Only 20% of Americans regularly attend church, and only 2 in 10 millennials consider regular church attendance important. The Church no longer has the option of embracing change or leaving it to the next generation. The time is now; otherwise, we will become irrelevant. Change is never easy, but anything is possible with the Lord (see Matthew 19:26).

People search online for answers to their problems. They turn to the internet for companionship, understanding, information, anonymity, and more. We must be the voice that answers back, online, to share our message of hope and wholeness. Our digital presence may be the only exposure to the Gospel many people receive. We must recognize that the mission field is online, and just as legitimate as traditional evangelism.

We need an army of digital evangelists dedicated to carrying the gospel to the digital mission field.
Here are 5 steps you can take to become a digital evangelist with resource links:

1. Determine your target audience and platforms. The first step in reaching your audience is to develop a clear picture of who you are talking to. Seek to understand their felt needs and core values. Become a student of their culture. You must go where they spend their time and speak the language they speak. SDAdata.blog/understandingaudiences
2. Develop a strategy. Define your purpose for being on social media and utilizing digital tools. Then frame your strategy accordingly, identifying key performance indicators for success. SDAdata.blog/foundation
3. Research relevant content ideas. When it comes to digital evangelism, content is made to inform, to educate, and inspire. The Church should be the leader in creating content that improves the lives of others, and supports their spiritual growth. SDAdata.blog/contentevangelism
4. Make time for engagement and community building. The church experience should extend beyond the confines of time and space in a building to an involved community that provides 24/7 support not only to members but also to our broader contacts. SDAdata.blog/community
5. Engage in digital door-knocking. Digital door-knocking is when you share spiritual content on your social media profiles or through messaging and email to create an opportunity for people to engage with you about your faith. SDAdata.blog/digitalDK
   
   

​The life, character, and gift of Jesus Christ should be on display in your digital content and interactions. Jesus came not to uplift Himself, but to reveal an accurate picture of God’s character. It’s not about how many followers you have on your digital platforms, but how people can and do discover Jesus through you.
Jesus sought first to fulfill people’s needs; He then invited them to follow. 

We can use social media and digital tools to achieve our mission of spreading the gospel and helping people by creating content that focuses on mental, physical, and spiritual needs first. Once this foundation is established, we can invite our audience to “taste and see that the Lord is good” (Psalm 34:8, NIV). When used for digital discipleship and evangelism, this shift in focus is a way we can follow Jesus’ example for everyday ministry to real people. We can use social influence for kingdom building while utilizing modern tools and technologies.

For a practical guide to using digital technologies for outreach, community service, growth and evangelism, purchase the North American Division’s Digital Discipleship & Evangelism Guidebook at SDAdata.blog/book.

Available from AdventSource.
Print, Kindle and ePub versions available.

People come to YouTube for entertainment and education. It’s not an exaggeration to say that video is king! Internet video traffic accounts for 80% of all consumer Internet traffic. YouTube is the second-largest search engine and the second most-visited website in the world. This is where young people spend most of their time online.
 
Creating a YouTube account is very cheap. All you need is a camera and a device to upload from. YouTube is great for communicating ideas quickly and provides a storage place where your content never dies. It can be revisited or reposted as many times as you want.
 
In this free guide, we’ll take you through a step-by-step process for starting a YouTube channel from scratch. We strongly encourage you to take the time to go through this guide completely and review the resources before starting your YouTube channel. Or, if you already have a channel, use this guide to evaluate where changes need to be made.

​If you’re not yet convinced that your ministry should consider creating a YouTube channel, review the following statistics. 

YouTube Statistics (May 2020) 

• More than 30 million daily users
• Two billion monthly active users
• Five hundred hours of video are uploaded every minute.
• Five billion videos are watched on YouTube every day.
• The average viewing session on mobile phones is more than 40 minutes (an over 50% increase per year).
• YouTube reaches more 18−34 year olds than any cable network in the US.
• Six out of 10 people prefer online video platforms to live TV.
• 93% of Millennials go to YouTube to learn how to do something.
• 86% of viewers regularly use YouTube to learn new things.
• 70% of viewers use YouTube to help solve a problem.
  
