Marketing and Management Thoughts

This really is an awesome flash visualization (via NYT) that you just have to check out online. It has a number of demographic break downs to see the different in how people use their time. You can also click on a part of the stacked line graph to see how that activity breaks down for the selected demographics.

Below are some quotes from the project that are particularly relevant to the church. Remember, the better we understand how people are using their time the more likely they will be to make sacrifices for Jesus.

“On Sundays at 11 a.m., about 13 percent of Americans are at church or participating in other religious activities.”

Time spent on Religious Activity per day:

By Race:

• White people spent 7 minutes
• Black people spent 17 minutes
• Hispanic people spent 8 minutes

By Age:

• 15-24 spent 5 minutes
• 25-64 spent 8 minutes
• over 64 spent 15 minutes

By Gender:

• Men spend 7 minutes
• Women spend 10 minutes
• Everyone averaged 8 minutes

View the Visualization Online

(hat nod kottke)

There is no doubt that Facebook is an online mega-site that every person and ministry needs to decide how they will interact with. I realize there are many opinions on how and in what ways you should use these sites, how much information to publish, and how much time to invest in it.

This post isn’t about that, but rather how facebook came about. How did a kid, who dropped out of Harvard, reach a net-worth of 1.5 billion by the age of 24. Mark Zuckerberg (pictured) has done just that.

Times Online article | Rolling Stones article

It seems that the mega church phenomena isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. A 2008 study of 12 of the largest churches in america found that it was these churches that we attracting young and single adults, and that 25% of their congrigations hadn’t been to church for a ‘long time’ before attending.

While some remain on the fence about the whole mega church movement, these numbers seem to indicate that the movement will remain a part of the American church landscape for quite a while.

Some of the interesting findings from the study are that:

• Young and single adults are more likely to be in mega churches than in smaller churches.
• Nearly two-thirds of attenders have been at these churches 5 years or less.
• Many attenders come from other churches, but nearly a quarter haven’t been in any church for a long time before coming to a mega church.
• Attenders report a considerable increase in their involvement in church, in their spiritual growth, and in their needs being met.
• Forty-five percent of mega church attenders never volunteer at the church.
• New people almost always come to the mega church because family, friends or coworkers invited them.
• What first attracted attenders were the worship style, the senior pastor and the church’s reputation.
• These same factors also influenced long-term attendance, as did the music/arts, social and community outreach and adult-oriented programs.
• Attenders can craft unique, customized spiritual experiences through the multitude of ministry choices and diverse avenues for involvement that mega churches offer

Check the study (linked to below) for all the stats and numbers, it is really interesting.

Download a copy of the study, “Not Who You Think They Are: The Real Story of People Who Attend America’s Megachurches”, free at www.leadnet.org/megachurch.

via Catalystspace

The BBC wrote a short article today about the current pope and his scholastic slant.

Does this strange gilded cage in which the Pope spends his life mean that he has become so detached from the ordinary concerns of the majority of his flock – so immersed in his theological and academic studies – that he is out of touch with ordinary Catholic believers?

I ask the question only because of a series of acts or remarks which have aroused surprise and criticism and have been described (even in the Catholic press) as “papal gaffes”.

While there is no doubt that a void, maybe even a chasm, exists between the academics and scholasticism of the Faith and the laity. Without a bridge between these two groups there will be growing apathy between those in the ‘gilded cage’ and those of us living with laity.

Most obviously, though it needs to be stated, is that those leading our Church can never lock themselves up in a tower without contact with the rest of our Church. It is amazing how much simple day to day interaction helps people to stay connected.

My second thought is that through design we might be able to communicate some of the complexities of our faith to the masses, and the world. There are many difficult and complex questions (many without answers) that people are asking themselves. How can we help them in their journey of understanding?

I believe through an intelligent use of print, web, and film we can communicate and encourage the world. By creating thoughtful projects (like this secular piece describing the financial crisis) we can help people see the unseen and grow.

What are your thoughts? Is this even a chasm that needs bridging? If not, how can we?

Photo: School of Athens by Raphael – Paul Prins

One of the most often overlooked aspects of any large event is how to adequately communicate the numbers involved in a way our minds can understand. For a long time the thought of a million was so much that it couldn’t be comprehended, and then it was billion, and now with all the talk of trillions related to the bailout it is near impossible to understand what these mean.

