Tag Archives: town

Mar 23

Outreach gets people to your meetinghouse / Hospitality keeps people returning.

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Over on Twit­ter feed came a tweet (h/t revrevwine):

seo - Google SearchTo trans­late, SEO is “search engine opti­miza­tion,” the often-huckersterish art of trick­ing Google to dis­play your web­site higher than your com­peti­tors in search results. “Usabil­ity” is the catch-all term for mak­ing your web­site easy to nav­i­gate and invit­ing to vis­i­tors. Com­pa­nies with deep pock­ets often want to spend a lot of money on SEO, when most of the time the most viable long-term solu­tion to rank­ing high with search engines is to pro­vide vis­i­tors with good rea­sons to visit your site. What if we applied these prin­ci­ples to our churches and meet­ing­houses and swapped the terms?

Out­reach gets peo­ple to your meet­ing­house /
Hos­pi­tal­ity keeps peo­ple returning.

A lot of Quaker meet­ing­houses have pretty good “nat­ural SEO.” Here in the U.S. East Coast, they’re often near a major road in the mid­dle of town. If they’re lucky there are a few his­tor­i­cal mark­ers of notable Quak­ers and if they are really lucky there’s a highly-respected Friends school nearby. All these meet­ings really have to do is put a nice sign out front and table a few town events every year. The rest is cov­ered. Although we do get the occa­sional “aren’t you all Amish?” com­ments, we have a much wider rep­u­ta­tion that our num­bers would nec­es­sar­ily war­rant. We rank pretty high.

But what are the lessons of hos­pi­tal­ity we could work on? Do we pro­vide places where spir­i­tual seek­ers can both grow per­son­ally and engage in the impor­tant ques­tions of the faith in the mod­ern world? Are we invi­ta­tional, bring­ing peo­ple into our homes and into our lives for shared meals and conversations?

In my free­lance days when I was hired to work on SEO I ran through a series of sta­tis­ti­cal reports and redesigned some under­per­form­ing pages, but then turned my atten­tion to the client’s con­tent. It was in this realm that my great­est quan­tifi­able suc­cesses occurred. At the heart of the con­tent work was ask­ing how could the site could more fully engage with first-time vis­i­tors. The “usabil­ity con­sid­er­a­tions” on the Wikipedia page on usabil­ity could be eas­ily adapted as queries:

Who are the users, what do they know, what can they learn? What do users want or need to do? What is the users’ gen­eral back­ground? What is the users’ con­text for work­ing? What must be left to the machine? Can users eas­ily accom­plish intended tasks at their desired speed? How much train­ing do users need? What doc­u­men­ta­tion or other sup­port­ing mate­ri­als are avail­able to help the user?

I’d love to see Friends con­sider this more. FGC’s “New Meet­ings Tool­box” has a sec­tion on wel­com­ing new­com­ers. But I’d love to hear more sto­ries about how we’re work­ing on the “usabil­ity” of our spir­i­tual communities.

Mar 23

Why I’m fasting with @eqat against mountaintop mining

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On March 22nd, I joined the fast against moun­tain­top coal min­ing called by the Earth Quaker Action Team.

“Old Zinc Fac­tory; Palmer­ton” by road_less_trvled on Flickr (cre­ative com­mons license)

When I was grow­ing up we’d make the trip from Philadel­phia to my grandmother’s house a cou­ple of times a year. As we headed north, the high­way threaded across farm fields and through rock cuts in the hills. About an hour in, we’d start notic­ing the thin blue band on the hori­zon. It would slowly get larger and larger until Blue Moun­tain loomed in front of us and we whooshed into Lehigh Tunnel.

My Nana lived on the other side of that moun­tain. On this side the moun­tain­side was red. The forests that car­peted the rest of the thousand-mile ridge had been ripped up by the decades of chem­i­cals pour­ing out if the smoke­stacks of the giant zinc pro­cess­ing fac­to­ries that book­ended the town of Palmerton.

When con­ver­sa­tion turned to adult mat­ters, I’d wan­der to the back porch and count the dirt bike trails going up the bar­ren moun­tain. When I tired of that I’d play in the stones of my grandmother’s back­yard. Even grass didn’t grow in this town. Ambi­tious home­own­ers would some­times make rock gar­dens for the space in front of each house that had been designed for marigolds, but most of the town had got­ten used to the absence of green. When the EPA finally got around to declar­ing the moun­tain a super­fund site we all snorted dis­mis­sively. My grand­mother was actu­ally offended, hav­ing long ago con­vinced her­self that the fac­tory effu­sions must be healthy.

The Palmer­ton fac­to­ries were funded by New York bankers. Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity got mul­ti­ple multimillion-dollar bequests in the wills of the founders of the zinc com­pany. I’m sure there are still a few resid­ual trust funds pay­ing out dividends.

Today we have Philadel­phia and Pitts­burgh bankers orches­trat­ing the removal of the moun­tain­tops in West Vir­ginia. As our tech­nol­ogy has improved so has our capac­ity for ill-considered mass destruc­tion of our nat­ural surroundings.

All liv­ing crea­tures have an impact on their sur­round­ings. My com­forts rely on the coal, oil, and nat­ural gas that are brought into our cities and towns. But I do know we can do bet­ter. I’m opti­mistic enough to can find ways to live together on this Earth that don’t break our moun­tains or poi­son our neighbors.

Photo: “Old Zinc Fac­tory; Palmer­ton” by road_less_trvled on Flickr (cre­ative com­mons license)

Oct 26

Butterfly Love

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Butterfly Love
The town parade was post­poned by rain again last night but as the but­ter­fly boys were all dressed up we ducked into our favorite pizza shop for some moz­zarella sticks and a slice of bruchetta-topped tomato pie. We got out with­out inflict­ing any major struc­tural dam­age or phys­i­cal injury, though Theo was only a twist or two away from destroy­ing one of their neon signs. Rumor has it that the parade will hap­pen next Tues­day though if the weather coop­er­ates we should have pic­tures of the Bat­sto Vil­lage hal­loween before that (last year’s pics).

(Still work­ing on get­ting com­ments and Twit­ter to show up properly.)