  

YouTube Demographics (May 2020)

• 73% of US adults use YouTube.
• 62% of YouTube users are males.
• 78% of US male adults use YouTube.
• 68% of US women adults use YouTube.
• 81% of 15–25-year-olds in the US use YouTube.
• More than 15% of YouTube’s site traffic comes from the US.
• The 35+ and 55+ age groups are the fastest-growing YouTube demographics.
• 75% of Millennials prefer YouTube over traditional television.
• 51% of YouTube users say they visit the site daily.
• 37% of the coveted 18–34 demographic is binge-watching.
• 94% of American 18- to 24-year-olds use YouTube.
• 85% of US teen boys (ages 13–17) use YouTube daily.
• 70% of US teen girls aged 13–17 use YouTube daily.
• 70% of YouTube watch time comes from mobile devices.
• YouTube services are available in more than 100 countries in 80 languages.
• 95% of the global internet population watches YouTube.

 
If you have the calling to reach young people, YouTube is a must. This 63-page guide will help you determine relevant topics for your target audience and position your videos to maximize reach and watch time.  

Click the button below to download this free guide. ​

If you can track it, you can measure it. As a result, you can gain a better understanding of your audience and their behavior, helping you adapt your strategies to more effectively reach them. Taking the time to review the performance of your digital communications and platforms enables you to better understand what is working and what needs to be changed, which empowers you to shape your digital communications strategy based on data. In the long run, this will save both time and money while maximizing impact.

Time is valuable. Don’t get so caught up in the details of the data that you respond too late and miss an opportunity. Aim to stay ahead of the curve and be proactive instead of reactive in your strategies.

Most ministries and churches do not have the luxury of a dedicated analytics team, but you don’t need to dive too deep to get valuable information about how your website and campaigns are performing. Since most ministries are new to digital communications and analytics, we’re going to stick to a high-level overview. Go back to those key performance indicators we discussed in the strong foundations section, and use those as a guide for what to track based on your ministry’s goals.

Take the time to familiarize yourself with the terminology of the various data points. Most analytics tools define their terms within the platform. You can usually access these definitions by hovering your cursor over the question mark next to the data category.

The data that is most important to your efforts will be:

• Website performance data
• Social media platform analytics or insights
• Social advertising performance reports

Compare the information you find to the performance goals and metrics you established. Always look for areas of improvement and adjust accordingly.
Communicate with everyone involved by:

• Sharing report summaries with your team (both good and bad)
• Creating summary reports for management, committees or boards; keep detailed reports for yourself
• Problem-solving as a team; sometimes the best solutions are found outside your industry/department/specialty

​UTM codes are segments appended to a URL that enable data platforms like Google Analytics to record information about website visitors and traffic sources. This is vital for social media managers as it enables you to measure and prove social media success or, alternatively, identify problems and adjust your strategies. Creating trackable links is surprisingly easy to do and will give you valuable insights into how well your digital communications and ads are performing.

What is a UTM code?
UTM = Urchin Tracking Module
Example: https://www.SDAdata.org/?&utm_campaign=DigitalGuide-2020&utm_source=Social-Media

UTM codes can be used in links shared via:

• Social media posts
• Email
• Online ads
• Websites
• Any link that drives traffic to your website

 
Creating your own trackable links
A trackable link has five building blocks:

1. The URL you want to direct people to
2. A ? to signify the start of the UTM code
3. & + UTM
4. The name of the promotional campaign the link is related to
5. The source where the link will be used
   

 
Example:

URL – https://www.sdadata.org/digital-discipleship-and-evangelism.html
Campaign – DigitalGuide-2020
Source – Social-Media

Put it all together using this formula:
Regular link + ?&UTM + Campaign (what event, month, where, etc.) + &UTM + Source (channel/platform)

Final result:
https://www.sdadata.org/digital-discipleship-and-evangelism.html?&utm_campaign=DigitalGuide-2020&utm_source=Social-Media

Be sure to always test your links!
After you create your trackable link, be sure to test it to make sure it works. It can be very frustrating for your audience to receive digital content with a broken link.

The most common analytics tool for detailed website performance tracking is Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a free tool for monitoring where your visitors come from and understanding how they interact with your website. It’s easy to set up a free Google Analytics account. Most website hosting platforms offer easy-to-follow directions to get you started. Once you are set up, take the time to familiarize yourself with the tool and make it a habit to check your website’s analytics each month.