Often we create mental images using other things that we can understand. How many times around the world can ____ go is a common one. In reference to the trillion mentioned earlier I read in the BBC a couple weeks back that:

A million seconds is 11 days.
A billion seconds is around 32 years.
And a trillion therefore is 32,000 years.

By far my favorite is when people visualize data graphically. I’m not talking about a pie charts and line graphs (which both have their place) but into innovative and visually striking representations. The steam graph to the right is a great example. This particular graph is visualizing the news from 2008. I think that it’s presentation and visual appearance clearly illustrates my point.

If this has peaked your interests, make sure you check out ‘The first sketches of history.’

If it is helping people to understand the budget of the church, the regular giving, or any number of other administrative details graphing is a vital way to accomplish this.

nod: Ned Wright

Sources: I Shot the Sherrif Graph, niemanlab.org

Hope - Obama by Steve Rhodes

Just about two weeks ago we wrote about the legal case around the image the iconic Obama hope poster was created from. It is an issue of what constitutes fair use, and what is copyright infringement.

This issue alone could cost a church millions of dollars if ignored. Thankfully fellow bloggers over at Church Marketing Sucks came out with a three part series on fair use, from a Copyright Lawyer Richard Byrd.

Check out each of the three parts:

• Part 1 – Defining Fair Use
• Part 2 – Understanding Intent
• Part 3 – Use of the material

Follow Up Post: Psychology of Tropicana Re-branding Failure

Yesterday it was announced by Pepsi Company (the owners of Tropicana brand Orange Juice) that the new packaging/brand that they rolled out in January for Tropicana will be removed. Over the last two months Pepsi has undergone a very aggressive re branding campaign of many of their largest products (Pepsi brands, sierra mist, mountain dew).

Now in a statement released by Pepsi Co and an article in the NY Times Pepsi says they are rolling back the brand to the much more familiar orange with the straw in it. So what was the problem?

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The Vatican has received much praise from the international media (BBC, Inquirer of the Philippines, LA Times, Time Magazine, CNN Int. to list a few) with the launch of their You Tube channel this last week (on the 23rd).

Currently it only holds just over a dozen videos (mostly address by Pope Benedict XV). This is a great way for them to reach and interact with an audience that has been, in my opinion, widely ignored by the Church as a whole (Protestant and Catholic).

Make sure to swing on over to their page and give it a once over, maybe watch a video or two. I must also comment that they are doing this page in four languages (Italian, English, Spanish, and Dutch).

Clive Thompson wrote an interesting piece on how YouTube is changing the way we use video/film in our society. While the majority of his argument stems from the

It isn’t quite a documentary; it isn’t exactly a conversation or a commentary, either. It’s some curious mongrel form. And it would have been inconceivable before the Internet and cheap webcams—prohibitively expensive and difficult to pull off.

This is what’s so fascinating about online video culture. DIY tools for shooting, editing, and broadcasting video aren’t just changing who uses the medium. They’re changing how we use it. We’re developing a new language of video—forms that let us say different things and maybe even think in different ways.

With over 100 years of the moving picture and we have still be drastically limited in how we use the medium do to cost and time restraints. Over just the past 10 years have peoples home computers been powerful enough to edit their videos on par with the pros, and costs have come down drastically since then.

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This article, “For Good Self-Control, Try Getting Religious About It”, by John Tierney was published two days ago in the New York Times that slipped under my radar until today.

“We simply asked if there was good evidence that people who are more religious have more self-control,” Dr. McCullough. “For a long time it wasn’t cool for social scientists to study religion, but some researchers were quietly chugging along for decades. When you add it all up, it turns out there are remarkably consistent findings that religiosity correlates with higher self-control.”

And another nice quote

Religious people, he said, are self-controlled not simply because they fear God’s wrath, but because they’ve absorbed the ideals of their religion into their own system of values, and have thereby given their personal goals an aura of sacredness. He suggested that nonbelievers try a secular version of that strategy.

The article continues and is chalk full of great quotes and while not explicitly for the Christian faith it shows there is a high correlation between those who are religiously devoted and their self-control. Really interesting.