Monthly Archives: January 2007

Church marketing blog

Peter Bowden of UUPlanet sent me a link to Church Marketing Sucks, a blog that is devoted to creating good church marketing. Some good material on this blog. For example, I liked this recent entry:

January 5, 2007
New Year Poll
(Filed under: Poll Results)

Last week we asked about your church marketing hopes and dreams for 2007. The perennial favorite, a web site that doesn’t make people cringe, took the top spot with 34%. Next came the novel concept of planning with 25%, followed by braqnd consistency at 21%. More of the same and as few typos as possible tied for 8%, and only 4% are planning a church name change in 2007. [Link.]

(You have to think that typo is in there just for laughs.)

The top three hopes and dreams are probably a good starting place for many churches, although I’d say planning should be in first place.

Hidden upgrade

Over the past week and a half, I’ve been cleaning up some technical problems on this Web site. One problem in particular has been bugging me:– I wanted to make it easy to print entries from this blog, because every once in a while I want to share something I write here with someone who doesn’t have computer access. In a sense, this represents a problem in accessibility.

The blogging software I use, WordPress, comes with a default setting that strips away all formatting when you try to print from a Web browser. So I wrote a new stylesheet specifically for printing. Which should have been an easy task.

But it wasn’t, and it took me a couple of hours to debug the new stylesheet. You see, most Web browsers do not comply with the CSS2 specification — which means that if you try to print a page from this blog from Internet Explorer, say, or Safari, things won’t work quite right. Most importantly, printing from Explorer or Safari will mean that when there’s a link in the text, all that will print is the text you see on the screen. But if you print from CSS2-compliant browser like Firefox, the address of the link will also print out. (I have made the rest of the site printer-friendly, too — with the same caveat.)

Two conclusions: (1) Everyone should use Firefox as their primary Web browser (besides, it’s free). (2) Until we see better compliance with basic Web standards, creating Web sites will continue to be overly time-consuming — which creates problems for small non-profit groups and small congregations.

Do-It-Yourself:
Printing with CSS — general principles, from “A List Apart”
CSS styles for print in WordPress

Overview

Our congregation’s CUUPS (Covenant of Unitarian Universalist Pagans) chapter asked me to meet with them this evening and talk with them about Unitarian Universalism. Which forced me to a quick overview of the current state of Unitarian Universalism. Here’s my short list of what we stand for these days:

  1. We’re non-creedal. We explicitly state that we don’t tell you what to believe.
  2. But we have boundaries, too. One of our boundaries: you shouldn’t come into a Unitarian Universalist congregation and tell other people what to believe.
  3. We’re pro-science. For example, we do not find evolutionary biology to be threatening to our religion.
  4. We’re disorganized. Like the rest of the religious liberals (or spiritual progressives, if you like that name better), we can’t seem to get our act together organizationally speaking.
  5. We’re “post-Christian.” To my friend the rabbi we look like Christians, but more conservative Christians are quite sure that we are not Christians. So I’d say we’re post-Christian and proud of it.
  6. We’re relatively open. No human community is perfect, and we have our moments of intolerance, but as religious organizations go we’re pretty open.

As one example of a definition of Unitarian Universalism, I passed out printed copies of Time Berners-Lee’s online essay WWW, UU, and I — which I still think is one of the best expositions of what it means to be a Unitarian Unviersalist in our time.

Then I talked a little bit about where Unitarian Universalism seems to be heading. Acknowledging that we’re too anarchic to really agree on a direction in which to head, here’s my short list of preferred destinations:

  1. We should be moving towards a new way of organizing. The organizational structure of most Unitarian Universalist congregations keeps us at 50 to 100 members. We should adopt a scalable organizational architecture. I like the idea of small groups linked in larger web formations (see Starhawk’s Dreaming the Dark: Magic, Sex, and Politics for a good discussion of this, or the Small Group Ministry Network for another approach).
  2. We should be interpreting the Western religious traditions (Western Christian, Jewish, and European pagan traditions) to support the healing of Nature and the earth.
  3. We should be working on building dialogue between secular non-religious folk and religious liberals, helping both groups to find common causes on which they can work together.

Towards the end, we also talked about how various religious liberal groups — pagans, Unitarian Universalists, liberal Christians, liberal Jews — could work together on the same sex marriage issue. We all pretty much agreed that this is the big issue facing religious liberals in Massachusetts today. (So I told the CUUPS group about the Religious Coalition for the Freedom to Marry and Mass Equality — send them money, and sign up to receive email updates from them!)

That’s my quick overview of Unitarian Universalism. Your results may vary. No guarantees that I will agree with myself tomorrow.

