I don’t have anything to say (either)

June 3, 2005
Some Quaker Bloggers

Sum­mer vis­i­ta­tions got an ear­ly start last month when the North­east US “Quak­er blogroll”:http://www.nonviolence.org/Quaker/Quaker_places.php con­verged in my back yard with no agen­da to fol­low and no epis­tle to write.Front row: “James”:http://curiouspenn.blogspot.com/, “Jeffrey”:http://www.nonviolence.org/martink/archives/000588.php and vis­i­ta­tion ring­leader “Amanda”:http://ofthebest.blogspot.com/. Back: “Ryan”:http://snorkelinglight.blogspot.com/, “Rob”:http://consider-the-lilies.blogspot.com/, “Me”:/martink, “Theo”:/theo and poor blog­less Christina.

Well since Kwak­er­saur is inau­gu­rat­ing the “I don’t have any­thing to post”:http://kwakersaur.blogspot.com/2005/06/i‑dont-have-anything-to-say.html meme, I’ll chime in that I don’t either. Actu­al­ly I’ve writ­ten two and half essays but real­ized they’re both real­ly for myself. This is how it hap­pens some­times. I’ve long noticed this phe­nom­e­non in fully-formed ver­bal min­istry that I know I’m not sup­posed to deliv­er and it feels as if such restraint is some­times healthy on the blog. The mes­sage will reap­pear in oth­er forums I’m sure, most like­ly next mon­th’s “Gath­er­ing workshop”:www.nonviolence.org/Quaker/strangers with Zachary Moon.
In the mean­time, there’s been fresh talk about plain lan­guage and dress this week by “Johan Maurer”:http://maurers.home.mindspring.com/2005/06/plain-language.htm, “Claire Reddy”:http://Quakerspeak.blogspot.com/2005/06/simplicity-unfocused-thought-blurt.html and the “Live­jour­nal Quakers”:http://www.livejournal.com/community/Quakers/105292.html. Russ Nel­son’s start­ed a “Plan­et Quaker”:http://planet.Quaker.org/ blog aggre­ga­tor (which includes Quak­er Ranter: thanks!). LizOpp talked about “field testing”:http://thegoodraisedup.blogspot.com/2005/05/after-annual-sessions.html her upcom­ing “Quak­er iden­ti­ty Gath­er­ing workshop”:http://www.fgcquaker.org/gathering/workshops/work36.php at North­ern Year­ly Meet­ing ses­sions and Kiara’s talked about “being field test­ed by Liz at this year’s NYM sessions”:http://wordspinning.blogspot.com/2005/05/northern-yearly-meeting.html (how cool is that?!).
I’ve been geek­ing out on “Del.icio.us”:http://del.icio.us/martin_kelley, the “social book­mark­ing” sys­tem and on the eso­teric con­cepts of “tags”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tags, the “seman­tic web”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_web and “folksonomies”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folksonomy. Two weeks ago I would have laughed at these neol­o­gisms but I’m begin­ning to see that there’s some­thing in all this. The only out­ward form the reg­u­lars will see is a more accu­rate “Relat­ed Entries” selec­tion at the bot­tom of posts (thanks to “Adam Kalsey”:http://kalsey.com/blog/2003/05/related_entries_revisited/) and bet­ter vis­i­bil­i­ty in “select­ed Tech­no­rati entries”:http://www.technorati.com/tag/Quaker (which will get less me-centric as I fin­ish tag­ging my own back posts).
And of course we’re till­ing the field, plant­i­ng a gar­den, putting up laun­dry lines and oth­er­wise thor­ough­ly enjoy­ing the first Spring in our new house. It’s bed­time, off to read the rad­i­cal­ly folk­so­nom­ic adven­tures of Sam and “My Car”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0060560452 (it’s pure tags: “My name is Sam.” “This is my car.” “I love my car.” I’d wor­ry that not-so-baby Theo is get­ting too excit­ed by com­bu­sion engines if he weren’t even more excit­ed by “dia-di-calschht” aka the “bicy­cle” Papa rides off to work on.)

Youth Ministries 2: What Do Young Friends Want?

April 28, 2005

I was giv­en per­mis­sion to pass along this data from the FGC-sponsored Youth Min­istry Con­sul­ta­tion that took place Third Month. A num­ber of goals and projects had been brain­stormed before­hand. The thirty-or-so par­tic­i­pants at the Con­sul­ta­tion were each giv­en ten stars, which they were asked to put next to the projects they thought should be pur­sued. Every star act­ed as a vote that there was one per­son inter­est­ed in that top­ic. The stars were cod­ed to indi­cate the age range of the vot­er: High-Schooler, Adult Young Friend (18 – 37 years old) and old­er Friends.

One of the “stars” charts at the consultation

Being the infor­ma­tion design geek, I con­vert­ed the resul­tant votes to into qual­i­ties and col­ors and put them into a chart show­ing inter­est lev­el. Projects that received no votes from a par­tic­u­lar age range are labeled “none,” for no inter­est; 2 – 3 stars is “weak” inter­est and so forth, up to “HOT” which are projects which received over 7 stars from an age group.

As an exam­ple, take “devel­op spir­i­tu­al­i­ty.” Sev­en adult young Friends (aged 18 – 37) put a star down for this, indi­cat­ing they thought it was some­thing FGC should pro­mote, hence “strong” (bright red) inter­est from this age group. No Friend over forty used one of their stars to indi­cate inter­est in this work, indi­cat­ing that none of them thought FGC should be pro­mot­ing spir­i­tu­al devel­op­ment. Here are the results:

High-School
Voters
YAF
Voters
Old­er Adult
Voters

Expecially for Adult Young Friends

Com­mu­ni­ty weak strong weak
Devel­op spirituality none strong none
Out­reach & how to explain our faith none strong weak
Crit­i­cal mass at MM, QM, YM none weak strong
Men­tor­ing by old­er Friends none strong none
Men­tor­ing to younger Friends none strong none
Men­tor­ing to old­er Friends: none strong none
Help with transitions none *HOT* weak
Adver­tis­ing programs none weak none
Sug­ges­tions:
Trav­el­ing Min­istries for AYF none lukew weak
Groups through­out the year for support none lukew weak
Sup­port for AYF groups at the YM levels none weak weak
Data­base to help iso­lat­ed friends none none none
Clearness/discernment process:
For HS to College none lukew none
For work transitions none weak none
For rela­tion­ships none weak none
For par­ent­hood none weak weak
Inter­gen­er­a­tional Spir­i­tu­al Conversations
About Vital Friends Issues none lukew none
Vision of Quak­erism in 50 years none lukew weak
Finan­cial sup­port for AYF weak *HOT* lukew
Retreats for youth workers none none weak
Mate­ri­als specif­i­cal­ly designed for AYF, none none none
Gen­er­al Questions:
How do we han­dle the broad age span? none weak none
How do we tap the ener­gy and pas­sion of this group MMs, YMs & FGC? none lukew strong
How do we meet the needs with­out sep­a­rat­ing AYF from larg­er community? none lukew none
How do we sus­tain com­mu­ni­ty when we only meet once a year? none lukew weak

Especially for High Schoolers

Needs:
Adults who are bet­ter pre­pared to work with them… weak lukew strong
FAP�s that have self confidence none none weak
Help with dis­cern­ment process around college none none none
Help with disc: C‑O none none weak
Help with dis­cern­ment around life choices none none weak
Dis­cern­ment ques­tions: #3, #4, & #5: none weak strong
Build­ing community weak weak weak
Net­work­ing weak none none
Bible study, RE curriculum none none weak
Train­ing how one per­son can have impact none none none
Train­ing on how to devel­op group dialogs weak none weak
Help to get more teens involved weak none lukew
Pro­gram­ming help none none none
Lead­er­ship Development weak weak weak
Sug­ges­tions:
Youth newslet­ter lukew weak none
Email forum lukew weak none
Email data base none weak none
Event b’ween Young Quakes and Gathering weak none none
Youth exchange weak none none
Pro­grams to facil­i­tate rites of passage weak none none

Things Younger Friends want­ed more than Old­er Friends:
In order by AYF popularity:

  • MENTORSHIP: The AYFs real­ly want cross-generational men­tor­ing rela­tion­ships. When the ques­tions were first posed, there only “men­tor­ing by old­er Friends” and “men­tor­ing to younger Friends.” Check the math and you’ll see that’s the same ques­tion (who­ev­er put the ques­tions togeth­er for­got that the Quak­er under­stand­ing of elder­ship is not nec­es­sar­i­ly a func­tion of age, hmm). I grabbed a pen­cil and added “men­tor­ing to old­er Friends” and it was instant­ly pop­u­lar. Even though the men­tor­ship issue was spread over three ques­tions, AYF’s vot­ed “strong­ly” for each of them, show­ing ter­rif­ic pop­u­lar sup­port. Almost no over-40 Friend vot­ed for this. This is not some­thing that can be forced onto dis­in­ter­est­ed old­er Friends, which means I think we young-in’s are going to have to rely on one anoth­er for mentorship.
  • SUPPORT FOR AYF CONFERNCES: Younger Friends want to spend more time togeth­er. Note should be made that the vot­ers were Friends attend­ing a con­fer­ence and that we were a select­ed and self-selected group who pre­sum­ably like to attend con­fer­ences. Still, this is popular.
  • TALKING ABOUT OUR FAITH: It’s sad that only two old­er Friends thought explain­ing the faith was worth­while. At the same time it’s encour­ag­ing that 13 AYFs want­ed this. It’s very clear that younger Friends aren’t as afraid of talk­ing about seri­ous faith issues as the Baby Boomers (it’s nice to see some of my essays confirmed!).

