The good news is our Internet Campus is in the midst of a spectacular rise in attendance.
The bad news is, yesterday morning, so many hit the site all at once that both of our servers – the video server and the chat server – crashed under the load.
We’re investigating how we can smooth out traffic. Our first seek, Sept. 25, 2011, brought us 844 attenders for our various interactive services. Since then, we have grown, in four month’s time as of last week. to almost 5,000 attenders a week. Our services stream Sundays at 10:30 AM and 7PM, Tuesdays at 7PM, a Bible study taught live at 7PM on Wednesdays, and 7AM and 7PM Thursday services. All times are EST.
Last week, the Bible class alone drew over 700 attenders.
Look at this chart and particularly, the growth since the first of the year, to see what a breathtaking ride this has been for us.
Our team is now trying to determine what is driving the traffic. But here are the three key factors we have identified:
- Social Media – Don’t let anyone every tell you that Twitter doesn’t work. It has amazing power. Leveraging a bunch of different Twitter accounts, we aggressively “tweet” each service, inviting followers to “Come to Church Right Now!” or asking them “Miss Chucch This Week? It’s not too late. Come to ours.” Instead of using the standard shortened Twitter URL, we make sure we use the Internet Campus full URL – http://woodside.tv. There are also posts we make to various Facebook pages and walls. I am convinced that social media is the single most impactful thing we can do to draw people to our services.
- Familiarity – As people check out our services, they begin to feel comfortable and, over time, become regulars. We use analytic software to watch for repeat visitors and we answer every communication and email we get. Our prayer facilitators often follow up with those who give an email, when appropriate. Relationships are a little more tricky to develop online but they can and do happen and we are seeing regular attenders from across the world.
- Chat – Our chatroom is like our front lobby. When we began, we expected a lot of chatters. We were surprised that not that many people actually type in things in the active window. But our analytics show they indeed are watching. We work hard to avoid anything that sounds like insider talk, the online equivalent of cliques. So we use chat to remind people we have one-on-one prayer available, they can email us, use our Facebook page, follow the message in sermon notes, watch the message in fullscreen or follow along in a Bible. At least twice a service, we offer to help connect people to a local church if they don’t already have one. We make such referrals a couple of times a month.
Besides coping with the heavy traffic, particularly for our 10:30 AM Sunday service, we have also realized that we need to be able to go live with a Sunday morning service and then play a recorded version of it on our simulated services the rest of the week.
The service we run on the Internet Campus is a week delated from the service at our Troy campus. For visitors, that’s no problem at all. But for our regular Woodside members, in invariably leads to comments in the chatroom like, “isn’t this last week’s message?” or “How come you’re playing the old message?” We patiently explain the reason for the delay – editing issues, mainly – but those “insider complains” sour the experience for visitors, who see the grousing.
The other area is the mix of the audio. Our worship music is mixed for the house. It sounds great live but streaming on the Internet, we need a better mix. That will requireextra work and a seperate, Internet service mixing board,
Going forward, besides whatever server upgrades we need, we will have to add two more people. An audio mixer and a video editor who will be able to quickly turn around our Sunday morning live service and make an edited version for our 7 PM Internet service and subsequent services streamed during the week. Maybe we can get lucky and find one person who can do both taskes. Alas, though, one is really three as we have found that, for week in and week out reliability, we need at least three people trained for every job.
But all these issues are good issues to have.
After four months, our online church services are helping us share the life-changing message of Jesus Christ in new and exciting ways. I can’t wait to see where we are in another four months.
