In an effort to quickly delete some articles in my email box which I felt didn’t relate, I glanced at an article which connected surprisingly well with web evangelism.

If you are willing to use online consumer behavior as an indicator of what online spiritual seekers might do, then a study sponsored by iProspect.com (done by Jupiter Marketing), the “iProspect Post-Holiday Online Shopping Study” indicates that as much as half of all online shopping results in an offline purchase. The accompanying press release by iProspect suggests companies find ways to measure related offline conversion and include those factors in their decisions related to online marketing expenditures.

We, as web evangelists, know that when God draws someone to himself our websites are often just one link in that process. Even though an evangelistic website may be a critical element God used in someone’s salvation decision, if there is no measurable indication of that then there is no way to know if it happened. Unless we find some way to measure it.

Right now I’m in the process of writing a report to a Foundation which generously funds the development of many of CCC’s evangelistic websites. Unfortunately we did not create a way to measure the offline conversions which may have occured as the result of these websites, and I am left with no other option then to conclude that these evangelistic websites didn’t accomplish this objective. But maybe they did, and we just don’t know it. Until we find a way to measure it, we’ll never know.