Things Old­er Friends want­ed more than Younger Friends:

  • TAPPING THE YOUTH: There was what I thought was a semi-obnoxious ques­tion about how to “tap the ener­gy and pas­sion” of younger Friends. This is very close to the all-too-common gen­er­a­tional mind­set that sees “val­ues young peo­ple as a resource” (as a ad in heavy-rotation at NPR pro­claims). We are not a resource for extrac­tion. Young peo­ple are too often seen mere­ly as a source of cheap labor for projects ini­ti­at­ed, designed and run by old­er Friends; they are want­ed as pas­sive audi­ence mem­bers for old­er Friends’ pon­tif­i­cat­ing lec­tures; they are end­less­ly pro­claimed a far-off “future” of Friends rather than the very much here-and-now present of Friends.While old­er Friends at the con­sul­ta­tion felt strong­ly that young peo­ple should be tapped, Adult Young Friends had luke­warm inter­est in being tapped and high school Friends showed no inter­est what­so­ev­er. While not all old­er Friends think of young Friends as “resources,” it’s a common-enough theme that we need to flag it as a part of the gen­er­a­tional gap. I sus­pect that pow­er issues will sur­face when Quak­er insti­tu­tions try to pull togeth­er projects that “tap” youth: twenty-something Friends are going to want more involve­ment in the design and oper­a­tion of these projects than old­er Friends will be will­ing to give.Similarly, old­er Friends seem to be more inter­est­ed that younger Friends attain “crit­i­cal mass” at Quak­er insti­tu­tions like month­ly, quar­ter­ly and year­ly meet­ings. The phras­ing of the ques­tion is a lit­tle ambigu­ous and I see two like­ly expla­na­tions. One is that younger Friends don’t feel they need crit­i­cal mass to be involved in Quak­er insti­tu­tions and want inte­grat­ed inter­gen­er­a­tional par­tic­i­pa­tion rather than “AYF ghet­tos.” The oth­er pos­si­bil­i­ty (the scari­er one) is that younger Friends sim­ply aren’t as com­mit­ted to Quak­er insti­tu­tions. I sus­pect the gen­er­a­tional dif­fer­ences in respons­es are the result of both these fac­tors, plus oth­ers perhaps.

Things no one par­tic­u­lar­ly cared about:

  • No one wants mate­ri­als specif­i­cal­ly designed for AYF. No one wants adver­tis­ing pro­grams. No one wants a data­base to help iso­lat­ed Friends.
  • An AYF trav­el­ing min­istries was luke­warm, 4 YAF stars, 3 over-40. This sur­pris­es me.
  • Any oth­er pat­terns that should be lift­ed up?

Dis­claimer
I should note that this was not a sci­en­tif­ic sur­vey. Though the orga­niz­ers of the Con­sul­ta­tion tried hard and the par­tic­i­pants were sur­pris­ing­ly diverse for an col­lec­tion like this, they weren’t rep­re­sen­ta­tive. There were only four high school par­tic­i­pants and I did­n’t adjust their votes: “luke­warm” sup­port from them should real­ly be relabled “strong” support.

While this is a small sam­ple size, this is one of the few recent sur­veys of it type in FGC Quak­erism and it bears close study. It con­firms a lot of what I’ve been say­ing all these years (yea!, I’m not crazy) and echoes what I hear a lot of high school and twenty-something Friends talk­ing about. Take it for what its worth!


Relat­ed:

FGC Gathering program is up, whew…

March 23, 2005

Thank you to every­one who refrained from com­ment­ing after 9pm last night. I final­ly slogged through the work of putting the FGC Gath­er­ing pro­gram online in my role as FGC web­mas­ter. Whoo-whee! For those who don’t know, the Gath­er­ing is a week-long con­fer­ence held at dif­fer­ent loca­tions each sum­mer: this year’s takes place Sev­enth Month 2 – 9 in Blacks­burg, Virginia.

Now I guess it’s time to think about work­shops. Zach Moon and I are offer­ing up one called “Strangers to the Covenant” but then you know that already. Liz Oppen­heimer aka the The Good Raised Up is lead­ing one called “Quak­er Iden­ti­ty: Yearn­ing, Form­ing, Deep­en­ing” that I sus­pect will be informed by her “own expe­ri­ence of step­ping into a Quak­er iden­ti­ty”. There’s also an excit­ing his­to­ry work­shop being led by Bet­sy Caz­den, “Dilem­mas from Our Quak­er Past” (I have to admit when I saw the list­ing I won­dered if I should call Zach up and assure him he’d be fine doing the Strangers work­shop on his own so I could take Bet­sy’s). Oth­er men­tions: my wife Julie real­ly liked the Lynn Fitz-Hugh work­shop she took a few years ago.

As always there are work­shops whose lead­ers I know to be more sol­id and ground­ed than the work­shop they’re propos­ing; con­verse­ly, there are work­shops that sound more inter­est­ing than I know their leader to be. Like always there are plen­ty whose appeal and/or rel­e­vance to Quak­erism I just don’t com­pre­hend at all, but that’s the Gathering.

Any rec­om­men­da­tions from the peanut gallery? I should say that I’d like to refrain from ridi­cul­ing all of the work­shops that beg to be made fun of. It feels as if this would edge too close to detrac­tion. We will only get to King­dom by mod­el­ing Chris­t­ian char­i­ty and wear­ing our love on our sleeves.

It’s My Language Now: Thinking About Youth Ministry

March 16, 2005

This past week­end I took part in a “Youth Min­istries Con­sul­ta­tion” spon­sored by Friends Gen­er­al Con­fer­ence. Thir­ty Friends, most under the age of 35, came togeth­er to talk about their expe­ri­ence of Quakerism.

Con­formed to the World

The issue that spoke most strong­ly this week­end was the expe­ri­ence of not being known. Young and old we longed for a nam­ing & nur­tur­ing of gifts. We longed to be seen as mem­bers one of anoth­er. Ear­ly on a young Friend from a well-known fam­i­ly said she often felt she was seen as her moth­er’s daugh­ter or con­fused with cousins and aunts. Anoth­er Friend with pedi­gree com­plained that as a young per­son inter­est­ed in Quak­erism he was seen by nom­i­nat­ing com­mit­tees as a gener­ic “Young Friend” who could be slot­ted into any com­mit­tee as its token youth rep­re­sen­ta­tive. Anoth­er young Friend agreed that, yes, there is “affir­ma­tive action for young Friends.”

Affir­ma­tive action?!? For young Friends?? At this state­ment my jaw dropped. Through­out most of my time as a twenty- and thirty-something Friend I have felt almost com­plete­ly invis­i­ble. I’d have to walk on water to be named to a com­mit­tee by my year­ly meet­ing (only in the last year has a year­ly meet­ing nom­i­nat­ing committee-member approached me). I can get pro­filed in the New York Times for my peace work but request as I try I can’t even get on the mail­ing list for my year­ly meet­ing’s peace committee!

And yet the deep­er issue is the same for me and the annoint­ed young Friends: we are seen not as our­selves but in rela­tion (or non-relation) to oth­er Friends. We are all tokens. As a small group of us met to talk about the issue of gift-naming, we real­ized the prob­lem was­n’t just lim­it­ed to those under forty. Even old­er Friends longed to be part of meet­ings that would know us, meet­ings that would see beyond our most obvi­ous skins of age, race and birth fam­i­ly to our deep­er, ever-changing and refresh­ing souls. We all long for oth­ers to give nur­tur­ing guid­ance and lov­ing over­sight to that deep­est part of our­selves! How we long to whis­per, sing and shout to one anoth­er about the Spir­it’s move­ment inside us. We all long for a reli­gious soci­ety where expec­ta­tions aren’t lim­it­ed by our out­ward differences.

