Think VLM

Consider the man hours invested to design the NUS survey site (nusccc.cru.sg):

• redraft the survey questions from “oweekquestions.com“
• contextualize the terms and conditions for the prize draw
• test out the survey questions repeatedly for 30 times
• define the process of the survey
• verify all the URLs are correct and linkable
• make sure the fine prints of the content are accurate etc…

The preparations listed easily took more than 30 man hours to set up the survey site.

Very often, we bank on the ravishing design of a website to rally traffic to the site, but we forget that it’s the substance of the website that draws people back for more.

And there are more things to be done…

• Is the ministry facebook fan page ready (if the survey site publicize the fan page) ?
• Is there plan to do facebook advertising to the freshmen about the survey site?
• What and how are we going to communicate to the freshmen after getting all their particulars?

Most of the campus ministries have their own facebook groups and fan pages. But if you ask me, most of these fan pages and groups are quite dead. Valuable freshmen contacts will be lost if they come to the fan page without someone engaging them on their queries.

If we want to effectively recruit the freshmen, more background works online and offline need to be thoughtfully sketched.

After skyping with *Tony O’Hagan from Australia, I gathered from him three compelling reasons why Australia CCC started the online survey to recruit freshmen since 2005:

1. Lack of finance
2. Lack of manpower
3. Unable  to set up ministry booths during orientation week

Not all campus ministries benefitted from doing this strategy. But one thing is for sure, there’s nothing to lose from trying out this strategy either.

So how can doing online recruitment profit the local campus ministries?

Here are 4 main reasons how doing online survey benefits the local ministry:

1. It complements the local recruitment strategies (whatever they are). This means that you can still do online survey without compromising your local recruitment strategies. Read more…