Muslim Group Gets Ministry Program Dropped

Well, it's begun.

A Christian television ministry program has been dropped from a CBS affiliate in Tampa because of complaints from CAIR, The Council for American-Islamic Relations.

The "Live Prayer with Bill Keller" program ran afoul of the pressure group by labeling Islam a "false relgiion" and suggesting that Islam is about "hate, lies and death."

Naturally, CAIR is using the spectre of potential "hate crimes" to justify its concern:

"It is our belief that anti-Islamic rhetoric like that used in 'Live Prayer with Bill Keller' is exactly the type of language that is likely to incite hate crimes against the American Muslim community," the letter said.

World Net Daily has the whole story.

Optimizing Your Landing Page

Via the good folks over at Target Marketing. . .

(Note: These tips are oriented toward online retailers but the principles can be adapted to ministries.)

3 Ways to Boost Landing Page Conversion

1. Brand. Reinforce your brand through visual elements, company history and credibility, and other pertinent customer service information, such as your toll-free number and guarantee. This makes for a risk-free shopping experience and gives browsers the confidence to become buyers.

2. Prioritize. Note top sellers and feature products, or call out sale items. Icons can be a valuable visual aid for callouts. By singling out specific products and promotions, you can direct shoppers to appropriate merchandise based on your strategic goals, inventory, sales and potential ROI.

3. Sort. Enable visitors to sort selections based on attributes important to your category. According to our 9th Annual Mystery Shopping Study, in which 100 big-name merchants were mystery shopped online, landing page sorts are a good way to convert visitors. Seventy-eight of the 100 merchants surveyed used landing page sorts.

Read the whole thing .

Editor's Note

The proud papa is none other than Chris Selby of Derek Prince Ministries and a contributer to the Hangar.

Proud Papa

There about a million things about my son that make me proud. Not proud in a "my son is better than your's" way, more of a "my son is far better than your's and it isn't even close" kinda way. I like him. He's great. And now, I will use all the powers of all the Internets to toot his proverbial horn (was there really a proverb about a tooted horn?).

My 10-year old son's dream is to play professional football. It is the same dream a lot of kids have. Along with firemen and police officers, professional athletes are the pinnacle of what most young boys hope to become. Last year (after making him endure 3 seasons of soccer first), my wife and I agreed to let Wes finally launch into football. We were stunned. He is great. He isn't just good, or even really good. He is great. He is a natural athlete and a gifted football player. He played half back for his team last season and averaged over 12 yards per carry, including a 45-yard run on his first carry in his first game and a 60-yard kickoff return to setup the winning touchdown in their last game of the year. It was exciting to say the least. Last season ended far too quickly and the spring and summer have been grueling waiting for season 2 to begin. Last week (after 2 weeks of team drills and practice) his new coach held tryouts for various skill positions on the team and Wes was once again named the team's starting half back. That night after practice was emotional for all of us. He is working so hard to achieve his goals and the encouragement we all felt was overwhelming. You see, he didn't ask to try out for half back. I didn't whisper in the coach’s ear about his success from last season and this coach had never seen him play. His hustle just paid off.

I don't know what the future will hold for Wes. God could have anything in store for him and in the end that's all I really care about. But I have no reason to believe that if Wes continues to work this hard and stay this committed that he won't make it all the way to the NFL. But regardless of his outcome, this past week my son learned a major lesson about hard work and what it means to earn something. Nothing could make me prouder.

Taking Your Ministry Email to the Next Level

So you're now getting emails out to your donor file with some regularity. Good! You're even making sure they comform to best practices so as to not get mis-labled as spam--so your messages are getting delivered. Even better!

What can you do now to make sure they're as effective as possible?

Spencer Kollas over at iMedia Connection has some good suggestions centering on personalization and design. Have a look!

The Apple of My Eye?

My flight home from Richmond, Virginia, is bitter-sweet. For today I write my final Hangar post.

Well, it’s my last one using a laptop PC.

What a long journey it has been. It seems like only yesterday that I got my first computer. It was a glistening, white Commodore 128 (which was a significant step up from the Commodore 64).

With it, I entered the personal computer world with a built-in keyboard, lightning-quick 600 baud (bytes per second) speed modem and a beautiful monochrome monitor (although it was more like a black and white security television). It came with a version of the Basic programming language and with it I could write awesome applications such as an alarm clock and calculator!

Wow.