This isn’t about fill­ing com­mit­tees and find­ing clerks. What if we could go beyond the super­fi­cial com­mu­ni­ties of nice­ness main­tained in so many Meet­ings to find some­thing more real – a “cap­i­tal ‘C’ Com­mu­ni­ty” as one Friend put it? This is about liv­ing that beloved Com­mu­ni­ty. Con­sul­ta­tions and pro­grams are easy but the hard work is chang­ing atti­tudes and chang­ing our expec­ta­tions of one anoth­er, expec­ta­tions that keep us from hav­ing to get to know one another.

One Body in Christ

As the con­sul­ta­tion wrapped up we were giv­en an overview of the next steps: set­ting up com­mit­tees, doing fundrais­ing, sup­port­ing iden­ti­fied youth work. It’s all fine and good but it was a pret­ty gener­ic list of next-steps that could have been gen­er­at­ed even before the meeting.
Caught up in the idea of a “youth min­istries pro­gram” are assump­tions that the prob­lem is with the youth and that the solu­tion will come through some sort of pro­gram­ming. I don’t think either premise is accu­rate. The real change needs to be cul­tur­al and it needs to extend far past youth. Even most of the old­er Friends at the con­sul­ta­tion saw that. But will they bring it back to the larg­er orga­ni­za­tion? Last Novem­ber I shared some con­cerns about the Youth Min­istries ini­ta­tive with its orga­niz­ing committee:

I haven’t heard any apol­o­giz­ing from old­er Friends for the neglect and invis­i­bil­i­ty that they’ve giv­en my gen­er­a­tion. I haven’t heard any­one talk about address­ing the issues of Quak­er ageism or the the cul­ture of FGC insti­tu­tion­al nepo­tism. At [the FGC gov­ern­ing board­’s annu­al meet­ing] I heard a state­ment that a youth min­istries pro­gram would be built on the ongo­ing work of half-a-dozen list­ed com­mit­tees, most of which I know haven’t done any­thing for youth ministries.

The point was hit home by an old­er Friend at the con­sul­ta­tion dur­ing a small-group break­out. He explained the all-too-familiar ratio­nale for why we should sup­port youth: “because they are an invest­ment in our future, they’re our lead­er­ship twen­ty and thir­ty years from now.” I sus­pect that a num­ber of Friends on gov­ern­ing boards – not just of FGC but of our ser­vice pro­grams and year­ly meet­ings – look at “youth min­istries” in a similarly-condescending, dis­mis­sive way, as invest­ment work in the future. Why else would younger Friends be so under-represented in most Quak­er com­mit­tees and pro­gram work?

The prob­lems tran­scend Quak­er insti­tu­tions. But Friends Gen­er­al Con­fer­ence is in a par­tic­u­lar­ly good posi­tion to mod­el the work. Will FGC cre­ate a youth min­istries ghet­to or will it do the hard work of inte­grat­ing its com­mit­tees? Will it final­ly start spon­sor­ing young min­is­ters in its Trav­el­ing Min­istries pro­gram? Will FGC ini­ti­ate out­reach efforts specif­i­cal­ly tar­get­ed at 20-somethings (the demo­graph­ic of the great major­i­ty of seek­ers who come to our doors)? Will there ever be a Friend under thirty-five invit­ed to give a major Gath­er­ing ple­nary talk?

Trans­formed by the Renew­ing of Our Minds

The con­sul­ta­tion was just 30 Friends. Most of the most excit­ing young Friends I know weren’t even invit­ed and real­ly could­n’t be with such a lim­it­ed atten­dance cap. One old­er Friend tried to sum up the week­end by say­ing it was the start of some­thing impor­tant, but that’s the wrong way to look at it. It’s real­ly only anoth­er step along the way, the con­tin­u­a­tion of work that’s been going on for 100 years, 350 years, 2000 years or more depend­ing on your frame of ref­er­ence. This is work that will con­tin­ue to be done over the course of gen­er­a­tions, in hun­dreds of meet­ing­hous­es and it will involve every­one in the Reli­gious Soci­ety of Friends in one way or another.

Lurk­ing unnamed in the back­ground of the Youth Min­istries Con­sul­ta­tion is the pop­u­lar “Quak­er” sweat lodge, which became so pop­u­lar pre­cise­ly because it was part­ly orga­nized by young Friends, gave them real lead­er­ship oppor­tu­ni­ties and knew–knew with a cer­tain­ty–that they could expe­ri­ence the divine and share that expe­ri­ence with their peers. If FGC’s pro­grams can’t match those cri­te­ria, then FGC will suf­fer the loss of yet anoth­er generation.
What was impor­tant to me were the trends rep­re­sent­ed. There was a def­i­nite inter­est in get­ting more deeply involved in Quak­erism and in explor­ing the reli­gious side of this Soci­ety of Friends.

Grace Giv­en Us

One strug­gle we’re going to con­tin­ue to have is with lan­guage. For one small-group break­out, the orga­niz­ing com­mit­tee broke issues down by top­ics. One was dubbed “Lead­er­ship Train­ing.” With that moniker it was sure­ly going to focus on some sort of delim­it­ed, sec­u­lar – and quite frankly bor­ing – pro­gram that would be based on an orga­ni­za­tion­al design mod­el. It was­n’t the con­cern I had heard raised so I asked if we could rename it to a “nam­ing of gifts” group; thank­ful­ly the sug­ges­tion was eager­ly accept­ed. Renam­ing it helped ground it and gave the small group that gath­ered per­mis­sion to look at the deep­er issues involved. No one in our small group point­ed out that our dis­cus­sion uncon­scious­ly echoed Paul’s let­ter to the Romans:

Do not be con­formed to this world, but be trans­formed by the renew­ing of your minds, so that you may dis­cern what is the will of God – what is good and accept­able and per­fect… For as in one body we have many mem­bers, and not all the mem­bers have the same func­tion, so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and indi­vid­u­al­ly we are mem­bers one of anoth­er. We have gifts that dif­fer accord­ing to the grace giv­en to us. Romans 12.

This uncon­scious Chris­tian­i­ty is very strong among our branch of Quak­ers. As our small group dis­cussed nam­ing of gifts we turned to the roles of our month­ly meet­ings and start­ed label­ing their func­tions. As the mis­sion state­ment was worked out point by point, I noticed we were recre­at­ing gospel order. I sug­gest­ed that one was to “for­give each oth­er our tres­pass­es,” which was an idea the small group liked. Even so, a few mem­bers did­n’t want to use that language.

We were talk­ing gospel order, but with san­i­tized lan­guage; it’s an odd­i­ty that we mod­ern lib­er­al Friends turn so often to sec­u­lar vocab­u­lary: we talk of child­hood devel­op­ment mod­els, we use orga­ni­za­tion­al design lin­go, we speak in the Quak­er committee-speak.

My feel­ing is that lib­er­al Friends do want to be reli­gious. But we’ve spent a gen­er­a­tion replac­ing any word that hints of reli­gion with sec­u­lar­ized alter­na­tives and that now we often can’t think past this self-limited vocab­u­lary. One word that needs to be exer­cised more is “God.” If you want to be a mod­ern day Quak­er min­is­ter, just refor­mu­late every sec­u­lar­ized Quak­er­s­peak query you see to include “God.” When Friends ask “How can my month­ly meet­ing meet my needs,” nice­ly sug­gest that we also ask “How can my month­ly meet­ing meet God’s needs.” I found myself con­stant­ly refor­mu­lat­ing queries over the week­end. It’s kind of odd that the word “God” has become so absent from a Peo­ple gath­ered in the knowl­edge that “Christ has come to teach the peo­ple Him­self,” but that’s the Soci­ety we’ve inher­it­ed and this is where our min­istry must start.

Near the end of the con­sul­ta­tion one college-age Friend explained a moment when her Quak­erism was trans­formed from out­ward iden­ti­ty to an inward knowl­edge. “It’s my lan­guage now” she declared to us. Yes, it is. And that’s youth min­istry and elder min­istry, the good news that there’s a God we can name who will reveal what is “good and accept­able and per­fect.” That’s our work today, that is the min­istry of our ages.

More Read­ing:

FGC pub­lished a Good News Bul­letin about the Youth Min­istries Consultation.

FGC Gathering Workshop

January 29, 2005

This fall Zachary Moon and I put togeth­er a work­shop pro­pos­al for the 2005 Gath­er­ing, which has been approved: “Strangers to the Covenant” is the title and here’s the short description:

This is for young Friends who want to break into the pow­er of Quak­erism: it’s the stuff you did­n’t get in First Day School. We’ll con­nect with his­tor­i­cal Quak­ers whose pow­er­ful min­istry came in their teens and twen­ties and we’ll look at how Friends wove God, covenants and gospel order togeth­er to build a move­ment that rocked the world. We’ll mine Quak­er his­to­ry to reclaim the pow­er of our tra­di­tion, to explore the liv­ing pow­er of the tes­ti­monies and our wit­ness in the world.