The high cost of low wages

In the December, 2006, issue of Harvard Business Review, Wayne Cascio has a short article titled “The High Cost of Low Wages,” taken from a longer article he did for Academy of Management Perspectives. In the article Cascio, a professor of management at University of Colorado, compares the salaries of two retail giants, WalMart and Costco.

WalMart’s subsidiary, Sam’s Club, competes directly with Costco. Yet while Sam’s Club pays an average of about $10 an hour, Costco pays an average of $17 an hour. In the cut-throat business of retailing low-price merchandise, where wages make up a substantial part of costs, how can Costco afford to pay wages that are more than 40% higher than Sam’s Club wages?

Cascio points out that the “fully loaded cost of replacing a worker who leaves (excluding lost productivity) is typically 1.5 to 2.5 times the worker’s annual salary” — but to be conservative, Cascio pegs it at 60% of a worker’s annual salary. In addition, Cascio points out that each year Sam’s Club loses “more than twice as many people as Costco does: 44% versus 17%.”

Bottom line: even though Sam’s Club pays far less, the annual cost of employee churn for Sam’s Club is $5,274 per worker, whereas it’s only $3,628 per worker for Costco. Cascio concludes: “In return for its generous wages and benefits, Costco gets one of the most loyal and productive workforces in all of retailing…. These figures challenge the common assumption that labor rates equal labor costs.” [Emphasis mine. Reprints of this article may be purchased online: Link.]

While Cascio does his calculations for the world of retailing, I believe the same principles apply to congregations. Churches often pay low wages in the mistaken assumption that they are saving money. However, low wages can contribute to high turnover. And in the church world, it takes far longer to build full productivity in an employee than it does in the retail world, suggesting the full cost of replacing a church worker is substantially higher than it is for Costco or WalMart.

Given the phenomenon of Baumol’s cost disease [which I defined in a past post: Link], I believe that churches also have to find ways to boost productivity. Generous salary and benefits packages alone won’t boost productivity — good management and evaluation are obivously necessary as well. On the other hand, low salary and poor benefits are likely to contribute to lower productivity — if you pay WalMart-level wages, you’ll get WalMart-level work.

Paying low wages and providing skimpy benefits packages may seem to save money for churches in the short term. But the most cost effective solution is to cut back on staff turnover and to boost productivity, by providing excellent salary and benefit packages.

For reference: Tables of salary guidelines for Unitarian Universalist churches can be found online: Link. Salary guidelines for the American Guild of Organists can also be found online: Link.

At the Massachusetts State House

“Join Us at the State House January 2,” said the announcement from the Religious Coalition for the Freedom To Marry, or RCFM.

Join us for an ALL DAY RALLY at the State House in Boston as we ask legislators to stop the discriminatory ballot initiative. Tuesday, January 2, 2007. All day, beginning at 7:30 AM. We welcome supporters to come whenever you can — before work, lunchtime, after work or school. Bring signs and banners, especially ones that show your faith. Show legislators, the media, and our opponents that People of Faith Support Marriage Equality.

I had a staff meeting and one phone appointment this morning, and then I drove right up to the Riverside T station, and took the trolley into Boston. By quarter of one, I was standing on Beacon Street across from the State House, looking at the people on the other side of the street who had rallied to oppose same sex marriage in Massachusetts.

Standing on Beacon Street

The woman standing next to me was taking a long lunch hour to stand in public witness of her support for same sex marriage. Someone had left a hand-lettered sign leaning on the fence behind me. “Do you mind if I get that sign?” she said. I got out of the way. She picked it up and looked at it critically. She read the sign out loud: ” ‘Another Ally for Same Sex Marriage!’ Had to make sure I agree with it before I hold it up,” she added. “And that’s me, another straight woman for same sex marriage.”

Bob S. and Jean K. from my church arrived at about one. “You didn’t wait for us,” said Jean. I had misunderstood the telephone message she had left at the church, thinking I was supposed to drive up as soon as I could and not wait for them. Bob found another hand-made sign to carry: “Jesus Loves Equality.” Across the street from us, two people held up a twenty-foot long bright orange banner that read, “JESUS IS LORD” — representing a slight difference in theology. A woman standing on the other side of Bob looked at the big bright professionally-done orange banner, and said, “Yeah, but if you ask W-W-J-D, what would Jesus do….”

“He’d’ve performed same sex marriages,” I said, finishing her sentence when she trailed off. “I didn’t want to say that, because I’m Jewish,” she said. “Well, I’m a minister,” I said, “so I can say it. Although Jesus didn’t actually perform marriages, as far as we know,” I continued thoughtfully to myself, but no one was listening to me.

