Thu 30 Mar 2006
Here’s an excerpt from my email thread yesterday.
From: Jerry Hertzler
Sent: Wednesday, March 29, 2006 5:44 PM
To: Brian Alex Dorsey Larry
Cc: Tom Mark
Subject: 300 responses from GodLovesRussia.com this month!
Earlier this month (March) Mark and Mike began using Google’s program to display ads for www.GodLovesRussia.com on other popular Russian language websites. This resulted in an increase in visits to our site and a 10x increase in responses! During the last five months our site saw about 20 people each month indicate they had trusted Jesus by clicking “Da” [Yes] at the end of the 4 Spiritual Laws page. This month there were 300.
Below is Ella’s description of what the new flood of responses was like.
Yours for the remaining 250 million (or so) Russian speakers,
Jerry
——————————————————————————–
From: Ella
Sent: Wednesday, March 29, 2006 1:21 PM
To: Jerry Hertzler
Subject: Re: I have a question
yes, it is working now. volunteers receive letters. We were indeed overwhelmed with many letters, some of them weren’t easy to answer and we neede time to think and prepare an appropriate answere to someone’s problem. some of these people still keep in touch with us. One girl from Russia even asked Andrey if we can come and visit them (they are in “deep Russia” far from major cities as far as I remember. Some asked us about our work and our testimony. It was about 10 letters per day at time for the two of us. Andrey usually takes care of all “relatively easy” letters and I take care of “heavy stuff” addressed for us.
It may be close to truth that we’ve had around 300 letters.
Ella
—– Original Message —–
From: Jerry Hertzler
To: Tom ; Andrey
Cc: Tom (Eastern Europe)
Sent: Tuesday, March 28, 2006 5:04 PM
Subject: RE: I have a question
Andrey,
Last week you said to Tom that responses from GodLovesRussia.com were not going to your two new volunteers. Is this working now?
The Google ad campaign indicates that over 300 people have clicked “Yes” on GodLovesRussia.com this month.
Have you been seeing an increase in responses this month?
Jerry
March 30th, 2006 at 6:13 pm
Exciting, to say the least! Looking forward to seeing you soon!
Goodness!!! 300 professions in one month!!!!
April 1st, 2006 at 5:26 pm
I later checked our follow up system to see that there were closer to 100 people who filled out our response form. 30% of the people who clicked “Yes” and then filled out our responses form is a great rate as far as I’m concerned. While it felt like 300 to Ella and Andrey, it wasn’t quite that high.
Also, only God knows how many people actually made a sincere decision. Many people click “Yes” to see what comes next. Often they fill out the comment form and indicate what was on their mind.
So at a minimum, a “Yes” click indicates someone considered the gospel, and at best it indicates a true decision. We are learning now how to evaluate what these responses mean. I think the best we can do is put the numbers in context and make sure we explain that these responses “indicate” a decision to trust Christ. We are careful NOT to say that “300 people decided to trust Jesus.” While 300 people may have decided to trust Jesus, we know that it was not the most likely case. Nevertheless, I don’t know any other way to express the response from the site than to say that many indicated a decision to trust Jesus.
Either way the response is great to see. People want a relationship with God!