This was very much an “as way opens” process. At the 2004 Gath­er­ing I felt sad that there weren’t more work­shops that I’d like to attend. And obvi­ous­ly I have a long-standing con­cern to sup­port younger Friends. But I was­n’t sure if I had the skills to han­dle this. One piece of dis­cern­ment was lead­ing the Quak­erism 101 class at Med­ford Meet­ing: I knew I would have most of the ses­sions under my belt by the time the work­shop sub­mis­sion dead­line came around and I hoped I’d have a feel whether I actu­al­ly like lead­ing workshops!

The Med­ford expe­ri­ence was sur­pris­ing­ly good, even on weeks where I could have been bet­ter pre­pared. I learned a lot and gained con­fi­dence in “teach­ing” Quak­erism to Med­ford’s class of very weighty, expe­ri­enced Friends.

Still, the Gath­er­ing work­shop sub­mis­sion dead­line was loom­ing and I had no spe­cif­ic top­ic in mind. Julie, my wife, was get­ting a lit­tle sus­pi­cious whether the work­shop would hap­pen or not. I knew that the most impor­tant thing was attract­ing the right mix of eager, curi­ous par­tic­i­pants and that for me the top­ic was almost sec­ondary. Still: a focus and top­ic is impor­tant, yes.

The week before the dead­line, I attend­ed the FGC Cen­tral Com­mit­tee meet­ing in New Wind­sor, Mary­land, as a staff­per­son. In a lunchtime dis­cus­sion I learned that my friend Zachary Moon was also con­sid­er­ing lead­ing his first work­shop. As soon as we sat down and start­ed talk­ing it seemed like the obvi­ous thing to do. The dis­cern­ment to co-lead this took two a half sec­onds or so, but of course this quick process was built on the thought, prayer and dis­cern­ment both of us had already been giv­ing the mat­ter. I’ve found that when I’ve laid the ground­work for a deci­sion, things can often move supris­ing­ly quickly.

The work­shop has devel­oped dif­fer­ent­ly than I sus­pect­ed. The most sig­ni­cant piece is its age lim­i­ta­tion: it’s for high school and adult young Friends only, mean­ing it’s par­tic­i­pa­tion is lim­it­ed to 15 to 35 years olds. I’ve always been a lit­tle wor­ried about con­struct­ing youth ghet­tos but I think it will work in this case. I apol­o­gize in advance to those Quak­er Ranter read­ers who might like to take it but can’t because of age (I’m too old myself, after all!). There will be many oth­er chances to spend time at Gath­er­ing and Zachary and I are only a part of a shift that’s been hap­pen­ing at the FGC Gath­er­ing over the last few years.

Nonprofit Website Design and Measurement

October 30, 2004

A 2004 Denom­i­na­tion­al Web­site Report

When I wrote this in the Fall of 2004, I was work­ing as the web­mas­ter for Friends Gen­er­al Con­fer­ence, the US/Canadian denom­i­na­tion­al body for the lib­er­al branch of unpro­grammed Quak­ers. As web­mas­ter, I felt that one of my most impor­tant respon­si­bil­i­ties was to under­stand how reli­gious seek­ers use the inter­net and how our non­prof­it orga­ni­za­tion could ben­e­fit from under­stand­ing these patterns.

My 2004 report on the three FGC web­sites touched on a lot of these issues. I offer it here because I hope it can give oth­er non­prof­it and denom­i­na­tion­al web­sites some ideas about how to mea­sure their site’s use. Too often we put up web­sites with­out any follow-up analy­sis of their use. You just can’t make an effec­tive web­site like this and if your work is min­istry you don’t want its reach con­strained by minor nav­i­ga­tion­al design issues. Please feel free to use the com­ment page to start a dis­cus­sion on any of these issues.

State of the Websites

Report for FGC Cen­tral Com­mit­tee, Octo­ber 2004
By Mar­tin Kel­ley, webmaster

It’s impor­tant to start off with a lit­tle edi­to­r­i­al about why we need reports like this. We put up a web­site and we know peo­ple use it. Why both­er spend­ing time col­lect­ing data?

The inter­net is simul­ta­ne­ous­ly vague and pre­cise. We can say defin­i­tive­ly that the FGC web­site received 114,097 “unique vis­i­tors” in the past fis­cal year. But how many peo­ple does that rep­re­sent? Is that a high num­ber or low num­ber? How did these users react when they came to the site. Did they think to them­selves “whoops, not what I want” and leave, or did they go “wow, what’s this FGC?, hey this is great.” LESSON: We need data to know if the site is being used well.

Every­one who reads this report is by def­i­n­i­tion an insid­er. None of us are able to step into the shoes of an unknowl­edge­able seek­er. In my study of usage pat­terns, I have found that the dif­fer­ences in web­site use between Quak­er insid­ers and seek­ers is so great that they might as well be look­ing at dif­fer­ent web­sites, if not dif­fer­ent media alto­geth­er (see How Insid­ers and Seek­ers Use the Quak­er Net.

Because of this gap we can­not design the site based on whims or per­son­al pref­er­ences. It is incred­i­bly dif­fi­cult to imag­ine how new­com­ers might nav­i­gate the site. We can only con­sid­er the design of the site after we’ve exam­ined in usage, both in detail (actu­al users mov­ing through the site) and in aggre­gate (pages and links vis­it­ed over peri­ods of time). See also: How to mea­sure the peace move­mentLESSON: We can only effec­tive­ly design the site if we incor­po­rate sophis­ti­cat­ed and detailed data about how the site is being used.


Part 2, Googlization

By far the most sig­nif­i­cant change in our web­sites over the past year has been the “googliza­tion” of Quaker­books and Quak­erfind­er, both of which now have over four times the vis­i­tors they were get­ting last year.

The Google Prob­lem: Both Quaker­books and Quak­erfind­er have had great con­tent from their start. The for­mer lists the entire inven­to­ry of FGC’s book­store, along with book descrip­tions and read­er com­men­tary. The lat­ter has our list of meet­ings – address­es, wor­ship times, and con­tact infor­ma­tion. But on both sites the bulk of the con­tent was locked up in data­bas­es. Before users could ben­e­fit from the sites, they had to find them. This lim­it­ed much of the use to peo­ple who already know about FGC and our resources. Because inter­net search engines can’t search web­site data­bas­es (a prob­lem known as the hid­den or deep web), they could index only a lim­it­ed num­ber of pages on these sites and they made refer­rals on only the most gener­ic search phras­es (e.g., “quak­er book­store” “quak­er meet­ing directory”).

We made var­i­ous changes to both sites (tech­ni­cal details below) that have made them search­able by Google and the oth­er search engines, which now return our sites for very spe­cif­ic search queries, e.g., “Quak­ers in con­flict Ingle” and “Quak­ers Poughkeepsie”.

A Wider, More Inclu­sive Audi­ence: What’s great is that this has giv­en us not just a big­ger audi­ence, but our tar­get audi­ence. Most of these vis­i­tors don’t know enough about how Friends are orga­nized to even know where to look for infor­ma­tion. With Quak­erfind­er and Quaker­books, we’re now be vis­i­ble on their terms.

We’re giv­ing them the basic infor­ma­tion they’re seek­ing and we’re doing it when they are active­ly seek­ing it. This last point is impor­tant. I spend a lot of time watch­ing how peo­ple use web­sites. If you email some­one out of the blue with a link to a web­site, they might fol­low it but only half-heartedly. They might be doing five oth­er things at the same time and they rarely stay to full use the web­site’s resources. When some­one comes to a site via a search engine they’re much more like­ly to look around: this is the vis­it that they are ini­ti­at­ing because they have some­thing spe­cif­ic they’re try­ing to find.

Hav­ing a “googli­fied” Quak­erfind­er means we’re actu­al­ly reach­ing peo­ple who are ready to try out a Quak­er meet­ing and we’re giv­ing them that most basic infor­ma­tion that’s often hard to find. With a search­able Quaker­books we’re sell­ing books to peo­ple who might not even have thought about Quak­ers as a pos­si­ble spir­i­tu­al path. I sus­pect that both sites are doing more out­reach about Quak­erism than any of us expect.

Update, 11/29/04: I recent­ly met some­one who came to Friends after read­ing the Quak­er entry in Wikipedia. He had gone through the list of reli­gious denom­i­na­tions in the U.S. till he found one that spoke to his con­di­tion. In the past month FGC has got­ten 57 vis­i­tors from Wikipedia.

The Fixes

In the offi­cial com­mit­tee report I tried to steer clear of too many tech­ni­cal details since I want­ed peo­ple to read it. So I’ll expand on them here on the web­site version.

Unique Domains: I don’t think it real­ly helped to give Quak​erfind​er​.org and Quaker​books​.org their own domains, at least ini­tial­ly. In last year’s report I not­ed that most of the traf­fic to those sites came from the main FGCQuak​er​.org site and that the sep­a­rate domains weren’t par­tic­u­lar­ly use­ful. Now the sites do have their own sort of iden­ti­ty, thanks to the “googliza­tion,” which was a dif­fer­ent process for the two sites.

