going to provide it for free. Now, if you go to some church websites, to buy a book here to pay some money, to listen to buy, to download a sermon, $3, buy a book, $15, $20, something like that, people charge different things. But we said, no, we want our website to be a free repository of all our sermons, everything. So you'll find all of our books, all our sermons from 2004 till now, so about 20 years of sermons. Of course, in the early days, we only did audio recording, and then slowly we started having early days, 2004, it was only audio recording and sermon notes. We did not even have PowerPoints. And slowly after that, I don't know which year, but some of the years, you'll have audio recording, sermon notes, PowerPoints. Then slowly after that, you'll have videos. We started having videos. So it all came later on, but 20 years of content is available. And then, so all our sermons, the videos, other content that we added. So that was our motivation that we will make it a content repository of content, Christian content, sermons, books, whatever we have, make it available for free. Now, that was our motivation. Now, somebody else may say, well, I just want my website to be like a brochure. I just want to give some information about the ministry, about the church. It's mainly informational, that's fine. You can be content, you're providing resources. Sometimes people may use their website to raise support. You want to mobilize finances or volunteers, that may be something. Some people may want to use their website to sell products, like people come and shop for whatever people are selling, Christian books, music, other things. Or sometimes you can use your website to get action, register for conferences, register for events, register for various things. Now, our motivation was mainly content. Now, we do provide information. That means we do let people know a little bit about our church and things like that. And we do have some information on where people can support if they want to give. And also all the registrations for all our events also happen through our website. So we kind of do all this. But this is like our main goal was it should be the content. People should come for the content. So with that as your objective, once you define what do I want to do with my website, then you can decide whom you want to target. So our goal was let's keep it plain simple classic. So you don't find anything very fancy on our website. It's not some glossy look and feel. It's very simple. Here are all the menus, here are all the information. It's an old classic look. And that's intentional. We just want to make it easy for people to navigate the website. And then you can think about what people call as information architecture, how you want to lay out your site map, how you want to lay it out. Make it simple, make it very intuitive. So even a new person coming, they will know, okay, here's your homepage. If I want to know about the church, I go to the about section. If I'm a visitor, I go to the new visitor section. If I want to know about the events, I can go here. If I want to know what are people leading this church, I can go to the team page. If I want to know, I don't want to contact them. I should be able to get the information. So make it very intuitive. What is the information people are looking for? It should be very accessible. What are the things? So people are looking for what time of the Sunday church service. It should be accessible because they want to come to church. They should find that information. Or where is the church meeting? Which location? What is the address? They should be able to find that. So make it very simple, very easy to use. And then use colors and graphics that are very pleasant. And there should be no error, zero error in anything on the graphics. So if there's a spelling mistake somewhere, it makes it look bad. So have somebody check it. So we have a QA process that we try to make sure. Now and then sometimes some mistakes slip in, but we try to keep it clean. No spelling mistakes. Keep the content updated. So literally every day the website is being updated. Everything is being, all information is taken off contents. Because if it's old, people think like, oh, it's not been updated. I can't trust the other information on the website. So keep the content updated. If you have links on the website, it should all be working. And as I mentioned, it should be very easy to navigate the website. Some other useful things you can do is when people come to your website, try to get their contact information. So have a simple form, but they can just enter the name, email number, subscribe. Something very simple. Don't make it complicated. Give me a full first name, last name, grandfather's name. People don't have time to enter. Just something very simple. If you want to know more detail, they can subscribe. They can be added to your database and so on. Then of course you can connect to social media accounts, which are, if you have these accounts, we'll talk about these little data social media, make that, you know, link to that from your website. And then very importantly, optimize your website for search engines. So basically you have a website, but remember there are literally zillions of websites all over the world. And your website is one among so many. So you have to make your website, you know, optimize your website so that when people search, they should find you. And there's a way to do this. There's a way to do it. And so you can get the help of people who know how to do search engine optimization to make your, optimize your website for searchers. That means you use certain keywords. You know, what will people search for when they want to look