Site visitors will find out who the staff is before becoming familiar with the mission, vision or even the beliefs of the church. How are you sharing who your staff is?
We live in the age of social media. Everybody knows everything about everyone. We spend countless hours clicking through pictures of babies we barely know and dogs we’ve never seen before. Employers look up potential employees on Facebook before interviews. Job seekers scroll through Twitter looking for new bosses. We scope out entire Instagram feeds before meeting someone for coffee. We want information, we want details ... we want to connect.
Potential members of your congregation are no different. They want to see pictures of your staff, read information about your pastor and learn about your worship leader’s favorite hobby. Providing this information gives a potential visitor/member the instant ability to connect to your team via shared hometowns, schools, interests or life stage.
This doesn’t mean you need to constantly share on your website what new TV shows you like or how you feel about the latest change in weather. It doesn’t mean that your individual staff members take precedent over the unified mission and vision of your church. But, it does mean that people who are looking to come to your church are actually interested in the fact that you are a real person who grew up in Branson, Missouri, moved to St. Louis after college and now have a beautiful wife, two Golden Retrievers and a yappy Chihuahua named Poco Loco.
We can prove it!
While glancing over our website analytics, we noticed we were getting a lot of hits on our "Who We Are" page, so we took a closer look to see just how much checking out our team mattered to the people visiting our website.
Fishhook’s Analytics
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Besides the home page, our "Who We Are" page receives more views than any other page on our website.
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Fishhook’s "Who We Are" page is a visitor’s first click 34% of the time.
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Our "What We Do" page only receives 18% of first clicks.
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Most visitors will travel from our home page to “Who We Are” and then to “What We Do.”
We had a hunch that if these stats were true for our business, they would be true for the churches we work with as well, so we took a look of one of our client church’s analytics to see if our theory held up.
Kingsway Christian Church’s Analytics
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Again, besides the home page, Kingsway’s “Staff” page received more views from new visitors than any other page on their website.
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Their “I’m New” page was a visitor’s first click 18% of the time, second only to their “Media” page (where members and visitors go to listen to past sermons).
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From the “I’m New” page, site visitors clicked on the link to Kingsway’s “Staff” page at a much higher percentage than any other page.
Kingsway’s stats make it evident that site visitors will find out who the staff is before becoming familiar with the mission, vision or even the beliefs of the church. In the same way that your Sunday morning greeters are a huge part of a visitor’s first impression, your staff page is often where site visitors get their first “virtual” impression of your church. As you can see from Kingsway’s analytics, a church visitor’s primary concern is feeling comfortable with the people leading the church they decide to attend.
In a world where online engagement is becoming king, staff pages are growing increasingly important. If site visitors find information that shows your staff is friendly, personable and might even have some of the same interests they do, this can only increase the chances of them feeling comfortable enough to walk through your doors on a Sunday morning. Don't want to clog up your staff bios with a bunch of extra content? Think about doing a staff highlight each week on your blog!
Seriously, tell them about your puppies. People love puppies.
Take a look at our “Who We Are” page to get some examples of how you can present your staff in a personal and professional way.