Quaker​books​.org: Vis­i­tors to the Quaker​books​.org site are giv­en ses­sion IDs to allow us to fol­low along with them as they make their selec­tions. Since some users don’t allow cook­ies, this ID some­times appears in the URL (it appears as some­thing like “?sessionid=1514” append­ed to the end of the address). Google real­ly hates ses­sion IDs because its auto­mat­ed soft­ware does­n’t know if the dif­fer­ent URLs are dif­fer­ent pages (to be indexed sep­a­rate­ly) or mere­ly dif­fer­ent ses­sions look­ing at the same page. So Googles just ignores any­thing that looks like this. The eas­i­est fix is to have the soft­ware look to see if the vis­i­tor is Google and take of the ses­sion IDs (Google is okay with this workaround; I also used this method to allow them to index my Non​vi​o​lence​.org dis­cus­sion board.)

Quak­erfind­er: On Quak​erfind​er​.org, the prob­lem was that vis­i­tors had to type in a zip code to get to any of the con­tent. Google’s not that inter­ac­tive and only fol­lows links. Until recent­ly, it thought there was only three pages to the site. To fix this we set up an alter­na­tive way to nav­i­gate the site: from the home­page you can now fol­low a link to lists of Quak­er Meet­ings by state. The zip code lookup is so much more con­ve­nient that we don’t sus­pect many live peo­ple will look up by state, but Google will and because of this it now lists 808 pages on the site. Now Google acts as a alter­nate lookup ser­vice, one that does­n’t depend on peo­ple find­ing our site beforehand.


Part 3, Comparing the Sites

Visitors

The basic mea­sure used to mea­sure web­site traf­fic is that of the “unique vis­i­tor,” which counts user ses­sions. Here are this year’s com­par­isons to last year’s. Num­bers rep­re­sent the month­ly aver­age “unique vis­i­tors” to each of our three websites.

     Site        FY 03/04 total  FY 02/03 total  Increase
     FGCQuaker.org    114,097         82,747           38%
     Quakerfinder.org  48,084         23,964          100%
     Quakerbooks.org   69,924         19,332          262%

The last two sites have tru­ly remark­able jumps. The num­bers are a lit­tle mis­lead­ing, how­ev­er, as the increase in traf­fic has­n’t been grad­ual but sud­den and climb­ing. Com­pare the last full month (Sep­tem­ber 2004) with the same month the pre­vi­ous year and all three sites have high­er jumps.

     Site             Sept 04         Sept 03         Increase
     FGCQuaker.org    9459            8254             15%
     Quakerfinder.org 8782            1997            340%
     Quakerbooks.org  7498            1611            366%

While the inter­net grows in use every year, the increas­es on Quak­erfind­er and Quaker­books rep­re­sent a quan­tum leap over that incre­men­tal increase. They rep­re­sent “search engine opti­miza­tion” of those sites, or what we all refer to the “googliza­tion” of the sites.

Links:

One way of mea­sur­ing the vis­i­bil­i­ty of a web­site is to count how many oth­er web­pages link to it. Here are

     Site              October 2004    October 2003    Increase
     FGCQuaker.org     496             396              25%
     Quakerfinder.org  196              46             326%
     Quakerbooks.org   151              96              57%

For com­par­i­son: Quak​er​.org is up to 11,900 links, Phi­la. Year­ly Meet­ing is 248, Pendle​Hill​.org is 420, FCNL.org is 10,200, Non​vi​o​lence​.org is 20,900 and AFSC.org is 21,800. See Mis­cel­la­neous & Notes at end to see how num­bers were obtained. See How Can We Mea­sure the State of the Peace Move­ment? for more on this method of measurement.


Part 4, The FGCQuak​er​.org Site

Visitors

blankUse of FGCQuak​er​.org con­tin­ues to grow at a good clip. We have a 38% increase this fis­cal year com­pared with last’s. The site received over 114,000 unique vis­i­tors from Octo­ber 1, 2003 to Sep­tem­ber 30, 2004.

To the right is the chart show­ing unique vis­i­tors by month for the past three years:

Referrers: Where did visitors come from?

In Sep­tem­ber 2004, there were 9459 “unique vis­its” to the FGCQuak​er​.org site, still our most-visited site. Here’s where they came from.

1021 from Quak​erfind​er​.org. One sur­prise this year is the jump in Quakerfinder-referred vis­its. This is due of course to the phe­nom­e­nal vis­i­bil­i­ty of that site. In a recent one-month peri­od, FGCQuak­er received 983 vis­its from Quak­erfind­er links, two-thirds of which came from the “googlized” Quak­erfind­er pages. About one in ten vis­i­tors are now com­ing to FGCQuak­er through Quak­erfind­er. Up 288% from last year.

842 from Google. We get a lot of Google traf­fic because we have a lot of con­tent on our site: dozens of pam­phlets, years worth of FGConnec­tions, large parts of the old Fos­ter­ing Vital Friends Meet­ings resource binder. Vis­i­tors via search engines often don’t know FGC exists but they want to know about our pro­grams and work. Because FGC does such great work (and because we pub­li­cize it online!), many of our resources answer ques­tions peo­ple have. I think this is great outreach.

Here’s an exam­ple. This Spring I noticed that we were get­ting vis­its on fair­ly gener­ic search­es for racism. Here’s a list of search inquiries that brought peo­ple to the CMR pages on FGC:

“end­ing racism”
“racial­ly diverse communities”
“quak­er racial diversity”
“diver­si­ty in friends”
“eth­nic diversity”
“respon­si­bil­i­ties to racism”
“pas­toral care racism”
“activ­i­ties for end­ing racism”
“tes­ti­monies racial unity”

This is a fas­ci­nat­ing list pre­cise­ly because these are gener­ic search­es. Peo­ple aren’t look­ing for “Quak­ers end­ing racism,” they’re look­ing for any­one “end­ing racism” and Google is bring­ing them to us (we’re num­ber 6 on that search term). This is sur­pris­ing: I would think the much big­ger denom­i­na­tions would all have com­mit­tees end­ing racism that would come up high­er just because of their larg­er insti­tu­tion­al clout. That we are so high sug­gests that this work is not as com­mon as I we might hope and that Friends might have the oppor­tu­ni­ty to play a role in larg­er faith dialogues.

When peo­ple use search engines, they get results from all over the FGC web­site. Search­es might pull up some four-year arti­cle on FGConnec­tions, or one of the “Friends And…” pam­phlets that we’ve put online. Google up 12% from last year. There were about 83 more vis­its from region­al Google sites.

434 from Quak​er​.org. Most of these peo­ple are com­ing direct­ly from the Quak​er​.org home­page to the FGCQuak​er​.org home­page. I esti­mate that about 60% of these vis­i­tors leave the FGC site with­out click­ing on any links. They’re prob­a­bly just super­fi­cial­ly curi­ous about us, but not enough to look around the site. Up 39% from last year.

253 from oth­er search engines: 118 from Yahoo (118), MSN (74), AOL (42), Ask (19).

81 from Beliefnet. Beliefnet has a pop­u­lar “Belief-o-Matic” quiz that will mag­i­cal­ly tell you what reli­gious faith you should join. It’s rigged in such a way that a lot of peo­ple unex­pect­ed­ly come up as Quak­er. The qui zthen directs peo­ple to an infor­ma­tion page on Friends, which includes some links to FGC. Most of the Beliefnet vis­i­tors are com­ing from that infor­ma­tion page direct­ly to the FGC home­page. Up 200% from last year.

69 from UVa’s Reli­gious Move­ments site. This is a pret­ty good descrip­tion of Quakerism

60 from Quaker­books. Our own book­store web­site attracts a lot of new peo­ple who aren’t part of the estab­lished Quak­er net­works and many of them first learn of FGC this way.

53 from Reli­gious Tol­er­ance. A pop­u­lar web­site from a Cana­di­an Uni­tar­i­an that pro­files religions..

52 from Quak​er​In​fo​.org. This is the Philadel­phia Quak­er Infor­ma­tion Cen­ter, a joint project of a num­ber of Quak­er orga­ni­za­tions, includ­ing FGC.

Where did people go?

Top Des­ti­na­tions in Sep­tem­ber 04:
* To the home­page: 2396;
* Library’s “Wel­come to Quak­erism” pages: 463;
* A&O “Resources for Meet­ings”: 320 (promi­nent­ly linked from Quakerfinder);
* Gath­er­ing pages: 309;
* “Silent Wor­ship Quak­er Val­ues” tract on the Library section;
* Gath­er­ing’s pic­tures from last year: 149;
* Reli­gious Ed: 149;
* FGConnec­tions arti­cles: 129;
* Ideas for First Day School”: 127;
* Advance­ment & Out­reach home­page: 124;
* Young Quakes: 118;
* Pub­li­ca­tions: 100;
* Devel­op­ment 97.

