A communications initiative, launched on Ash Wednesday, which provides a new way for Episcopalians to share their connection to and appreciation for the Episcopal Church, was heavily used during Lent.
A special welcoming page on the church’s website, technically called a “microsite” and titled “I am Episcopalian,” was visited more than 500,000 times in the six and a half weeks between Ash Wednesday and Easter, according to Michael Collins, director of digital communication in the Episcopal Church’s Office of Communication.
The microsite contains short video clips of Episcopalians representing the diverse membership of the Episcopal Church.
I know I watched some.
I always slow down to gawk at a wreck….
It would be interesting to see how many of those views came from websites such as this and standfirm.
Heh.
I have no doubt that it got a ton of traffic.
I was struck by the line: “Our governance (in TEC) is transparent” (ENS). What a joke. Why don’t they tell us then how much money has been spent on lawsuits against departing parishes, and where those millions of dollars came from?
David Handy+
I have looked at a representative sample.
Very revealing, IMHO, is the prevalence of “love for the denomination”, but little if any “love for Christ who I found in the denomination”. TEC is, alas, the quintessential “Church-ianity” in that- though Jesus may be reinterpreted, or demoted to the same level as Buddha- the loyalty to the denomination is the pride and joy of all who say, “I am Episcopalian”. I noted that even the bishop of Louisiana rested his joy on the social services/MDG bona fides of TEC, rather than on the salvation of his soul or the Good News of forgiveness through Jesus Christ available thru TEC.
Once, Episcopalians knew that their denomination had no religion that was distinctive…they understood themselves to be the humble inheritors of the (reformed) Catholic Faith. Now, Episcopalians are stirred to pride in their institution.
I’d like to know the # of unique visitors to the site, that is a much more important # than total visitors.
This is actually really fascinating. It appears that “iamepiscopalian” is where all visits to the main church website are automatically redirected. Ergo, this figure represents both intended “iamepiscopalian” website traffic as well as their general “episcopalchurch.org” traffic for the six+ weeks (46 days). By my lousy math, this gives both websites an average visitor number of about 11,000 a day, or 76,000 a week.
To really know how successful this campaign was, we would need to know what their daily/weekly/monthly visitor traffic for their main site alone was for a similar time period when iamepiscopalian.org wasn’t up and running. It would also be very interesting to know how many people clicked through to the main site and how long they viewed material on “iamepiscopalian.org” before doing so.
My personal fave is the “community reaction” to the nomination of the new Episcopal “Divinity” School president. Especially check out the Hipsher vid, and check out her area of “academic” concentration. See them at the link below, or if that link doesn’t work, navigate there via the link on the home page of EDS.
http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=EDScommunication&view=videos
(Sorry for all the sneer quotes, but yes, I’m sneering.)
[url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4lYLBSllRsA]Too bad this one didn’t make the cut.[/url]
Thank you Peter Frank for basically saying what I was going to say. I had no intention of visiting iamepiscopalian.org. It’s launch and blatant self-promotion of TEC on Ash Wednesday disgusted me. But I did have to do some research on the TEC page or look up news links, so in trying to go to the TEC main page, I hit iamepiscopalian without wanting to. I clicked through to the home page. I’ve not yet watched any of the videos and don’t intend to.