What if instead of waiting for students to come to your website you could send your website to them? And you could see exactly who (by name) was clicking – whether to investigate a relationship with God or checking out your Bible Studies. We send our “website” to 2500 students every week (most are contacts from spiritual interest surveys).
Now I’ll be the first to admit that technology is not the answer. Whether the question is: “how do I get more students to my weekly meeting?”, “how can I reach more lost students?”, or “will the iPhone4 fill the hole in my heart?” - Technology is not the answer (well, maybe on that last one).
I love technology and good design. And I find myself dreaming about how a new website or really slick publicity will draw in millions of college students to our Cru meeting. But the reality is that most come because of relationships.
BUT… in our increasingly spammy world, good design and technology can get your foot in the door (or inbox) and help you connect with students on their terms (online).
For us, I love that students can, at a glance, see when our meeting is, a map to Cru, and what we offer. And students can click on any of those links to easily get more info.
Why we decided to use Mailchimp:
- Relatively cheap/free (depending on usage)
- It’s really pretty
- Students can unsubscribe easily (again, avoiding spammy-ness)
- It has crazy-cool Analytics. You can see how many people are opening the e-mail AND who is opening them (you can even see that Joe Freshman clicked on “Bible Study info”).
A few tips on usage:
- Mailchimp has some nice templates so you don’t have to know HTML
- With that being said, you’ll get better results if you get a web savvy student to run it (especially one that knows HTML). A volunteer put ours together (using HTML – not the templates).
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