These are pret­ty typ­i­cal num­bers. The only sig­nif­i­cant vari­a­tion over the year comes in Spring, when traf­fic to the Gath­er­ing pages goes up. In May 2004, 961 peo­ple vis­it­ed the Gath­er­ing home­page, and 355 vis­it­ed the work­shop listings.

Forget the Aggregates: How Do People Use the Site?

So far I’ve looked at tallied-up num­bers: how many peo­ple vis­it­ed, how many pages were looked at. The prob­lem with this sort of sta­tis­tic is that it does­n’t give us a feel for how indi­vid­u­als are actu­al­ly using the site. Look­ing at usage explodes the pre­con­cep­tions that many of us “Insid­er Quak­ers” might bring to the web.

The first les­son: most peo­ple don’t come into our site via the FGC home­page. Even more shock­ing: close to half nev­er even see the homepage!

This blew me away when I first real­ized it. We spend so much time design­ing the home­page and won­der­ing how we’re going to direct seek­ers from it but a lot of this work is in vain.

Of that 45% or so that enter the site via the FGC home­page, most of them leave the site imme­di­ate­ly with­out fol­low­ing any link whatsoever.

Let’s splice this anoth­er way: 70% of the peo­ple who hit our site (wher­ev­er they enter) don’t look at any page oth­er than that first one. They don’t click on any­thing but the back button.

What are some of the lessons on this: one is that con­tent is all impor­tant. Those major­i­ty of vis­i­tors who bypass the home­page to para­chute direct­ly inside the site are com­ing for spe­cif­ic infor­ma­tion. Many of them don’t know any­thing about FGC and most of them don’t care to learn about FGC the orga­ni­za­tion. They’re look­ing for some spe­cif­ic piece of infor­ma­tion on Quak­ers (“paint­ing of Penn­syl­va­nia Abo­li­tion­ist Soci­ety Quak­ers” and “Quak­ers prison reform”), or on reli­gious edu­ca­tion in gen­er­al (“reli­gious meet­ing”), or on how church­es are deal­ing with racism (“racial diver­si­ty” and “do blacks wor­ship with only blacks”). These are all search phras­es that have brought vis­i­tors to FGCQuak​er​.org. So it’s great that we have our pam­phlets online and FGConnec­tions and RE mate­ri­als and A&O brochures.

There are hun­dreds of pages on our site, most of which we prob­a­bly for­get are there, but Google knows them and will dis­play them up when the query is right.

Anoth­er les­son is that we should­n’t rely on our home­page to help vis­i­tors nav­i­gate. We should­n’t even wor­ry much about using how its design will work for both insid­ers and seek­ers: most of the seek­ers nev­er even go there. Most of the peo­ple com­ing to the FGC home­page are look­ing for FGC the orga­ni­za­tion.

Com­mit­tee Page Case Study: One com­mit­tee, Advance­ment & Out­reach, is con­sid­er­ing redesign­ing their com­mit­tee page. In prepa­ra­tion I’ve looked at the usage and I think it makes a good case study. The A&O com­mit­tee gets the most vis­i­ble link on the FGC Home­page (top left, it gets this posi­tion because the com­mit­tee list is alpha­bet­i­cal). Despite this promi­nence, almost no vis­i­tors actu­al­ly fol­low this link. Only 1.5% of vis­i­tors to the FGCQuak​er​.org site ever get to the A&O home­page and even at that it’s the most vis­it­ed com­mit­tee page on our site!

Most of the vis­i­tors that did get to the A&O page
left with­out click­ing on any­thing. It is safe to say that most of those
vis­i­tors did­n’t thor­ough­ly read through the page. The most-followed
link is the first one, for the “Inreach/Outreach” review. In the one-month peri­od I exam­ined only 9 peo­ple fol­lowed this link! This does­n’t mean A&O mate­r­i­al isn’t used: Quak­erfind­er is very suc­cess­ful and the pam­phlet “Resources for Local meet­ings” is pop­u­lar. And over 300 peo­ple in this month came to some part of the A&O site. Com­mit­tee pages are use­ful for the rel­a­tive trick­le of Quak­er insid­ers who vis­it the page, but we should focus more on the con­tent com­mit­tees are producing.

The les­son is clear: vis­i­tors are pri­mar­i­ly look­ing for 1) good use­ful con­tent from the “Quak­er Library” resources and 2) prac­ti­cal infor­ma­tion about the Gath­er­ing. Pages about com­mit­tees and inter­nal FGC work­ings are not well used. We need to con­tin­ue the focus on prac­ti­cal resources. We also have to accept that peo­ple will not be look­ing at what we think they should be look­ing at. Through these vis­its we will slow­ly build up FGC’s rep­u­ta­tion but many peo­ple only dim­ly know what they’re look­ing at.

What I didn’t say in the report

In my offi­cial FGC report, I only hint­ed at the dif­fer­ences between insti­tu­tion­al web­sites and focused online new media sites.

One sur­pris­ing find that did­n’t make it into the report is that the three most-viewed pages on my own Quak­er Ranter site were seen by more peo­ple than all but the two most-viewed FGC pages. The most viewed pages on FGCQuak­er are the home­page and the Wel­come to Quak­erism page. Three of the pages on “Quak­er Ranter” are seen by more peo­ple than any oth­er page on the FGC web­site. FGC’s Reli­gious Edu­ca­tion and Advance­ment and Out­reach and Pub­li­ca­tions pages all are more obscure than my home­page or my “resources on plain dress” directory.

Insti­tu­tion­al web­sites by their very nature have too many con­flict­ing audi­ences and too timid a voice to act as much more than a ref­er­ence resource. The Friends Gen­er­al Con­fer­ence web­site is prob­a­bly more friend­ly to seek­ers than most oth­er insti­tu­tion­al web­sites out there but even it gets a lot of peo­ple hit­ting the “back” but­ton as soon as they hit the homepage.

Reli­gious seek­ers are look­ing for indi­vid­ual voic­es with some­thing to say and I sus­pect new media seek­er web­sites will only become more impor­tant as time goes on. I sus­pect this will come as a sur­prise to insti­tu­tion­al insid­ers as it hap­pens. Sort of relat­ed­ly, see my Peace and Twenty-Somethings for some of the gen­er­a­tional aspects of this shift. My Books and Media sec­tion col­lects sim­i­lar sorts of essays.

One more piece in this: the FGC web­sites did­n’t get a lot of blog traf­fic. If all I were was the web­mas­ter of Friends Gen­er­al Con­fer­ence, I’d assume that all this blog talk in the media was hype. But as the “Quak­er Ranter” I know that a pop­u­lar blog and/or per­son­al site can get a lot of read­ers. The les­son here is that there’s lit­tle cross-over. Blogs seem to send lit­tle traf­fic to insti­tu­tion­al web­sites and vice ver­sa (actu­al­ly insti­tu­tion­al web­sites can’t real­ly send peo­ple to blog­gers for a vari­ety of rea­sons). I’ve had a num­ber of peo­ple read my blog and declare they’ll be com­ing to the next FGC Gath­er­ing so I know per­son­al blogs can help raise orga­ni­za­tion pro­files but that inter­est does­n’t man­i­fest itself as an immediately-followed link. I sus­pect the com­mu­ni­ty being formed by the blogs is far more impor­tant than the raw num­ber of refer­ral links.


Part 5, Quaker​books​.org and Quak​erfind​er​.org

Quaker​books​.org

blankThe first of our two sites to be “googli­fied” was Quaker​books​.org. I had long hoped to have our book list­ings show up on the search engines, espe­cial­ly since we car­ry a lot of hard-to-find ones. I had opened up the dis­cus­sion board of my peace site to Google and been hap­py with the results.

Back in ear­ly 2003 we installed new soft­ware by Steve Beuret to pow­er the book­store web­site, one that would allow easy trans­fer of infor­ma­tion between the web­site and our inven­to­ry pro­gram. The web­site could now list whether a book was in stock, and orders would go direct­ly into the sys­tem (no more retyp­ing them!). Once the new sys­tem was run­ning smooth­ly, I emailed Steve about opti­miz­ing it for Google. There were two parts to this: hav­ing the books show up (Steve) and link­ing them in such a way that Google would index them prop­er­ly (me). It took awhile to get ito all work­ing but on Decem­ber 17, 2003 Google came through and indexed the site.

