Q: What’s the single biggest day of the year when everyone is tuned in to see your carefully crafted message?
A: If you’re hawking beer or cars, it could very well be Super Bowl Sunday. If your church website is anything like mine, Ash Wednesday is by far the busiest day of the year. And Shrove Tuesday (the day before) is a close second.

In 2006, we saw traffic more than four times our usual traffic (2,041 visits versus a typical 473). Shrove Tuesday saw an increase of almost two hundred percent. Each of the previous years going back to 1999 saw similar spikes. The least busy day? It happened to be July 4 in 2006.

Based on search terms and pages visited, it looks like we attracted many newcomers who were looking for ashes. Even though Ash Wednesday isn’t a holy day of obligation for Catholics, the occasion draws overflow crowds to my church and to the website. As a church webmaster, make the most of this annual opportunity while you have the attention of hundreds who don’t typically set foot in your church or click on your site.

Will your site be ready? In a follow-up post I’ll outline the best practices to kick off Lent on your church website.

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Kick off the new year by giving parishioners a reason to visit your church website: add a poll about new year’s resolutions. You might ask, What are your new year’s resolutions? and include the following choices:

• Pray more
• Eat better
• Lose weight
• Quite smoking, drinking or drugs [you might break these out, depending on your audience]
• Exercise more
• Reduce debt
• Go to Mass more
• Get organized
• Learn a new skill
• Volunteer more
• Find a new job
• Spend more time with family/friends
• Travel
• Find love
• Stop having extra- or pre-marital sex [if you want to offer an edgy choice]
• Limit use of pornography [ditto]
• Participate in parish mission [plug a major upcoming church event]

We quickly generated 74 responses on my parish’s site with this poll.

What options would you add?

MLK Jr. Day is almost here–is your church website ready? Here are some ideas to get you started.

1. Acknowledge the day with links on your home page to MLK documents & audio files and the King Center (note: audio automatically kicks in); ResourceShelf has a thorough list.
2. Run a provocative poll, such as When will the USA reach full racial equality? Choices could be:
   – We’re pretty much already there.
   – In another generation.
   – In 50 years.
   – In 100 years.
   – Probably never.
3. Highlight your pastor’s previous homilies/sermons related to Martin Luther King, Jr. or civil rights. At my parish, we’re highlighting “Hear and Heed the Call,” “I Will Not Be Quiet” and “No Limits to Equality.”
4. Recap or link to any parish and local events commemorating the holiday.

Make it a day on, not a day off, and let us know what you did.

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