Then I moved into the PC world with an IBM PC XT “clone” which looked something like this:

This powerhouse came complete with an 8 bit processor churning out the answers at the blinding speed of 4.77 MHz (close to 6 MHz in “Turbo” mode!), had a beautiful amber screen monitor and a modem that boasted connection speeds of nearly 1200 baud. It came with Microsoft DOS calculator and alarm clock software, so I no longer had to create my own!

I was truly computing in style.

And then came Dell.

With an amazing array of choices (including a color monitor) and this thing called “Ethernet,” how could you go wrong? It had Windows! Over the years, we've had about 14 Dell Desktops and laptops. Needless to say, I’ve been a faithful Dell PC man ever since.

Until now.

This week there was a dramatic change in the computing force at Holland|Simpson.

We’ve taken a byte of the Apple with the delivery of our Mac Book Pro 17” HD laptops this week… each with its own glistening, white-backlit keyboard. They came while David and I visited Faith Landmarks Ministries in Richmond. During a pre-production meeting this past Thursday, I received this instant message from Brent Evans: “The Mac’s are coming today!!!!!”

I found it difficult to focus.

Of course, I’ll miss the (presumably patented) PC “blue screen of death” (although Mac has its own “beach ball of doom”), the thrice-weekly re-boot ceremony, the always helpful Microsoft Error Reports that follow a software crash and those constant threats of virus-born disease, but it’s time to move on. And we are not alone! Even long-time PC computer commentator and analyst John Dvorak took the plunge and reported that the water is fine.

Actually, for an old PC guy, the new Mac’s aren’t really that much of a risk. After all, I can awaken this beauty’s Intel processor as a PC. For example, I routinely use Adobe’s Audition 2.0 for some of our audio work in the field. (It’s a PC-only application and Adobe has no plan to offer it for the Mac.) That is not a problem for me, though, because I’m toting a double-barreled, willing-to-be-a-PC-if-you-so-deem Mac.

Options… now that’s what I’m talking about!

Of course, Virgil Lynn (our resident Art Director and long-time Mac maven) has vigorously extolled the virtues of the Mac for years. Likewise, many of my Pro Tools toting friends have likewise mumbled the Mac mantra under their breath anytime I would mention Pro Tools for Windows XP. So, the pressure has been on for quite some time now. But with Apple’s clever decision to create a machine that would run XP based programs all my fears fell away.

So off we go… into the promise of enlightened Mac-puting. We’ll see how it goes.

Review, Rethink and Retool

A recent study predicts that by 2011, spending on Internet advertising will surpass newspapers to become the nation's leading ad medium. So, it appears that we have another indicator of the increasing rate of radical change for traditional media. As I like to say, it's a great time to be a programmer.

But with audience consumption habits changing, what kind of program will be the right kind of program to take advantage of this change? That is a question we ask ourselves every single day. We are constantly exploring ways to get the messages of those we serve delivered more powerfully and more efficiently. Part of that exploration includes a close examination of the vehicles that their messages ride. (More on that in future posts.)

One expanding area is Internet Radio. In a recent Hangar post, we reported that the future looks bright. There are more than 8,000 Internet radio stations around the world. Of course, many are poorly programmed and sound awful. Still, the audience is growing and the Internet is slowly cutting its copper tether and soon ubiquitous wireless Internet service will be here.

Already, there are a number of standalone devices that will permit you to “tune” into any station on the net.

Of course, the future isn’t limited to audio delivery. The iPhone (warts and all) and the like devices that will follow will do their part to accelerate the rate of change for video delivery. Time will tell.

The Korean Missionaries in Afghanistan: The Bigger Picture

Millions of believers around the world continue to pray for the 23 Christian missionaries from South Korea that are being held captive by Taliban terrorists in Afghanistan—this, amid the news that two of them, including a pastor, have been executed.

This group is very much like the short-term medical missions groups that my home church sends out with some frequency. Of course those groups usually head for spots such as Jamaica, Honduras or Guatamala—not Afghanistan.

The Wall Street Journal ran an interesting article on the growing numbers of Christian missionaries coming out of Asia these days. One key paragraph said:

"Although only about 30% of South Korea's 49 million citizens are Christian, the country is second only to the U.S. in the number of missionaries it sends abroad. As of last year, 16,600 Korean missionaries were stationed in 173 countries."

It's an eye-opening story. Read the whole thing here.

