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The New Church Web-Site

Grant Schnarr

AN ARTICLE FROM WINTER 2001 MISSIONARY MEMO

The evangelization website for the General Church certainly offers a broad array of helpful information for inquirers. Here, the Internet inquirer can take advantage of the following and more:

• General information about the church
• Answers to frequently asked questions
• Questions about the church
• Questions about their own spiritual lives
• A broad variety of sermons from New Church ministers
• Full pamphlets with illustrations about various subjects
• Pertinent quotations from the Writings
• Newsearch
• Biographical and historical information about Swedenborg
• Information about congregations around the world
• A bookstore offering almost every New Church related title, and the books of the Writings themselves
• A free cassette offering a contemporary New Church sermon
• Related Links
• Invitation to join a list-serve
• A link to our young people's site which has a variety of offerings
• Contact information

Advertising about the Web-Site

Last year we took three approaches to advertising the website.

1. Advertising to our members and friends

   We wanted everyone in the church to know about the site and become familiar with it so that they would feel comfortable referring friends and inquirers to this unique evangelization tool. We developed a pamphlet, posters, and postcards, and sent packets introducing the site to all our congregations. Results have been gratifying. Church members are aware of the site. We hear again and again of people who refer newcomers to it regularly. If our members are excited about it, they will pass along the knowledge to their friends.

2. Advertising the site on a local church level

   We helped several congregations work up advertising campaigns which not only pointed to www.newchurch.org. but invited inquirers to come to a local church. Bryn Athyn, Glenview, Ivyland, Seattle, Boulder, and Bryn Athyn College all ran modest advertising campaigns highlighting their local congregations and offerings as well as our invitation to the world on the Internet. Results were hard to measure, but we do know of several inquiries as a direct result of this campaign, and this was only a modest start to a practical public awareness campaign where people can come to an actual church or center and meet real people. Plans are to do this on a more concentrated level this year in certain locations.

3. Advertising on the Internet Itself

   We ran a three month campaign on Yahoo and several other popular sites on the Internet inviting people to check out our website. The banner ads used the popular heading "The New Church: A Religion that Makes Sense", "You Were Bom to be An Angel", an ad about the Writings' impact on the life of Helen Keller, and several other very sharp ads that were designed by professionals in cooperation with our Office of Evangelization. The results were phenomenal with thousands flocking to our site. We are currently running ads on the Yahoo search engine in the religion section, where people who are hungry for answers are surfing the net. The ads only run occasionally, but you might just see one if you point your web-browser to www.yahoo.com. And click on the religion section under "Society and Culture".

Internet Advertising Results

Remember how excited we were in 1997 when we first advertised the site for a period of five months and had 44,000 hits (people coming to the site)? In the year 2000, we ran a similar campaign for five months and had 135,278 hits! Now a hit can mean they came and took a look and then went away. With new technology, we can actually track the number of those who spend a significant amount of time journeying through our web-site. The good news is that during this campaign and even now we average 288 actual visits to the site a day, where people spend some quality time taking a good look at what is offered. The average stay for a visitor is 8 minutes. How good is this? Compare this length of stay to the average length of a visit to the Washington Post. They're average visitor stays in their site for 2 minutes! Our books and tape sales have just about tripled in three years as well. Sales are still fairly small compared to large bookstores on-line, but we are currently receiving daily orders from inquirers, something that wasn't happening ever before until this new medium came into existence. With our plans to build a new store on-line this year, and to become credit card capable on-line, we expect our sales to soar. Heaven and Hell, Arcana Caelestia Volume One, and some of our new bridge books are our best sellers.

The Future

We have plans for the site. Besides upgrading the overall look of www.newchurch.org this year, we plan to add the newest technology to introduce people to the church. We will offer a "flash introduction" to those who have this capability. Flash technology incorporates movement, sound, and animation into a short informational introduction. We also plan to add a new section where we introduce inquirers (and this will serve our children and young people as well) to the basic spiritual sense of stories from the Word. We will offer an animated storyline of the Woman Clothed with the Sun and the Creation Story with brief explanations of their inner meaning. This area will grow as we expand the site. Technology is becoming so advanced in this field that we can almost morph a natural object into its spiritual meaning right on the computer screen! We also hope to add some in-depth perspectives from the Writings on various subjects, incorporate other languages, improve operational capabilities and follow up, and completely revamp the bookstore so that it functions similarly to top of the line operations such as amazon.com. We will also offer broadcasts of actual church services from selected congregations so that inquirers and also isolated New Church people can hear and see a service in progress.

Conclusion

Swedenborg says that one of the reasons he was chosen to be a revelator was because he had the means to publish his works. I think many of us recognize that the birth of any new technology which helps spread the Word is a forum for New Church evangelization. Because the Internet is accessible to all who are capa-ble of going on-line, the new Gospel can overcome bar-riers and be proclaimed throughout the globe. We will always want and endeavor to reach everyone, even those who cannot afford the luxury of computers or have not even learned to read. The church is for every-one. But we also rejoice that this new forum gives the New Church an opportunity to reach millions of people. Perhaps some day in the distant future we will look back at this time and smile at our meager efforts and their tiny results. Certainly the future holds incredible capabilities to spreading the Lord's Word. This is the beginning of something big - bigger than we can even imagine!