Axletree Blog

Better known as the 80/20 rule, the Pareto principle simply states that you get 80 percent of your return from 20 percent of your input. While the Pareto principle is widely viewed as a simple rule of thumb, it holds up nicely across a broad variety of subjects from weight loss and exercise to economics and volunteerism.

Optimization Is Important

Optimizing your content for mobile devices is important for a number of reasons. Two of the most important ones are: people aren't willing to wait and they're cognizant of mobile data consumption.

People Won't Wait

According to data from Akamai and Gomez, 46 percent of respondents indicated that they wouldn't wait more than 10 seconds for a page to load. However, tests showed that page abandonment began to climb steeply after just 4 seconds. What's more, only 11 percent of mobile respondents thought that sites would load “much slower” on their phones than on their desktops. However, the reality in most places is that mobile data speeds aren't nearly as fast as landlines.

Tiered Data Plans

With the introduction of tiered data plans, people are more cognizant of mobile data consumption than when data plans were “unlimited.” If your site is a consistent data hog, you may find visitors visiting less often, or worse yet, going somewhere else. In other words, if you don't optimize your content, you could be losing visitors.

Obsession Isn't the Answer

On the other end of the spectrum, some hardcore optimistas obsess over every byte. They create complicated schemes for serving up perfectly optimized files for various groups of devices; they recommend maintaining a completely separate mobile site; and they spend an inordinate amount of time excising each byte from their media files.

While data shows that content optimization is important, for most of us, there's a decreasing return on investment for the comparable time, energy, storage and delivery required to obsessively optimize content. Consider the following reasons why aggressive optimization isn't optimal: 

-        Resizing media exactly to fit a small space can hurt reuse and actually increase the amount of data used across your site. For example, downloading a small file for one page and another larger version for another page is more expensive than downloading a single file for the first page and getting it from the cache for the second.

-        Over-compressing audio, image and video files to save a few extra bytes can result in distracting artifacts that reduce comprehension and hinder reception of your message.

-        The HD screens on today's media devices not only take advantage of higher resolution graphics, but also reveal the flaws in lower resolution graphics that are unnoticeable on desktop screens.

-        Creating and serving multiple device-dependent versions of a file is expensive in terms of time, storage and development.

-        Squeezing the last 20% out of a file requires a level of experience and understanding that the average person doesn't have. Of course, you'll develop both of these as you practice content optimization.

-        Faced with the daunting task of perfectly optimizing content, many people will simply give up and either not optimize at all or skip including media altogether.

Many of us would love to stay forever in the position that we are currently in. However, reality most likely won’t let that happen. Transitions are a reality of organizations. Sometimes people move up into management positions, and sometimes outside events cause team members to be gone for extended periods of time.  These phases can cause organizations to lose efficiency, but we can help ease the transition by preparing other team members to take over those roles.                 

...cause potential leaders to exit the organization
...stifle needed insight from valuable team members
...hinder your ability to recruit volunteers
...limit the growth of your programs and ministries”

Replacing yourself is crucial to the longevity of your team or your organization. If pouring your knowledge that you have learned from your failures and your successes is not part of your team's strategy, then you could be at risk for a fast decline. Always remember these three things when implementing a replacement strategy...

1. Know exactly what you do and be able to break it down
2. Hand it off to someone
3. Let it go

Scott Hodge, pastor of The Orchard Community Church in Aurora, Illinois, points to the relationship between leadership (pastor) and the team as the key element for developing your team.

An essential part of being a Senior Pastor is to lay out a vision for the church and seek God’s direction for the church. It is very important for Senior Pastors to surround themselves with people who are passionate about creative and clear communication. And that's where the communications team comes in.

Pastors empower and give permission to the communications team to be directly involved with bringing consistency and clarity to the vision. Be patient with the communications team. They eat, breathe and sleep communication all the time, so they’re bound to constantly push for clarity. Instead of being threatened by this push, embrace it. Give them time and space to ask questions.

Team members also need to be patient. Sometimes it takes a while for pastors to gain clarity on where God is leading their hearts. Ask a lot of questions. Your job is to understand what God is doing in your pastor’s heart.

What does your communication look like?

Jay Argaet, the head of communication at Hillsong Church in Sydney, Australia, defines communication as the tool into which we can breathe life, stir a thought, bring inspiration and make something that is otherwise difficult to understand, clear and relevant.

Communication in the church should be 2-way communication. Provide ways to hear back from those with whom you are communicating. Don’t dispense only. Communication in the church should be personal, not technical. Touch is greater than technical.

Understand communication is not simply communicating the happenings within your church. This is global communication. The Body of Christ is commanded to share His Word across all nations.

Why should you develop a communications team?

The church is a global avenue for communicating the gospel. The ways we interact and communicate are changing every day. It has been said that more data will be created in the next four years than in the entire history of the world.

