Here is a great post from Nonprofit Online News. It’s a list of 5 Syndromes in online marketing. Here are 2 of those syndromes that more than one church website has been guilty of:
#3 – Seeking Safety in Self-Promotion:
Take ten nonprofit organizations with email newsletters. Collect 100 links to web pages from them. You would be lucky to find more than one or two that point to sites other than those of the organizations sending the newsletter. What’s going on here? Let’s say we’re an organization that works on homelessness in Baltimore. (I’m not picking on any particular organization here.) Our stakeholders probably share our passion for this issue: the conviction that nobody in this great city should be without a roof over their head. But do we ever link to what some other organization may be doing about this issue? No! We act as though our stakeholders have some sort of focused passion for us as an organization. We are organizational narcissists. [emphasis mine]
Why is this? Why do we stand in front of our partners in our cause and point, not at the cause, but directly and indirectly, always at ourselves? It feels safer somehow. Our stakeholders have limited attention and we want every single bit of it directed at our news, our stories, our calls to action. We fear that if we open the door to anything else, any other organization, that we’ll lose them.
#4 – Seeking Safety in Cautious Language
Irony, humor, drama, passion, specificity, intimacy, idiosyncrasy – these are some of the characteristics of the kinds of content that holds people’s attention these days. And yet, to a frightening degree, these are also the characteristics of which we seem to be most afraid. This becomes especially true when we strive to make our online communication more “professional”. For example, in the nonprofit newsletters currently in my own inbox, I can’t find a single joke.
We seem so afraid of offending a few people that we’re willing to let everyone else be mildly bored. We may constantly try to inject urgency into our communication, but the sheer frequency with which we do that just adds to the impersonal and formulaic experience. We’re also afraid of what people (even our staff) might say, were were to give them the freedom to speak to stakeholders. Even though we know that people want to hear the genuine voices of other people, we are too afraid of disagreements and “mistakes” to let that happen.
Throw caution to the wind! Well, not entirely.
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