Benchmarking My Virtual Self

Orginally published on Monday, April 09, 2007 at 7:00 AM
by Earl Creps

Like a lot of people who got into the Internet later in life, I spent years admiring and using the sites of others while feeling that a net presence of my own was somehow out of reach. My seminary had a faculty page for me, but that’s not quite the same as having your own electronic home. Today, I have a personal site that includes blogs, articles, and podcasts. None of this happened by accident. And I suspect that my net journey reflects developmental phases that a lot of older leaders go through. They look something like this:

1. I need lots of help from much younger people: With my first primitive Xanga blog set up, my twentysomething friend Valerie volunteered to make the thing look great while designing the first version of a personal site.

Tim Bednar took the original site design and pushed it to the next level, along the way helping me to realize that selling audio CD’s online was hopelessly outdated in the iPod era. Who knew? Of course, the fact that no one bought any of the CD’s made the decision easy. (I now have hundreds of them sitting in my basement looking for a purpose in life.)

Tim, whom I have never met face to face, is one of the sharpest Internet strategy people around. He is also half my age.

2. I feel just glad to be here: The net made my thoughts global with one click, so I was delighted when my site went online and my first blog was posted (in the early days I wrote a lot about 24). Like a mediocre sports team making the playoffs for the first time I was just happy to be in this strange, new venue. It never occurred to me that being one tiny tree in a very large electronic forest was also a form of virtual obscurity.

3. I see the need for measurement: My first clues about measuring the performance of my website emerged from connecting my Xanga blog to Site Meter. Soon, I was deluged with statistics on “visits,” “page views,” etc. Tim connected earlcreps.com with Google Analytics to give me a read on what kind of traffic we were attracting. I am an infomaniac, so I loved the numbers, but had no idea how to interpret them.

4. I rethink performance assessment as a cycle of measurement, evaluation, action: Currently, Tim is walking me through a draft of Spectrum, a new product he’s developing that evaluates the traffic on your site in ways you can actually do something about. In other words, it provides a simple way to revise your Internet ministry based on the goals you want to accomplish, rather than just on ramping up the number of “hits.” I don’t mean this to sound like an infomercial, but this cycle just makes a lot of sense to me.

5. I realize that I am more careful with my site than with my life: This one hurt. Spectrum and Google Analytics provide tools for the virtual me far beyond anything I do to assess the performance of the real me. I jokingly posed this issue to Tim, who directed me to Twitter a site on which you report what you’re dong at the moment. I went there and browsed some comments. At least these people were paying attention. What am I doing?

So my question is: what would a set of assessment tools for our ministries look like? I don’t mean our attendance, or sales, or “hits,” but our own lives as leaders? What should be evaluated and how could those evaluations be turned into an opportunity for God to shape us? 

About the Author:  Earl Creps has spent several years visiting congregations that are attempting to engage emerging culture. He directs doctoral studies for the Assemblies of God Theological Seminary in Springfield, Missouri (http://www.agts.edu).  Earl and his wife Janet have pastored three churches, one Boomer, one Builder, and one GenX. He speaks, trains, and consults with ministries around the country. Earl’s book, Off-Road Disciplines: Spiritual Adventures of Missional Leaders, was published by Jossey-Bass/Leadership Network in 2006. Connect with Earl at http://www.earlcreps.com .

 

 

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Hi... I'm Todd Rhoades. I'm a Christ-follower, husband, father and I love to connect leaders with other leaders. Hopefully you'll find something here at MMI you like and will return often. If you want, you can find out more about me or follow my every step on Twitter.

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