July is in the Books - August Awaits!

Greetings,

We have made good progress in our ministry since we last communicated. Brother Ebey's tour went well with sufficient support raise to help many of our pastors continue their outreach. We have some key ministry tours planned for August to MN and TX. Lord willing, Jane and Benjamin will be able to travel with me to both of these meetings.

Web Development Project Underway
We were also able to get additional funding for our web development project which will bring our web site up to a standard with our contemporary ministries. Currently we only have about 200 visits to our website each month and very few of our pastors have been sponsored via the web. Our goals after our web development project gets off the ground will be to see 30 to 50 pastors sponsored per month. This kind of response will enable us to keep up with the growth in India and allow Brother Ebey to add 300 - 500 pastors each year. These pastors are the key part of reaching 100,000 unreached villages in India. As you may well know, we currently have 1007 pastors working in over 5000 unreached villages.

As we have been talking with our web development consultants, they are amazed that we have been able to accomplish what we have without any web presence. All the donors we have found thus far have come from church meetings and personal contacts. Word of mouth will still be a major emphasis for Serve India but by bring our web site up to standard, our growth will be accelerated. Right now we have 300 unsponsored pastors and we do not have the church relationships to find enough sponsors for them. The web site can be an important tool to help us.

If you are familiar with web development, you know that it is can be very expensive. If we decide to go cheap or try to get work donated, we find that we usually get what we pay for. We have had a couple of key donors who have given so that we can get a feasibility and a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) study done. These are now complete and we have a writer, a graphic artist and a web developer working on all the changes. Our goal will be that we can bring in 5000 new visitors per month and the nice thing about utilizing the web for our donor acquisition is that people coming to are web site are actually looking for our type of ministry but they would never find us if we didn't have the right search engine rating. They would not respond to us if our web site was confusing without a clear call to action. Once the changes are implemented, people coming to our web site should quickly know what Serve India Ministries is all about and they should know how to partner with us in planting churches with clear action points.