June 11, 2019 

Friends,

Ah, the summer days. An opportunity to slow down and catch one's breath. To go fishing in the afternoons. To just...chill. For others maybe, because we have a ton of work!

But we also have life and work balance. Which is why during these months the newsletter is coming out every three weeks. And why I have some vacation time coming up. But worry not, we also have some interesting stuff going on.

Spin Church experiment closes
If we judge something a success or a failure only by the prescribed outcome we were seeking at the start, then I think this was one that we tried and it simply did not work. We know … 

• That 26,799 people saw the Facebook ads,
• Those people are 86% women and 14% men,
• They saw those ads a total of 160,671 times,
• And that 1,176 of those people took action from those ads.
• That’s a click-through rate of 1.40 which is more than 3x the Facebook benchmark for “well-performing” campaigns.
• However, only 9 people signed up to attend Spin Church over the campaign, and
• None went to the class.

My thinking is that people’s curiosity is piqued when they saw the Spin Church ad and they are curious. So they clicked-through and went to the website. And nine folks were brave enough to sign up. But when it came down to it, they didn’t go. Not half didn’t go...a full 100% didn’t go! 
 
I think what we found here is that those who are getting their spirituality from fitness are going to keep getting that spirituality from THE WAY THEY CURRENTLY DO  and something new is just not of interest. (So maybe having a Christian spin studio where the Christian message is just part of the DNA of every class might work.) For those to whom this was a “curiosity” thing, it just wasn’t of enough value in the end.
 
We could iterate and try to save something from this, but I don’t know that we have a reason to do so. Even if we were able to get people to actually go to a class, my guess is that they would simply go for a few and then stop.  
 
So, I think that in the end, it was a “cool” idea but there was no there, there. But there is a lesson here: engage potential users in the development cycle. And you can bet that this will be a way we do more things going forward. 

As always, stay tuned! 

With gratitude, 
Fr. Lorenzo

Father Lorenzo and Deacon Chris Cassels leading the Eucharistic prayer at SpincChurch in Newport, RI on May 11, 2019. ​

Friends,

Greetings from New York City! I am here for some General Theological Seminary events and several meetings this week. This past weekend I had the privilege of being present at SpinChurch in Newport, RI and of preaching to the great people of the partner congregation there, Emmanuel Episcopal Church. 

About the SpinChurch experiment, the devil, as they say, is in the details. The experiment is working pretty much as we planned it. But although our advertising on Facebook got us 15,300 views and we can confirm that 325 went to our landing page, none of those people came to the class. (Those who were there are mostly friends of the partner church.) So what gives?

A little further exploration showed the problem was that once we captured the attention and got people to the page, we then did not lead people to register. (We had no way for people to register there. It required a few more steps that were complicated, at best.) And so, we got to work on that. And now when people follow the ads, it will be easier to know what SpinChurch is and how to participate. 

It's a little detail that we didn't think through because we ourselves did not have to register each week. But a small detail did not allow any of the 325 people who took the effort to come and learn more to join us. Learn, adjust, try again. ​