The most vis­it­ed pages are the intro­duc­to­ry ones:

  • Wel­come to Quakerism
  • Becom­ing a Member
  • Basics for Everyone

The search phras­es that are bring­ing in vis­i­tors used to be gener­ic (“quak­er book­store”) they now are very spe­cif­ic. Sep­tem­ber’s list is typical:

  • crash by jer­ry spinnelli
  • Andrew Goldswor­thy
  • cel­e­bra­tion of discipline
  • the mis­fits by james howe
  • rufus jones

I knew we’d show up high in the Google rank­ings for obscure books but I’ve been pleased that we’re right up there with Ama­zon and Barnes and Noble even with main­stream books.

Our online best sell­ers are pretty

  • Ground­ed in God: Care And Nur­ture In Friends Meetings
  • Friends for 350 Years
  • The Quak­er Way
  • Philadel­phia Faith and Practice
  • Lis­ten­ing Spir­i­tu­al­i­ty Vol­ume 1
  • Silence and Witness
  • The Jour­nal of George Fox

The book­store inven­to­ry soft­ware is not very good at pulling mar­ket­ing sta­tis­tics. While it’s very good at telling us what books have sold and what books need to be reordered, it won’t tal­ly up things by type of sale (phone vs. web vs. mail-order). The book­store report should include more infor­ma­tion on actu­al web sales.

Anec­do­tal­ly it appears as if about half our web orders are new cus­tomers. Many of them are from geo­graph­ic areas which are not tra­di­tion­al­ly Quak­er. A&O has pro­duced a fly­er which goes into orders for new customers.

Quak​erfind​er​.org

blankAfter we saw how suc­cess­ful the “googliza­tion” of Quaker­books was, I thought we should try it for Quak­erfind­er. It took a lit­tle sea­son­ing to get every­one on A&O to sign off on the project but I am delight­ed to say they saw their way clear. The result has been noth­ing sort of amaz­ing. Use of the site has grown by 340%. But the actu­al num­bers are even more impor­tant: by my best esti­mate, over 6000 a month are using Quak­erfind­er who would not have even found the resource if we had­n’t made it search engine friend­ly. That’s 72,000 peo­ple a year – twice FGC’s mem­ber­ship, and these are the EXTRA peo­ple com­ing. Alto­geth­er at our cur­rent rate, this site is being used by over 100,000 unique vis­i­tors. Even if only one in ten of them make it to a Meet­ing, that’s a lot of people.

In last year’s report I point­ed out that most of Quak­erfind­er’s traf­fic was com­ing from the FGC site. At that point, it did­n’t look­ing like giv­ing the loca­tion look-up util­i­ty it’s own domain name was pay­ing off in any tan­gi­ble way. Now it’s clear­ly worth it. Just the extra 600 or so vis­i­tors Quak­erfind­er is throw­ing to FGCQUaker​.org site makes it worth it! Horray!

blankTwen­ty Times the Google-Linked Vis­its: I com­pared two typ­i­cal months, one before and the oth­er after the “search engine opti­miza­tion.” In May 2004 Quak­erfind­er received 241 vis­i­tors from Google search­es (foot­note 1). In Sep­tem­ber, it received 3813 vis­i­tors – that’s over twen­ty times the vis­its. Over­all vis­its almost tripled, from 2292 to 6037, with 60% of those extra vis­i­tors direct­ly attrib­uted to the Google bounce. The chart to the left shows dai­ly Google-referred vis­its since the mid­dle of March.

More Than Just Google: Oth­er search engines were affect­ed too: all togeth­er search engine vis­its went from from 311 in May to 4134 in Sep­tem­ber. For those inter­est­ed, the top five search engines for Quak­erfind­er traf­fic are:

  • Google​.com 83%
  • AOL: 5%
  • Google Cana­da: 3%
  • Yahoo: 1%
  • Com­cast: 0.8%

As you can see, Google far over­whelms every­one else, which is why we often just call this “the googliza­tion” of Quakerfinder!


Part 6, Miscellaneous and Notes

Miscellaneous

Mail­ing Lists

Late in the fis­cal year, we pur­chased bulk email soft­ware. No, we’re not going to try to sell Via­gra or a new home mort­gage. This pro­gram will help us get infor­ma­tion out to our book­store cus­tomers and com­mit­tee lists. Our occa­sion­al book­store emails (“Book Mus­ings from Lucy”) have been very well received, with only a tiny frac­tion of recip­i­ents ask­ing to be tak­en off the list.

Web Host Changes

A big project, though not very excit­ing, is that we’re chang­ing our web host­ing com­pa­ny. FGCQuak​er​.org is with the new com­pa­ny (OLM) and Quak​erfind​er​.org and Quaker​books​.org will be mov­ing short­ly. The new com­pa­ny orga­nizes our accounts bet­ter and we hope that their ser­vice is bet­ter. (We’d rec­om­mend avoid­ing Data Realm also known as Serve​.com.)

Notes

Pro­grams I Use to Col­lect Stats:

  • For over­all num­bers, I used a extremely-common pro­gram called Webal­iz­er, which gives use­ful month­ly summaries.
  • For details I used a pro­gram called AXS Vis­i­tor Track­ing Pro­gram, which lets me watch indi­vid­ual users as they nav­i­gate the site. With AXS I can also get details on where vis­i­tors to spe­cif­ic pages come from.
  • I have a list of key words which I watch on Google; every few weeks
    I record where our sites stand on those phras­es and watch how
    nav­i­ga­tion­al changes I make affect our Google rankings.
  • I also use Google to see what oth­er web­sites are link­ing to us. I
    look at what they link to (often not our home­page) and how many sites
    there are linking.
  • I also fol­low links using more spe­cif­ic search engines such as Tech­no­rati, which index­es blogs (“web blogs” or per­son­al diary-like sites).

Mea­sur­ing Links:

I use Altavis­ta’s search engine to mea­sure how many links a site has. For good rea­sons, Google does­n’t list obscure web­sites and also counts how a site’s links back to itself. Here’s a sam­ple Altavista query:

link:www.fgcquaker.org/ ‑site:www.fgcquaker.org
See How Can We Mea­sure the State of the Peace Move­ment? for more on this method of measurement.

Unique Vis­i­tors:

The most stan­dard mea­sure of web­site usage, here is a def­i­n­i­tion: “A real vis­i­tor to a web site. Web servers record the IP address­es of each vis­i­tor, and this is used to deter­mine the num­ber of real peo­ple who have vis­it­ed a web site. If for exam­ple, some­one vis­its twen­ty pages with­in a web site, the serv­er will count only one unique vis­i­tor (because the page access­es are all asso­ci­at­ed with the same IP address) but twen­ty page accesses.”

We Quakers should be cooler than the Sweat Lodge

July 5, 2004

I have just come back from a “Meet­ing for Lis­ten­ing for Sweat Lodge Con­cerns,” described as “an oppor­tu­ni­ty for per­sons to express their feel­ings in a wor­ship­ful man­ner about the can­cel­la­tion of the FGC Gath­er­ing sweat lodge work­shop this year.” Non-Quakers read­ing this blog might be sur­prised to hear that Friends Gen­er­al Con­fer­ence holds sweat lodges, but it has and they’ve been increas­ing­ly con­tro­ver­sial. This year’s work­shop was can­celled after FGC received a very strong­ly word­ed com­plaint from the Wampanoag Native Amer­i­can tribe. Today’s meet­ing intend­ed to lis­ten to the feel­ings and con­cerns of all FGC Friends involved and was clerked by the very-able Arthur Larrabee. There was pow­er­ful min­istry, some pre­dictable “min­istry” and one stun­ning mes­sage from a white Friend who dis­missed the very exis­tance of racism in the world (it’s just a illu­sion, the peo­ple respon­si­ble for it are those who per­ceive it).

I’ve had my own run-in’s with the sweat lodge, most unfor­get­tably when I was the co-planning clerk of the 2002 Adult Young Friends pro­gram at FGC (a few of us thought it was inap­pro­pri­ate to trans­fer a por­tion of the rather small AYF bud­get to the sweat lodge work­shop, a request made with the argu­ment that so many high-school and twenty-something Friends were attend­ing it). But I find myself increas­ing­ly uncon­cerned about the lodge. It’s clear to me now that it part of anoth­er tra­di­tion than I am. It is not the kind of Quak­er I am. The ques­tion remain­ing is whether an orga­ni­za­tion that will spon­sor it is a dif­fer­ent tradition.

How did Lib­er­al Friends get to the place where most our our younger mem­bers con­sid­er the sweat lodge cer­e­mo­ny to be the high point of their Quak­er expe­ri­ence? The sweat lodge has giv­en a gen­er­a­tion of younger Friends an oppor­tu­ni­ty to com­mune with the divine in a way that their meet­ings do not. It has giv­en them men­tor­ship and lead­er­ship expe­ri­ences which they do not receive from the old­er Friends estab­lish­ment. It has giv­en them a sense of iden­ti­ty and pur­pose which they don’t get from their meet­ing “com­mu­ni­ty.”