More than half the signs on the other side of the street were identical white-on-green signs saying “Let The People Vote.” On our side of the street, we all noticed that most of their signs were professionally printed, while most of ours were hand-made. Compared to us, they looked like well-organized shock troops against same sex marriage. I decided we looked more like a grassroots movement — but I was biased in our favor.

The Constitutional Convention was supposed to convene at 2:00 p.m. Jean, and then Bob, went in to the State House to watch the proceedings. I have little tolerance for political maneuvering, and said I would stay outside. But the wind began to feel colder and colder. Then a voice said, “Is that Dan Harper?” Standing right in front of me were the father and stepmother of Jim, my brother-in-law. “We’re going in to the State House,” they said, and I decided I was cold enough to tolerate the political maneuvering.

In the bowels of the State House

Of course, we didn’t get in to the actual room where the legislators were deliberating. We got to watch it on a projection screen, supporters of same-sex marriage on one side of the room, the other folks on the other side of the room, the middle occasionally patrolled by a state cop or a park ranger. I felt as if I were back in high school — the bland institutional space, the somewhat rickety old projection screen, the authority figures. But there was Dwight from Fairhaven, and Andy and Bev from the New Bedford area, and one of the ministers from the Tri-Con UCC church in my old hometown, and a few other people I recognized.

At two o’clock, the Constitutional Convention convened, and they voted on the measure to place an anti-gay constitutional amendment on a state-wide ballot. If 25% of the legislators voted in favor, then the ballot proposal would move forward to next year’s Constitutional Convention for another vote; if 25% of the legislators voted in favor the second time around, then the measure would go on the ballot. Which would mean (I’ll bet my boots) that huge amounts of money would pour into the state to support that anti-gay amendment, and even though polls show that the majority of Massachusetts voters support same sex marriage all that money could sway people. That’s why we don’t want a vote on civil rights.

The vote was taken. More than 25% of the legislators voted to place the measure on the ballot — 61 out of 200.

Recess

The legislators voted for a one-hour recess. I went out and got some lunch, and then went back to stand with the same sex marriage supporters across from the State House. Someone from the Mass Equality office came over and told us that the legislators had voted to reconsider the first vote. By now, the sun was getting low and there weren’t many people on either side of Beacon Street.

A young woman wearing a RCFM sticker showed up on a bike. She was a high school Latin teacher, and she biked down to the State House as soon as classes had ended. Two other woman showed up, all of us churchgoers, and we talked about our respective churches. One woman belonged to Trinity Church in Copley Square, Boston (“Yes, our building does take up a lot of our time,” she told me); one woman belonged to Old South Church across from the Boston Public Library, and the Latin teacher belonged to Hope Church. “The UCC church in J.P.?” I said. “Yes,” she said. “That’s supposed to be a really cool church,” I said. “It is,” she said. We agreed that a cool church has to be multi-generational, multi-racial, and totally hip.

We all noticed that the people on the other side of the street were, on average, much older than the people on our side of the street. You saw more hip clothes on our side of the street, too. But then, I’m biased.

The ending

The people on the other side of the street erupted in cheers. Someone from the Mass Equality office came over and told us that the legislators had voted to allow the anti-gay amendment to move forward to next year. We all filed over to the lawn on the east side of the State House for a closing rally. As we walked past those other folks, I swore I heard them singing “Cumbayah” (so un-hip).

We gathered in the darkness. Someone from Mass Equality told us that we have made progress — the vote to move the amendment forward was lots closer than anyone had thought it would be — Deval Patrick, our governor-elect, had been calling legislators all day, and yesterday too, trying to shut this amendment down — and seven of the most virulently anti-gay state legislators had gotten voted out of office back in November. “The new legislature will be a whole new ball game,” said the man from Mass Equality. Then the executive director of Mass Equality told us that now we have to roll up our sleeves and get to work — we don’t have much time to work to defeat this next vote — “As soon as you get home, start calling your friends and neighbors and getting people mobilized,” he told us.

The beginning

Consider yourself mobilized. If you’re a Massachusetts resident, contact your state legislator tonight (find your legislator here, and then click on their name to get contact info for them). If you’re a U.S. resident but not a Massachusetts state resident, consider making a donation to Mass Equality [link] — because if same sex marriage gets outlawed in Massachusetts, you know it will be a very long time before you get same sex marriage in your state.

More coverage on this issue:

Bay Windows posted a minute-by-minute account of the Constitutional Convention, and has posted which legislators voted for and against the anti-gay amendment (“N” or no votes are on our side) — Link.

The Boston Globe Web site, Boston.com, has posted a very short article — Link. (In the photo showing supporters of same-sex marriage supporters, I must be just out of the picture — I was standing a couple of people away from the guy with the flag and the guy on the right.)