Poland provides us with a model of how the Web can be used to reach a whole nation. It's a country where:
- despite lower levels of income than W Europe, a rapidly growing number of people are online.
- evangelicals are a small minority and outnumbered by Jehovah's Witnesses. The majority
population views evangelicals as a cult, perceiving them as very similar to JWs.
- Poles are unlikely to have any evangelical friends or acquaintances, or otherwise come into
any meaningful contact with evangelical truth.
- because there are limited numbers of churches and Christians, it is in one sense easier for an
online outreach team to arrange local contact and followup for inquirers and new Christians.
- English is not widely spoken, therefore Polish-language websites are a key to online outreach within the country.
- because not many people are searching online for Christian topics, the Bridge Strategy
is vital - the use of secular page subjects to draw people in.
There are many other
hard-to-reach
countries for which the Web is equally appropriate.
The Ewangelia.com Polish outreach team have developed a range of approaches to reach their country.
These strategies could also work in many other countries. Because there are relatively few Polish
language websites, it is possible for the team's sites to have a much higher profile than might
be possible for English-language pages within the much larger English 'pool'. In some cases, one
of their websites may be be the only one about that topic in Polish - or one of a very few.
Michau Pleban, the team leader,
shares some of their strategies:
Our strategies
The strategy we use in our Web outreach for Poland consists of three parts:
- Preaching.
In order to evangelize successfully, we have a nunber of
evangelistic sites - with explanations of the Gospel, thought-provoking
articles, questions and answers sections, etc. They serve as a place where
people can explore the Christian faith and look for the answers for their
own questions concerning it.
- Advertising.
There is no point of making evangelistic webpages if
nobody looks at them. There is also not much sense in advertising such
pages on Christian sites, since we don't need to evangelize the already
evangelized! For these sites to work, we must attract non-believers to
them. For this reason, we maintain a number of secular websites, which
attract people and are a platform to advertise our evangelistic pages.
These include themed websites, such as a humor site, a recently
launched love and relationships page, and culture-related pages (such as a TV program or a new movie in cinemas)
in which one can find analogies to the Gospel. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings
movies is a good example. We also have secular banner exchange and
popunder exchange sites which we use for advertising the evangelistic
sites.
- Follow-up.
Evangelism is not about merely preaching the Gospel, but
about making disciples. If we set up a website with a Gospel
presentation, this should be only a small part of the total program.
That's why we are trying to provide as many follow-up
possibilities as possible. This helps people who read our pages to contact
us, have their questions answered and their doubts addressed, and if they
are really interested in the Gospel they can be directed to appropriate
Christian fellowship in their city or area so that they can grow. Current
possibilities that we offer include: email, live chat, email discussion
list, email Bible study, Web discussion forum and face-to-face meetings
with our volunteers.
The strategy seems to be effective - we have seen people not merely
filling an online form and ticking the "I have just prayed the sinner's
prayer" checkbox, but real conversions where people are touched by
the Gospel presentation we prepared, have contacted us and had their questions
answered, dedicated their lives to Christ, found a church fellowship, been
baptized (or preparing for baptism) and started to grow in faith within a real
Christian community.
How we started
Our first site was the main evangelistic one,
Ewangelia.com. In the first
year of our work, we concentrated mostly on this site (only later did we
develop our 3-step strategy). I wrote some articles for it and designed
the layout. Later on, many other texts were added, either written by me or
translated from English. Now there are many pages on the site, including testimonies.
We held our first advertising campaigns by paid mailings. But it was
expensive, so we had to look for another solution. The idea was simple -
instead of buying edvertising opportunities from other people it was better
to have use our own! So we created a banner exchange program. To make
it more popular among webmasters, I added several interactive components
(such as polls and guestbooks) which can be added for free to websites of
registered users. One day I spotted an English popunder exchange website
and it interested me, so I reverse-engineered their JavaScripts needed for
it and added this feature too - now it is the most popular feature. Since
we have 7:10 exchange ratio, 30% of impressions remain for our advertising
- and that's quite a lot.
Mobile phones
Seeking more popularity I learned by accident that one of the most popular
searches in Polish search engines is "SMS" (mobile phone text messaging). People are
looking for free SMS gateways, as the prices of GSM operators are still
high. I downloaded a free SMS gateway script, put it on our
webmaster site, and on the day it hit the search engines, the number
of visitors multiplied! Impressed by this, I created a separate GSM website
with this free gateway, offering logos, ring-tones etc. This is currently
our most popular website.
Culture
Realising how many people use search engines to inquire about cultural topics, I started creating themed
web-pages using cultural events and their
parallels to the Gospel. When
Lord of the Rings
arrived in the cinemas, many people entered the title in
search engines and found our evangelistic material about it.
We have also used other topical and cultural events in this way, including
Valentine's Day which has been the most popular.
Search portal
Regarding search engines, I thought of something similar to the banner
exchanges - as well as web-positioning in search engines, why not
own one ourselves? Thus came an idea of creating the multi-search portal,
Tutaj.net
combining a range of Polish and international engines and directories in one place.
We are encouraging Internet cafes to use this as a preset start page - in exchange for
a listing within the site. There are thousands of Internet cafes throughout Poland, and initial
reaction by those approached has been very favorable. When the first 12 cafes signed up, they
created 1000 visitors a day! Among the many links offered on Tutaj.net are the 'Bridge Strategy'
outreach sites operated by our team. Of course, the page is an ideal start page for private computer users also.
We give each Internet cafe an unique URL to set as a start page - http://www.tutaj.net/?k=abc
where 'abc' is a code identifying the cafe. This allows us to monitor if they really set up our
page as a start page! But it allows also customization of advertisements that display on the page.
Because we know which code applies to which city, we can offer city-specific ads. For instance, if
a church is organizing an evangelistic event in a particular city, we can put information about it
which is only visible to Internet cafe users in that city.
Approved churches can post these links and content via a password-protected interface,
which then automatically appears on the start-page displayed in Internet cafes for their town or city.