Breaking news and seasonal events

In a world full of excitement and tragedy, web-pages on breaking news issues can be very popular. We can use the Bridge Strategy around such issues in different ways:

• a purely factual page about a matter of interest, which may lead people into the rest of the site.
• specific comment on a story with an evangelistic focus, extracting a message or parallel from the situation in a sensitive way
• a tribute page to a famous person in the news – particularly someone who has recently died.

A number of Christian ministries created evangelistic pages after the Space Shuttle Tragedy in January 2003: for instance Leadership University quickly created a range of links, and ATS immediately published a tract.

Tribute pages based on the lives of Princess Diana and Mother Teresa were very effective at that time, and were able to lead seamlessly on into issues of grief, bereavement, and faith. A whole evangelistic site could be built up around the lives of famous people, past or present. Parallels could be drawn from their actions, writings, sayings, speeches, etc.

Evangelist Ron Hutchcraft frequently adds current news comment to the ministry site.

John Edmiston writes:

"Actually I think the web is built by techies but run by journalists. The person who "wins" on the web is the person who can write a brilliant 800-word article on a topic of high interest and gets it online and in the search engines before anyone else can. When I was doing Eternity Online Magazine back in 1995-98, my big moments were always when I caught the wave about a cult, or the cloning of Dolly the Sheep, or UFOs; and wrote a timely Christian response within 48 hours. The hits go through the roof."

Global Change "Dr Dixon lives in the year 2010 and sees tomorrow as history". The Global Change site is a quite remarkable mind-blowing 18,000 page resource of comment on hundreds of issues that face the world today. It is not directly evangelistic – but it is a site written by a Christian analyst from a Christian worldview, and is hugely influential in the business and political world. As it also promotes Patrick Dixon's availability for conferences and consultations, and his books, it has a twin track function.

Search engines may take weeks to list a new web-page, so where it may be possible to anticipate a future news event to some extent, and perhaps create a brief 'holding page' on the topic, you have a head start in the search engines when a story really breaks.

Correct targeting

Breaking news pages, if they are to be evangelistic, must be written primarily for non-Christians. There are thousands of comment pages which interpret the news for Christians, but these are not, in the main, accessible or indeed of any interest to non-Christians. Outreach pages should occupy a high number on the X-Spectrum

The seasons of publicity

Throughout the year, there are also topical subjects and special dates that interest people. These too can be used as a bridging introduction to an evangelistic site. Consider building pages around:

• popular festivals - Christmas, Easter, New Year, Valentine's Day
• public holidays - going into their history and inner meaning
• academy awards, BAFTA, Grammies, etc
• events in the sporting calendar
• summer holidays, back to school
• tax filing deadline

If you have pages on your site all year round about any of these topics, they will remain listed on search engines (provided you maintain at least one link to them via a sitemap), then you can reactivate them as the time approaches. Read more on this approach.

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