Fellowship Admin
IT/Web Report
Prepared for the General Council
January 2009
Note: This report is intended as a brief overview. For in-depth information review the supplemental documents listed at the bottom of this report.
Website
For the past several years the website has been almost completely neglected due to the priority of other IT projects. In the Fall of 2008 I attended an Internet marketing seminar and got a professional evaluation of the Fellowship website. The result was a complete redesign of the site, particularly on the technical side. The implementation of the recommendations I received from the evaluation are only 20% complete and likely will take the next 6 months to reach completion.
However, just with the design changes which have been made to date, independent web traffic analysis firm, Alexa, shows average traffic to our site to have increased by 120% during the past three months. We are now in the top 5% of all websites world-wide. 72.7% of our traffic is from the United States, with 27.3% from international sources.
Furthermore, during this same period the number of pages viewed by the average visitor increased by 50%. Google Analytics shows that 70.23% of site visitors are first-time visitors viewing an average of 5 pages each.
Internal server statistics, after accounting for traffic by robots, shows some 1.5 million visitors during 2008; we will have well over 2,000,000 visitors during 2009.
Developmental Directions
The Fellowship Web Store
The economics of our situation require us to do everything we can to assure funding for our dissemination projects. To this end the Fellowship web store is being completely redesigned in preparation for an aggressive web marketing effort in 2009. Online sales are already approaching 25% of our total. The redesigned web store will feature not only language-specific pages for each translation of The Urantia Book, but also Bill Sadler's "Study of the Master Universe" along with its appendices; an extensive list of source books, Urantian DVDs and CDs, a list of theological books which might be relevant to students of The Urantia Book (sold through our affiliate status with Amazon.com), and a section featuring Urantian jewelry designed by Arley Grubb. This will support and extend our overall dissemination effort while increasing income.
Although much remains yet to be implemented, our current web store software provides the ability to:
Create and manage affiliate programs
Create and manage wireless device purchasing forms
Ability to implement coupon programs -- Pipeline or member discounts
Multiple currency support
Inventory control
Customer order tracking
Ability to support multiple polylingual storefronts
In affiliate marketing, anyone with a website can sell the book and get a cut of the sales revenues. The transaction goes through our web store. This could be particularly useful in international situations as local or regional readers could set up their own websites and use sales commissions to support other local outreach efforts or the costs for maintaining websites.
Translation Support
We continue to expand our support of online translation distribution through our relationship with Barry Clark's translation portal, the Polygloss on the Fellowship site, and the deployment of Urantia Book Translator. This is in addition to the marketing of translations in our web store accompanied by an aggressive online marketing program.
Print On Demand
We're continuing to work to lay a foundation for providing viable print-on-demand resources. Some basic documents are being formatted for testing by users. Formatted texts are available on the website at http://urantiabook.org/downloads.htm. This collection of resources will be greatly refined and expanded over the coming year.
Migration to multiple, narrowly targeted sites
A part of long-term strategy for the website is to move away from a large general site and develop multiple smaller sites that are narrowly targeted for very specific audiences. This is part of an overall effort to create small sites dedicated to specific topics which are accessible by wireless devices.
Database
Work on the database continues. We will soon have direct feeds from the database to pages on the admin website listing General Council members, EC members, committee members, and Society officers.
Current database work includes refining and extending the report generating capacity and building a web interface allowing much greater access to data by volunteers and staff.
ZIP code proximity searches
It is now possible to do zip code proximity searches; enter any zip code and specify a radius in miles. The return set contains contact information for anyone in the reader database whose postal address is within the specified radius of the zip code. Contact David Kantor for more information about using this feature.
Inter-organizational marketing coordination
A great deal is being done in the background to integrate the online marketing efforts of Urantia Foundation, the Fellowship, and TruthBook -- primarily with regard to translations. The result is greater market penetration, elimination of duplication of effort, and realization of increasingly greater economic approaches to book marketing and distribution.
If you have questions or comments about this report, please contact me.
For more information see:
International
Web Marketing Strategy for the Fellowship
A
Default Strategic Plan for the Fellowship
Submitted with appreciation for the opportunity to serve,
David Kantor