Winter Weather Driving People to the Web.
Posted by nathan on 12 Dec 2007 | Tagged as: Communications, Tech Stuff.
This past weekend, the winter weather outside was simply horrible!
When I arrived at New Hope at 8:25 a.m., the weather wasn’t too bad. It was freezing rain a bit, but nothing too bad. At 9:30, I walked outside to find 1/4″ ice on my car, and the sidewalks very slick from ice.
The freezing rain continued to worsen as the morning progressed.
Off and on over the past two months, we have told our people at New Hope they can find out if we cancel a service by logging on to NewHope.in or calling in to the office and listen to the recorded greeting, and I honestly wondered what the response rate would be to our driving people to the website.
Well, on Sunday, our website traffic was up 450% of the daily average for the previous 30 days. In fact, traffic was more than twice as high as our highest day of traffic ever, which was a peak from an invite drive we did earlier this year.
So…driving people to the website worked. I was very thrilled to know people respond when we drive them to the website.
Yes! I would like to move toward driving people more to the web for even more information, and I think our gathered data confirms people are willing to go to the web for their info…
Did any of my readers here log on to check the status this weekend?
2 Comments »
on 12 Dec 2007 at 1:32 pm 1.
Tara Lilly said …
Yes, I checked the website to see. I don’t know if this affects your count, but we checked several times throughout the morning. We were just so surprised that there wasn’t a cancellation. Maybe it wasn’t as bad in Waterloo as it was in Garrett, but here we couldn’t even get to our cars safely, much less drive there. We ended up not coming to church because it didn’t seem safe. I’m directing the middle and high school choirs here and they had a concert Sunday afternoon that was canceled by 9am. Since I didn’t have to go to that we just made it a “stay in” day. I’m sure we weren’t the only people that checked the church’s website more than once, but maybe you have a way of not counting repeat visits from the same computer.
on 12 Dec 2007 at 2:07 pm 2.
nathan said …
Tara,
Yeah, actually 25% of the hits were repeat on Sunday. So, omitting those visits, traffic was up around 300%.
We had people drive more than 20 minutes to get here!