for your website? So example, the way we talk through this is, okay, if somebody's in Bangalore, they will, what will they look for? They will look for spirit filled church Bangalore. Like if somebody wants to vote for spirit filled church, that's a spirit filled church. Or if somebody wants to go to a word based, I'm looking for a word based church in Bangalore. Or if somebody wants, you know, a charismatic church, let's say charismatic church Bangalore, or Pentecostal church Bangalore, whatever they're looking for, you know. So you think about these are the phrases people will search. So that phrase, those phrases must be in your website for your website to show up. So in all the content you do, you're very thoughtful about what words you're using in your website. And also important is your URLs, the links that you make in your website should also include those keywords, right? So somebody searching for online church, they should be able to find it. Or free Christian books they'll search, they'll find it. So you create, you optimize your website for these search phrases by including them in your URL. So that's another trick. Also make sure that you add your church locations to Google Business Listing. This is free. So just go to google.com slash business and you add your address of your church location, church office so that it'll show up on Google Maps. And it increases, you know, the chances of people finding you. And this is all for free. You don't have to pay for this. They just verify your address. And you add your church location, your church address. When people search, they should find you or your church office on Google Maps, et cetera. Just add it there. It's for free. They just verify your address. And another important thing to do is to cross-link. That means from other places on the internet, you should link back to your website. Somebody who understands search engine optimization will explain this to you. But basically, the more links you have linking back to your website, the ranking of your website goes up. So that means you'll be ranked higher. So you need to cross-link back to your website from other places. And you can use other directories, yellow pages and so on to link back. Now, in today's world, with the rise of artificial intelligence, the way search is happening is beginning to change. So we need to adapt to it. But this is all still valid. All of this will still work. And then one more thing is submit your website to Google Search Console. Again, this is free. You go to this URL, Google Search Console. Use your Gmail. Go there. And then you link your particular domain, your website domain. Submit it to Google Search Console. So that will happen. Google, what they call it is crawlers. It's their search engine. That's how they read. Basically, Google has software. They call it crawlers. It goes and reads everything on every website. Or almost everything on almost every website. So the crawler crawls through your website. It indexes every page, looking at all the content. And it links your page, indexes it. But if you submit here, then it will pick up your website, index the pages in your website. And that's what makes your website visible to other people when they search. And you can also, if you want to make your website accessible from other parts of the world, which you can do. So there will be people anywhere in the world who will search for certain key phrases they can find your website. And I'll show you that. And so that means your content then becomes visible anywhere in the world, in the English-speaking world, if your website is in English. Keep your website some basic things. Keep the content updated. Keep it increasing. And if you have a lot of content in your website, build search into your website also. And make it easy for people to find content by grouping it and so on. So let me just give you a little demo of what we have done. So let me go back to the browser and let me share the browser. So all this, we've been working on this. We keep working on this constantly. I just want you to see. Can you? Sorry, I forgot what I shared. Stop. Let me share my screen. Can you see my screen? The web browser? You can see just the web browser, right? Okay. Right now in Bangalore. So we'll do lots of different searches. So let's say, as I mentioned, somebody's searching, somebody comes to Bangalore or somebody's planning to come to Bangalore and they're looking for a spirit-filled church. So they would type spirit-filled church Bangalore, right? That's what they'll type in the search. And of course, Google does it search. It shows out some of the churches that these are churches that are listed on Google Maps. And then first in the list is All People's Church, right? So we've optimized our website to be number one. So if you did, you know, so you look at All People's Church and Bangalore Spirit-Filled, right? So this is important. You rank number one so that people can find you. And I'm not saying that everybody who sees it will come to church, but at least they find this church, right? So let's do something else. You know, suppose somebody wants to type a word-based church in Bangalore. What will they see? So they type word-based church and All People's Church is right on top, right? So again, we've optimized our website for people to find us here, right? Right on top. Or if people search for... Because that's what we want you to find us for. Charismatic church in Bangalore. Again, there are some other churches listed, but you'll find APC, you know, they're listed right on top. First in the search results page. That means we optimized our website for such searches. Now, you can also do other searches. Let me open a new browser window