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 Outreach > Poland  < YOU ARE HERE   KEY:
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Case Study: Web evangelism strategies for Poland

A model for other countries to emulate

Poland provides us with a model of how the Web can be used to reach a whole nation. It's a country where:

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:
  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

The team's portfolio of sites

Some of the most important websites we currently maintain are:

A footnote: prayer or support Michau?

Michau produces a monthly prayer letter in English. Sign up here:


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