Terms and definitions

• Session: A visit to the website during which the user is active
• Users: Number of unique people who have visited your website during a specific time frame
• Page views: Total number of pages viewed; repeated views of a page by a single user are counted
• Page/session: Average number of pages viewed during a session
• Average session duration: Average length of a session
• Bounce rate: The percentage of single-page sessions in which there was no interaction with the page

Key metrics to monitor

• Demographics: Age and gender
  Known data about your website visitors.
• Geo: Location
  You can see location by country, city, state, and metro area. You can also look at language if that is relevant to your ministry.
• Behavior: Site content – pages
  Here, you can determine your most popular and least popular pages.
• Behavior: Engagement
  Length of visit/depth of visit.
• Acquisition and traffic sources
  As communicators, we want to know what is working and what is not working to drive people to our website.
  
  

The channel (or traffic sources) breakdown

• Other = UTM codes or campaigns
• Direct (visitors typed in the URL)
• Social media (no tracking code)
• Referral from another website
• Search engine (e.g., Google, Bing, etc.)
• Paid search (results from Google Ads)

When you drill down deeper under campaigns, you can learn what aspects of a campaign performed the best by using unique UTM campaign names for the different components of your communications strategy. Google Analytics automatically picks up the campaign name and source from the tracking links. There is no need to do anything in Google Analytics to make this work! Just be consistent with the UTM codes you use, and be clear with your campaign and source names.

Remember, prioritize. You don’t have time to track everything, nor do you need to!

Once you have determined what you’re going to track to determine whether or not you’re reaching your goals, check performance monthly, and record your results in a way that enables you to see trends over time. Some analytics tools like Google Analytics allow you to create dashboards for easy access, while social media insights may require that you create your own charts and graphs. To learn more about Google Analytics, check out our beginner tutorial on SDAdata.org.

Most social media platforms offer at least basic insights into the performance of a ministry’s account and who their audience is. Take the time to familiarize yourself with the analytics for your social media platforms and regularly check them to understand trends over time.

Pay particular attention to:

• Demographics. Who follows/likes your page by location, age, gender, and language.
• Engagement. This includes comments, likes, shares, messages, video views, etc. If you’re creating content that resonates with your audience, you should expect to see strong engagement rates.  
• Video views. A more reliable metric for gauging success than number of views is how many minutes are spent watching your videos and the number of thru plays. Many platforms count a few seconds of watch time as a view, so the number of views can be misleading. 
  ​
  

Peak visit/engagement periods. Knowing when your profile traffic peaks and when your audience is most likely to engage with your content will enable you to schedule your content strategically. 

After you place your ads, don’t wait until the campaign is over to check performance. Monitor the ads closely to make changes and optimize as needed. Catch problems early on; otherwise, your money may go to waste. The great thing about social advertising is that you can edit campaigns at any time if they are not meeting your expectations. Make sure you understand what the numbers mean; most platforms have descriptions available in pop-ups next to the column head. 
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Be sure to:

• Understand where your ads are appearing and what locations have the strongest results.
• Determine who you are reaching by age, gender and location. You may find that your ad doesn’t resonate with who you thought it would or that your targeting was off.
• Monitor engagement/response. Are you getting the results you expected?
• Test images, messages, and audiences (A/B testing) to learn what type of ad and messaging performs the best with your target audience.
• Connect performance to Google Analytics and monitor visitor behavior using trackable links.

 
Some basic terminology you should know:

• Results: The number of times your ad achieved an outcome, based on the objective you selected
• Reach: The number of people who saw your ads at least once; reach is different from impressions, which may include multiple views of your ads by the same people
• Impressions: The number of times your ads were viewed
• Frequency: The average number of times each person saw your ad
• Cost per result: The average cost per result from your ads
• Cost per impression: The average cost per impression of your ads
• Relevance: An estimation of how well your target audience is responding to your ad
• Click-through rate (CTR): The percentage of times people performed a click after viewing your ad
• Cost per thousand (CPM): The average cost per 1,000 impressions
• Cost per click (CPC): The average cost for each click

​Remember, if you’re going to take the time to put together a campaign strategy, take the time to track its performance so you can be better informed next time. There’s no point in testing strategies without tracking your efforts. If you don’t learn from your campaign, you can’t improve the next one. Social media and digital marketing are both an art and a science. Use data to inform your intuition.