Building An Audience

Buildings are not constructed in a day. Babies are not born fully-mature adults. Youth groups are not grown overnight. Website traffic doesn’t come in one week. It takes time to build stuff.

From my experience in ministry and in web development, you can’t build something over night. You can create a framework and a structure very quickly, but adding people to the equation is a much longer process. I’m not talking about a huge one-time flash crowd. I’m talking about real growth over time.

When I was a kid I watched a mason build an entry way on my neighbor’s house. I would always get up in the morning and watch him work day after day. After a few days I got frustrated because it was taking him so long. He would mix up the mortar to be the perfect consistency, check his lines, place a new brick on top, check it with his level, tap on it a couple times, check it again, and then he’d go to the next brick.  He built that wall one brick at a time.

I have framed many ministry ideas on paper, and thought visualized it being a massive success the first week. To my disappointment, my dreams of a microwave audience never came true. Audiences are like that mason with his bricks, you build them one person at a time. The mason had a lot of bricks for sure in a pile, but they weren’t in the form that he needed them to be. They were not structurally sound or useful to the building until they were carefully and consistently built into the framework.

Consistency In Ministry

Consistency is the most important element of building an audience in ministry or on the web. At the inception of a ministry or even a website, if you miss one week plan on starting over from scratch. When I started a young adults ministry, we had over 20 people come the first night. I was ecstatic. For one reason or another the next meeting was canceled. The following week, we had less than 10 people.

My wife and I worked with less fortunate people near downtown Miami in Little Havana. We held a Bible study every week and we had a meal afterward. We saw many drug addicts turn their life to Christ. We also had an erratic schedule and I found when we missed one week, our audience went down to almost nothing.

Consistency is the most important tool when building an audience. It takes hard word and sacrifice, but in the end it’s worth it. Consistency builds trust, it creates well-traveled paths and even routines in people’s minds. When we follow through on a consistent basis, people will begin to trust you more and more.

“If you build it, they will come” is one of the most annoying cliche’s to me because it focuses on the building rather than the people. It infers the individual’s motivation for showing up is purely because of the framework. When we build individuals consistently, we are building an audience that doesn’t just show up for the framework, they are the framework.

Consistency With Technology

Mister Nifty started almost four years ago with a readership of about five people. It was disheartening at first, but I decided to keep adding resources and articles whether or not people read my blog. I began using Mister Nifty as a personal repository for ideas. I consistently added posts and I found when I wrote on a regular basis, my readership numbers started increasing. When I missed a week, the numbers went down. It mirrored what I experienced in ministry. Today, MN get almost 5000 hits per month which is not huge to corporate websites, but it’s big to me.

I’ve found if I’m consistent in implementing a technology solution, it becomes a success. For example when switching our school to Google Apps, no one jumped on board the first week. So, I decided to train on an individual basis and one-by-one people started buying into the solution until they knew more about the solution than I did.

Technology implementations that fail can be traced back to inconsistency in training and education of the people. Failed websites can be traced back to a lack of good consistent content and marketing. The bottom line is, if you want people to buy into what you’re doing, you have to buy into them first and do it consistently. If you want your page rankings to go up, consistently write good content. If you want a larger audience, consistently be genuinely interested in people and interact with them about your product or group.

You Can Do It!

Whether you’re in ministry or building a site. If you can maintain consistency, you will build something awesome. It might not happen today or even this year, but keep working at it. Remember that people are the bricks. Content, solutions, programs and ideas are the mortar that brings people together. If you build people, you won’t have to worry about the building.