here. Suppose somebody wants to search for an online... online church. Yeah, online church. So here, again, you see we are listed. We are ranked number second. I think this is from the U.S. church. That's number one. We are number two here. Of course, the churches are localized. Life church is from the U.S. But APC is, you know, for this region in our local, we are number two in the search results. So it's been optimized for this search. Suppose somebody searches free Christian books. See, we've been optimized. Our website comes up even for free Christian books. APC, you know, there's another somebody else that's here, number one. But number two and number three are APC websites. So our website's been optimized for this search also. Okay. If you search for online Bible college, APC Bible college, number two. So you have some online Bible college. Somebody has one. Mori Bible Institute is in the U.S. But APC Bible college, number two in the search results. So you optimize our Bible college website for ranking on top, right, in the search. So this is how people are going to find you. If you optimize your website for these searches. Now, let me go to the U.S. So all these searches were happening as though I'm here based in Bangalore. So let me go to the U.S. Google.com slash geolocation is U.S. That means I'm changing my geolocation to U.S. That means I'm going to search now as though somebody would search in the U.S., right? So if somebody searches, and I'm just using some known searches. So if somebody's searching for a book called Minister in Healing and Deliverance, okay, they search. Look, APC comes up. So in the U.S., our website comes up for this title, Minister in Healing and Deliverance. This is our book. So if somebody's searching in the U.S., that's what they will see. So even in the U.S., our APC books and videos are being made visible, right? Like this you could, you know, search for, for example, we have a book called Code of Honor. I don't know if that will come up here, but let's see. Code of Honor. Okay, that's actually a movie. And yeah, there's our movies. Yeah, so it's like it's all powered by the movies. So let me go to New Zealand. Google.com, geolocation, New Zealand. So suppose somebody's searching in New Zealand. So now I'm searching as though I'm living in New Zealand. And here again, you know, you can search, for example, if I search, do the same search, Minister in Healing and Deliverance. Again, in New Zealand, if somebody searches for Healing, our APC website will come, our book will come first, right? So, so anywhere in the English-speaking world, our church website has been optimized to rank highly on certain things. It's not going to rank highly for everything, but certain, you know, based on the content we have, right, which is like the books we have or things that so on. So let's see and think of anything. Wonderful benefits of bringing in talents. So like there's a lot, I'm sure there's a lot of content on this. Let's see if the APC comes anywhere here. Okay, so APC comes here. See, even for this search topic, on the APC website is there on page one. So, you can search this way and you will find. So, just a little example where or if I search for free Bible college, I don't know if we'll come up for this. We do. So even for that free Bible college, APC is ranked number one. Number two is some Bible college practice. That must be in the U.S. Something, and this is one in India. But you see like APC Bible college is ranked second after this Christian leadership institute. So even for this, you know, so students will be searching for free Bible college or if people search for Bible colleges in India. I don't know. Okay, we are on the first page, but we are kind of, I don't know, six or seven below, but we come up on the first page and people search for Bible colleges in India. They'll find us. So, let me stop sharing. So this is the benefit of having a website and optimizing it so that when people search and literally, you know, if they search from anywhere in the world, they will find you. And they will use your content. So in some ways, we are able to actually serve people all over the world. So let me just show you. You know, we can track the traffic that comes from all over the world. Let me just show you quickly. At least last year's data. I think this year must be just getting started. So this is our analytics website. So that's actually connected. This thing is monitoring all our church websites, different websites. And so let's go to the dashboard. So, you know, this is telling us it's monitoring. You can see my screen. Yeah, the analytics. So this is, we're looking at APCWORG website. So you can see in the last 24 hours, we've had 4,256 visits. And you can see people from different parts of the world. There's somebody from the U.S. right now. And this is from Ethiopia. This is from somebody from Iraq. It's on our website right now. They've been on the website for the last 25 minutes. Somebody from Pakistan is on our website. A website Pakistan. This is from Nicaragua. This is Pakistan, India, U.S. So this is monitoring the church website. And it's telling us, you know what, so people actually downloading all these resources from our website. And you can look at the visitors. You know, so this is just for the last day. But let's see, for example, let's see for this current year, that means for this year, that means we are now in February 7th. So from Jan 1st till today, we've had almost 60,000 visits to our church website. And let's see the locations. They have come from almost all over the world. So just in this last month and a half, we have people from almost all over the world come. Of course, the highest is there from India. You've