I don’t care about ban­ning the work­shop. That does­n’t address the real prob­lems. I want to get to the point where younger Friends look at the sweat and won­der why they’d want to spend a week with some  white Quak­er guy who won­ders aloud in pub­lic whether he’s “a Quak­er or an Indi­an” (could we have a third choice?). I’ve always thought this was just rather embar­rass­ing.  I want the sweat lodge to with­er away in recog­ni­tion of it’s inher­ent ridicu­lous­ness. I want younger Friends to get a taste of the divine love and char­i­ty that Friends have found for 350 years. We’re sim­ply cool­er than the sweat lodge.

* * * *

And what real­ly is the sweat lodge all about? I don’t real­ly buy the cul­tur­al appro­pri­a­tion cri­tique (the offi­cial par­ty line for can­cel­ing it argues that it’s racist). Read founder George Price’s Friends Jour­nal arti­cle on the sweat lodge and you’ll see that he’s part of a long-standing tra­di­tion. For two hun­dred years, Native Amer­i­cans have been used as myth­ic cov­er for thin­ly dis­guised European-American philoso­phies. The Boston pro­test­ers who staged the famous tea par­ty all dressed up as Indi­ans, play­ing out an emerg­ing mythol­o­gy of the Amer­i­can rebels as spir­i­tu­al heirs to Indi­ans (long dri­ven out of the Boston area by that time). In 1826, James Fen­i­more Coop­er turned that myth into one of the first pieces of clas­sic Amer­i­can lit­er­a­ture with a sto­ry about the “Last” of the Mohi­cans. At the turn of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, the new boy scout move­ment claimed that their fit­ness and social­iza­tion sys­tem was real­ly a re-application of Native Amer­i­can train­ing and ini­ti­a­tion rites. Quak­ers got into the game too: the South Jer­sey and Bucks Coun­ty sum­mer camps they found­ed in the nineteen-teens were full of Native Amer­i­can motifs, with cab­ins and lakes named after dif­fer­ent tribes and the chil­dren encour­aged to play along.

Set in this con­text, George Price is clear­ly just the lat­est white guy to claim that only the spir­it of pur­er Native Amer­i­cans will save us from our Old World Euro­pean stodgi­ness. Yes, it’s appro­pri­a­tion I guess, but it’s so trans­par­ent and clas­si­cal­ly Amer­i­can that our favorite song “Yan­kee Doo­dle” is a British wartime send-up of the impulse. We’ve been stick­ing feath­ers in our caps since forever.

In the Friends Jour­nal arti­cle, it’s clear the Quak­er sweat lodge owes more to the Euro­pean psy­chother­a­py of Karl Jung than Chief Ock­an­ick­on. It’s all about “lim­i­nal­i­ty” and ini­ti­a­tion into myth­ic arche­types, fea­tur­ing cribbed lan­guage from Vic­tor Turn­er, the anthro­pol­o­gist who was very pop­u­lar cir­ca 1974. Price is clear but nev­er explic­it about his work: his sweat lodge is Jun­gian psy­chol­o­gy over­laid onto the out­ward form of a Native Amer­i­can sweat­lodge. In ret­ro­spect it’s no sur­prise that a birthright Philadel­phia Friend in a tired year­ly meet­ing would try to com­bine trendy Euro­pean pop psy­chol­o­gy with Quak­er sum­mer camp them­ing. What is a sur­prise (or should be a sur­prise) is that Friends would spon­sor and pub­lish arti­cles about a “Quak­er Sweat Lodges” with­out chal­leng­ing the author to spell out the Quak­er con­tri­bu­tion to a pro­grammed rit­u­al con­duct­ed in a con­se­crat­ed teepee steeplehouse.

(Push the influ­ences a lit­tle more, and you’ll find that Vic­tor Turn­er’s anthro­po­log­i­cal find­ings among obscure African tribes arguably owes as much to his Catholi­cism than it does the facts on the ground. More than one Quak­er wit has com­pared the sweat lodge to Catholic mass; well: Turn­er’s your miss­ing philo­soph­i­cal link.)

* * * *

Yes­ter­day I had some good con­ver­sa­tion about gen­er­a­tional issues in Quak­erism. I’m cer­tain­ly not the only thirty-something that feels invis­i­ble in the bull­doz­er of baby boomer assump­tions about our spir­i­tu­al­i­ty. I’m also not the only one get­ting to the point where we’re just going to be Quak­er despite the Quak­er insti­tu­tions and cul­ture. I think the ques­tion we’re all grap­pling with now is how we relate to the insti­tu­tions that ignore us and dis­miss our cries of alarm for what we Friends have become.

Plain Quaker Dressing at FGC

July 3, 2004

blankAs we got onto the cam­pus of UMass Amherst to help set up for this year’s FGC Gath­er­ing, Julie & I real­ized that this is the first time we’ve been to this venue since we start­ed plain dress­ing (last year we stayed home since Julie was very preg­nant). FGC Friends tend to turn to the Lands End cat­a­log for sar­to­r­i­al inspi­ra­tion. Hip­pie cul­ture is anoth­er font, both direct­ly as tie-die shirts and in mut­ed form as the taste­ful fair-trade clothes that many old­er Friends pre­fer. Because the Gath­er­ing takes place in July and in spo­rad­i­cal­ly air-conditioned build­ings, peo­ple also dress for sum­mer camp – kha­ki shorts & once col­or­ful fad­ed t‑shirts are the de fac­to Gath­er­ing uni­form. In this set­ting, just wear­ing long pants is cause for com­ment (“aren’t you hot like that?!”) Try broad­falls and a long-sleeve col­lar­less shirt, or a long dress!

So I’ve decid­ed to write down all the con­ver­sa­tions or ques­tions I get about my dress this week. I should men­tion that I actu­al­ly pre­fer curi­ous ques­tions to the strange star­ing I some­times get. So here we go:

  • While ring­ing up a Gath­er­ing store order: some­one I’ve known for years asked me whether my cloth­ing was “a the­o­log­i­cal state­ment or if it was just comfortable.”
  • While trou­bleshoot­ing the store com­put­ers and answer­ing a cell­phone call from the office: com­pared to a lit­er­ary char­ac­ter named “Cos­mic Pos­sum,” who was described to me as some­one able to seem­less­ly live in both the past and mod­ern world (at the time the ref­er­ence was made I was work­ing two com­put­ers and tak­ing a cell phone call.
  • Walk­ing by the din­ing hall, an old­er Friend called out “Looks good!” I said “Huh?”, he replied “that’s a good outfit!”

Mon­day:

  • “Nice out­fit” again, this time from Nils P. As soon as he said it I warned him that I was keep­ing this log and that he should expect to see him­self in it.
  • I talked a lit­tle bit about dress with a friend from Bal­ti­more Year­ly Meet­ing, a gay Friend involved with FLGCQBC who is iden­ti­fy­ing more and more as con­ser­v­a­tive and think­ing about going plain. One con­cern he raised was avoid­ing sweat­shop labor. (I point­ed out that plain dress is a cot­tage indus­try and that the seam­stress­es are usu­al­ly local and believ­ers.) He also does­n’t want to look “like a farmer” as he walks around the city of Bal­ti­more. (I talked about how I have lim­its as to how plain I go and don’t want this to be a his­tor­i­cal out­fit but one which peo­ple might actu­al­ly be able to see them­selves adopt­ing. I also talked about how I still want to iden­ti­fy on some lev­el with urban anar­chist cul­ture, which has a sort of plain aesthetic.)

Tues­day:

  • An extend­ed con­ver­sa­tion with a book­store cus­tomer from Cal­i­for­nia. She began by ask­ing if I’m doing plain dress for the same rea­sons as anoth­er plain dress­er here, who I’ve seen but not met yet. We began talk­ing about moti­va­tions and what it’s like and how it is for women, espe­cial­ly who lead active lives. I talked about my wife’s Julie’s prac­tice, which includes leo­tards when she’s work­ing at a gym­nas­tics coach. We also talked about dif­fer­ent kinds of Quak­er­sIt was a great conversation.
  • While sit­ting on a book­store couch blog­ging: “You’re look­ing very dis­tin­guished here, with facial hair and susspenders. Is this what mar­ried life does? You’re look­ing very Quak­er­ly. Does thee also have a hat?”

Wednes­day

  • I spent sick most­ly in bed…
  • I did have a brief, fever-fed con­ver­sa­tion with some of the oth­er plain dress­ing youths and soon-to-be plain dress­ing youth. It’s not about dress, but about being Quak­er and about how we live as Friends.

Thurs­day:

  • I had an extend­ed con­ver­sa­tion with a cou­ple who run the Equal Exchange table about plain dress, Gohn Broth­ers cat­a­log and avoid­ing sweatshop-made cloth­ing for union-made cloth­ing. There’s a lot of peo­ple inter­est­ed in this and the issues real­ly con­nect with sim­plic­i­ty and jus­tice issues.