Robin Roberts

You have undoubtedly heard that ABC's Good Morning America host Robin Roberts has been diagnosed with breast cancer.

What you may not know is she has been more outspoken about her faith in God. Our good friend, Scott Ross, interviewed her not too long ago for CBN's 700 Club.

Take a moment to watch Scott's report here.

Media Alert!

Our friend and colleague, Stephen Mansfield, will be on Michael Medved's radio program this afternoon in the 3 o'clock hour talking about his new book, Ten Tortured Words .

Stephen is the host of Derek Prince Legacy Radio which it is our privilege to help produce.

So Long, Tom

One of television’s pioneers has died.

When I was an RTV student during my sophomore (or maybe junior) year at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, I had the opportunity of my life. Being the exuberant, budding broadcaster, I called NBC, New York and asked if I could “drop by” and watch the production of my favorite late night program, “Tomorrow.”

After a number of letters and calls, an associate producer, Lattice Richards, finally worked it out for me to visit. You have to understand… my first job (after mowing lawns) was working at the local radio station. And at Ohio University, I was on the fast-track toward being a student staff member at their PBS station, WOUB. I loved broadcasting and the notion of this small-town Ohio boy going to the big Apple and participating in a network television program was way too cool!

Somehow, I managed to get to New York and was headed to mid-town Manhattan. I was told to come to 30 Rockefeller Plaza, enter the main door and check in with the security guard.

So, at 7pm (I think) I proudly walked into 30 Rock, waltzed up to the security officer and said: “Hello, I’m Jon Simpson and I’m scheduled to observe the Tomorrow show.”

There was an eternal pause as the officer s-l-o-w-l-y looked over the log book.

“Ok,” he said gesturing to one of the group of elevators, “Take one of those up to the 8th floor and follow the signs.”

“Thank you!” I squeaked.

There I was… pressing the “UP” button on a real network television elevator and about to go into a real network television studio to watch the production of a real network television show!

The doors opened. I glided in and calmly pressed the “8” button, all the while working to not flop-sweat through my shirt as the doors closed and the elevator began to move. In a few moments, the elevator stopped on the 7th floor and a very tall man with tissues tucked in the neck of his shirt got on board. I looked up and was immediately gobsmacked (although, at that time, I didn’t really have that British word in my vocabulary). It was Tom.

Tom Snyder was standing beside me! Where was his bodyguard? Where was the script girl? Why would they expose this legend to potential harm from a small-town Ohio college boy?

After trading cordial greetings we rode up one floor and exited the network television elevator.

“Are you here to see the show?” the legend asked?

“Yes.” I squeaked.

“Great. Enjoy the show,” and off he went.

About that time, whilst standing transfixed, Ms. Richards walked up, introduced herself and escorted me into studio 8H (which is, of course, the legendary studio that Saturday Night Live now occupies and has for most of its 32 years.) I was about to cling to the studio's back when Ms. Richards pointed to the door to the control room and we entered.

Dude... the control room.

I took my seat at the producer’s desk (oh man, the NBC TV Producer’s Desk in Studio 8H) and stared at the wonderful wall of glass monitors. Lots of people were doing lots of things, but it wasn’t the “madhouse” I expected.

Before long, the calm chaos converted into quiet focus and the show started. They taped at 9:00 pm for playback at 1:00 am Eastern. Soon, the tape was rolling and the show was on.

Let’s just say I wasn’t there for one of Tom’s most engaging programs. It wasn’t Kiss, nor John Lennon, nor Charles Manson or anyone that you’d recognize. In fact… I can’t even remember. What I do recall was watching a masterful broadcaster comfortably and confidently work his craft and loving it all the way.

When the show ended, there were no "high-fives" or shouts. The wall of glass went dark and the control room crew took off their headsets. Ms. Richards asked me what I thought of the program.

"It was great!" I squeaked.

As I left the control room I saw the legend getting on the elevator. As he got in, he looked my way and gave a quick nod of the head.

"Dang," I thought, "Tom said goodbye to me."

Tom Snyder was the kind of guy that did anything he could to get into a TV or Radio station as a boy. I think that’s why he took a moment to make the little geek visitor feel at home. Perhaps he saw a future broadcaster. All I know is that it was one of the most memorable experiences I’ve had.

His network of so many years, NBC, bade him a fond farewell (though you'll have to suffer through an ad first to watch it).

So, thank you Tom. Godspeed and I sincerely pray I get a moment to interview you one day in Heaven.