got quite a number from the United States, but almost every country. There are some countries which are white, which we haven't had any visits. But otherwise, from almost every part of the world, they've been visiting our website using our content. And if you look at 2023, if you say I want to look all of what happened in 2023 from Jan 1 to December 31, 2023. So for last year, for 2023, we've had about 337,000 visits from all over the world. And you see the distribution. Like almost every country in the world, people have been coming to the website and using it. So we are literally able to serve people all over the world through the website without having to pay any etiquette to go to any of these countries. People are coming and using these resources. And so let's just share that with you. Let me stop. And similarly, for our website, we can monitor what people are downloading. So all our books that we have, we can see through the admin console, we have a count of how many of these books have been downloaded. And we can see, literally, I forget what the number was, but let me try to remember this. Last year, we had 556,603, so almost half a million downloads of our PDFs of our books. So it's just keeping a count of that. So imagine, this is digitally. That means almost 500 plus, 150,000, almost half a million copies of our books were distributed online. That means it's not the print online. People have downloaded that many books from all over the world and they're making use of it. So in one way, our vision for our church website is being fulfilled. We wanted to make it a content repository and people are actually making use of those resources globally. There's only the books. Now, similarly, we can track the sermons, how many MP3s are being downloaded, how many people are listening to the videos. We can track all of that. These are real numbers, because they're coming to our website, downloading the books or downloading the sermon MP3s and making use of that. Any questions, any comments, any thoughts here? As far as websites are concerned, any questions you have about how can I build a website or whatever, anything that you've seen or discussed so far? It's very interesting, Pastor. Especially the analytics helps us to understand the reach and people being blessed. It's so wonderful to see, Pastor. Yeah, it's very encouraging. And especially, we share this back with our IT teams. You guys see all the work you're doing, how it is blessing people all over the world that people search. Some people may be searching for different things. They land on the website and they will start using the resources. Yeah. Okay, so we'll just do one more topic and then we will stop. We will just talk a little bit about email. So our next topic is about emails. We'll just do this and then we'll stop. So we talked about websites. That's one way to engage people. Another way is emails. Remember previously, you have to write letters, go to the post office, buy stamp, put stamp, stick it, post it if you want to contact people. But today, emails are so easy, so quick, we can connect with people. So it's so important to create a mailing list. That means you need to get people's email IDs. So right from the beginning, we used to start collecting email IDs. So of course with people's permission, please give us your email ID. We can keep you informed of what's happening in church. And it used to be manual. I remember still back in 2002, 3, 4, after Sunday, Monday will be my email day. I will manually send an email to 30 people saying, here is a sermon outline. Here, what is it? Then it became 100 people. Okay, manually click. I mean, not 100 times, but I'll put them in small batches and then send emails to keep them informed of those things. So just be all manual of those early years. And then after that, we automated the whole thing. So now I'll just show you. But email is a great way to keep people connected, inform them what's happening. And you can use it for many things, raising funds, updates, encouragement, so many things you can use email as well. But some things is, use it carefully, don't become a burden like every 10 minutes when email is coming down. So we have a rule that we follow. Maximum, we want to send out two emails, broadcast emails from the church to our congregation. Two plus one. That is no more than two emails in a week. The plus one is if there is a real need, maybe there's a funeral happening or something like that, then that's the plus one. But otherwise, the rule is, don't send more than two emails a week to the people. And people don't want to get bombarded with emails. So that's kind of what we follow because they shouldn't think we're just randomly sending emails. So first is, you know, build your email list. So we have now, you know, when we collect, we have a simple form to plan to the email to subscribe. So we have it on our church website. It goes into a mailing list. So I will share that with you a little later. And then so they can subscribe to weekly sermon emails or so on. And of course, we have to give them the option to unsubscribe anytime. Or there is a visitor form, FTV from online. They can enter their name, number. We also collect the mobile number if they would like to give it to us. And then, you know, we collect that information. So with their permission, basically, you're collecting the information. You're also, if you want to volunteer again, they're providing their mobile number, email, they sign up for whatever. So you have sign up forms, different forms on your website that you can use. And then you're collecting their email. And it goes into that particular list. So now it's kind of automated before I had to manually put it in various lists. But