Online Excellence Conversations – DJ Turner of Denver Seminary

As part of the Excellence in Online Ministry research project, I have gotten to speak with a number of thought leaders in the area of online ministry. Recently I spoke with DJ Turner, Director of Communications for Denver Seminary and she shared with me about their challenges and success in leveraging the web to serve their broad audience. DJ provided tremendous insight into how strategically approaching your online activities can help a ministry to be excellent. Here are some highlights from our conversation:

In your experience, how does research contribute to online excellence?
I think research is very important for ministries to be excellent online. I wish I had more time for it because it’s so important. If you don’t know where your audience is, you can’t achieve excellence. Having an understanding of where audience is is very important. You also have to understand how they interact with the different sorts of things that are online and what their goals are. Say we have 900 students who are fans of our Facebook page, but only 200 want to interact with us on it; it isn’t realistic for us to push the other 700 of them to engage more online. In this way, the understanding we develop through research helps us to set realistic goals.

What about the use of analytics?
Where research helps us establish our goals, analytics helps us to determine how we are doing in achieving those goals. In addition, there is research that comes from analytics. If our analytics shows that we have 50 hits a month from South Africa, that tells us maybe there is something going on there we need to pay attention to.

What other factors contribute to excellence?
This may fall under research, but you have to have an awareness of what your peers are doing. Not for comparison, but so you can gauge and have the opportunity to dialog with them and explore other things and stretch your horizons. There are a lot things that can be learned from that.

If we’re continually sharpening each other… but not for comparison, balanced by knowledge of who your audience is and what your mission is – I think that can contribute a great deal to being excellent.

I also think that learning an important part of excellence. If you’re not aware of what’s developing, you’ll find that you’re left behind because your audience will have moved on. Research is not something you do one time, but has to be an ongoing process. Being able to learn and grow and understand and be aware of what’s going on is important so that our priorities shift appropriately.

Online excellence is a process, not something you achieve in a one-time “oh we’ve arrived” sort of thing.

You can learn more about Denver Seminary and the great work they are doing advancing the kingdom here.

And you should definitely check out DJ Turner, she’s doing great things in online ministry. Find her on Twitter here.