In the book, "Outspoken: Conversations on Church Communication", Tim Schraeder says the following on the importance of church communication:

"We, as the church, have never been as equipped or resourced to communicate the message of the gospel as we are today. With the amazing opportunity comes a tremendous responsibility. We have a moment and time in history to steward the opportunity and resources God has given us to communicate his story. We are literally able to reach millions of people around the globe with a click of a mouse. Our content has never been more widely accessible and our message is one that desperately needs to be heard. Everything our churches do today forms the message we are ultimately communicating to the world. As the ways we interact and engage continue to change, the role of communication will only become more vital to the life of the church."

At times you may wonder if it would be a good idea for your organization to create a communication team.  It’s a good question, but before we answer that, let's first see what team development means.

Wikipedia defines team development as:

"A philosophy of job design in which employees are viewed as members of interdependent teams instead of individual workers. It refers to a wide range of activities, presented to businesses, schools, sports teams, religious or nonprofit organizations designed for improving team performance."

A communication team divides the weekly communications responsibilities over several people which, when done effectively, reduces the workload and leaves more time/energy for creativity.  The end result is that your communication improves and the burnout factor is reduced.

Here are a few other ways a solid team will improve your communication ministry.

A Good Team Will

 - Build commitment by engaging all team members in a structured and inclusive process

 - Improve processes and procedures by having everyone on the team at the table

 - Improve organizational productivity

 - Improve the ability to problem solve

 - Find and overcomes the barriers that get in the way of creativity

 - Open communication across the team by having an objective, third-party assessment of the key issues affecting performance

I love what Steve Kryger, author of communicatejesus.com, says about team building: "Don't ask for volunteers. Ask for team members." In reality, your team will be volunteers. But, it is important that they see themselves as part of a team. This will go a long way in successful Team Development. Ideally, the team members will fit one or more of the following roles:

1. Graphic Designer: Provides graphics for print, electronic and web materials.

2. Webmaster: Builds and maintains the church website using a Content Management System such as Thrive or E-zekiel.

3. Writers: Provide copy for print, electronic, web and social networking materials.

4. Publisher: Proofreads and edits the copy that is created and gets it ready to be distributed.

5. Videographer: Sets up and shoots video such as sermons or video shorts.

6. Audio Specialist: Runs the soundboard when necessary and also records and distributes sermons or other events.

7. Social Media Engagement: Develops strategy and engages your audience by building a social networking presence.

8. Photographer:  Takes pictures to be distributed throughout the various forms of communication mediums.

Assess your needs and add other roles accordingly. For example, if you have multiple graphic designers, you may want to put a team leader in place. It may be fitting for your church to have a staff/ministry liaison to keep lines of communication between your team and senior leadership flowing smoothly. While you may choose to do so, you don't need one person for each of these roles. A volunteer or staff member can fulfill multiple roles where possible.

Good luck identifying your team members and putting the pieces together.

1. Allow them to take part in crafting the vision.

2. When planning for the execution of the vision, allow for your team members' input.

3. Be sure to give the team credit for its accomplishments.

The message is simple.  Everyone should have an understanding that the project isn’t the sole responsibility of an individual, but rather the whole team.  However, the task of actually getting all of your team members to truly buy-in to that can be difficult sometimes. Regardless, we must continue with the message that the project is “ours” not “mine.” As leaders we have to make a concerted effort to get our team members to buy into the idea that this project belongs to them because it will lead to higher quality work. Team members who take ownership in the project are more likely to produce high quality work because they are invested in the final outcome. Those team members feel the final product is a reflection of their work.

This is not a gimmick. This is not a trick to pull on your team to try and get them to work harder. You’re not trying to get them to produce a quality product so you can get the credit. Your goals and objectives should truly be a shared team vision. When you and your team have a shared vision and have all taken full ownership of the project, you can then ensure that final product will be one of very high quality. 

• August 2012 - Instagram hits 80 million users (7.3 Million ACTIVE/Day) • 5 Million Photos are uploaded every day • 40% of corporate brands have adopted Instagram for Marketing • Instagram has 432k more daily users than Twitter

It may seem obvious, but having quality content should be the most important aspect of your SEO strategy.  Over the years, we have seen many tips and tricks pop up for optimizing your site. Many of these tips were good and some were more of the “magic hat” variety.  These strategies often led to over-optimized, non-user-friendly websites. To overcome this, search engines changed their algorithms. These changes led to a resurgence of high quality content-driven sites.

Listed below are a few questions you can ask yourself when trying to develop quality content:

1. Who is my audience or whom am I trying to reach?

2. Is this content usable for my audience?

3. What response am I trying to get with my content?

4. Is my content new and relevant?

Being able to consistently produce quality content should be the foundation of your SEO strategy, not just another item on the SEO checklist. There are some great tips for SEO out there right now, and there are some great new opportunities on the horizon. However, the opportunities and tips should be supplemental. Search engine algorithms will change and with it many of our tricks will be rendered useless. However, if your strategy is built around quality content, it will be able to stand the test of time -- because having quality content is not a trick, and it never goes out of style.