now it's on from our website. It goes to the email list. I'm not sure. So what now once you collect emails, you can send emails, do it regularly, but carefully don't overuse it. Use graphics and images, but they should be small size. So we don't want to, you know, burden people span with the usage data usage on their site. So keep your emails very succinct, short, error free. If you want to link back to your website or social media, you can do that. Keep your emails mobile friendly, because nowadays many people actually check their email on their mobile phone. So be mindful of it. It should show up nicely on their mobile phone as well. Use exciting subject lines, but keep it factual. Don't create some things not there, but the subject line should be interesting. So then only then they will read the email. Or limit yourself to one or two. We do two plus one. That's what we follow. And also segment them. That means you can have men, men, youths. So if you want to target your email, if you're having a men's conference, no point in sending that information to all the ladies. You only want it to go to the men. So you should be able to target your audience as and when needed. Past can send a note from time to time. It's good to send it on midweek, because Sunday they have heard the announcement. If you want to remind them, remind them around Wednesday, Thursday. If you send it on Monday, it's not. And then of course give people the option to unsubscribe. So we have what is called as an email list manager. That means we have a free open source software. It's called PHP list that we have set up, where we manage all our email IDs and through which we send the email. So you can set up the email there, press a button and it'll go to 20,000 people. So right now we have between 20 and 30,000 people and it's segmented. So we can always target. If you want to send only to people in Bangalore, we send it. If you want to send it to people in India, we send it. If you want to send it to Christian leaders, we can send it. If you want to send it to men or women or whatever. So it's segmented, but totally the whole database may have somewhere, I think a little over 20,000 some email IDs. If you want to send it to everyone, they can send it. So this list manager manages all of that for you and through this we can send it out to people. Just one last section and I'll stop. I will show you the email list manager later on when we talk about the software that we use. I'll show it to you. But this is what we use PHP list. It's free and you're hosting it and running it. I'll show this to you later. Internally, when you're communicating among between staff between people who are working in the organization, of course we prefer face-to-face communication, but if you cannot meet in person, send an email. You also use email to document conversations. Use short meaningful subject lines. Keep the content crisp and short. Don't write long essays. People don't have time to read. Be courteous. Use polite. Use please. Thank you. Use be polite in the emails. Be professional. Only when it's needed, you highlight or you underline. And be careful not to use bold and caps too much because it's emphasizing something that it may come across in a different way. So how do you write the email should be important. All right. So those are just some quick thoughts and emails we use. So in from APC, we have every Monday or Tuesday, we'll send out a sermon email that goes to several thousand people that we keeping them informed about the Sunday sermon and maybe one or two events that are happening that week. So that goes out every Monday, Tuesday to go out. I think goes to about 6,000 people. Just about the sermon. Encouraging them to listen to the sermon and so on. We call it Sunday sermon email. And then if there is a particular event happening, we will send a reminder, which will usually happen on Wednesday or Thursday. An email goes out. So basically those are the two kinds of emails that go out on a weekly basis. The second email may or may not happen. It just depends if there's an event or not. Or it could be an event, an announcement about an event coming up several weeks later. We will send an email out. The third email is an emergency email. If there's an emergency like a funeral or some other thing, I think then we will send. So one email will definitely go out the Sunday sermon email. The second email may happen. The third one is an emergency, which we don't normally... It doesn't go out a bit. Any questions about email communications? So remember, all of this began in a very small way. That means way back in the early 2000s, I just had like 30 email IDs. I used to manually send it. But now we use the mailing list server to send out thousands of emails. It's all automated. So you start small, start with what you have, and then you will grow into something like that. And you can get the help of IT people to manage things for you. So let's pause here. We'll continue this next week. I hope these are giving you some useful thoughts. And as your churches and your ministries are growing, you can start using these for your ministry. Can somebody close in prayer please? Heavenly Father, we want to thank you for the opportunity to learn and understand more about technology and what you have given us. We pray to God that you'll be able to continue to use it according to the wisdom that you've given. And we pray that you would help us to use this of God and help us to think strategically in every area of our ministry, Lord God. We thank you for this time. Thank you for this learning. We humble ourselves once again in Jesus' name. Amen. Thank you, Lord. We'll be connecting again next week. Talk to you tomorrow. Bye.