Digital Missions Project: Reaching People w/ Jesse Carbo

Jesse Carbo, founder of the Digital Missions Project, is with us this week to explore the world of digital outreach and its potential for churches to effectively share the gospel and connect with people in their communities. 

We dive into strategies, tools, and success stories of churches using the Google ad grant to reach thousands of individuals online. Learn how to leverage the power of digital marketing to engage with seekers, build relationships, and share the most important answers to life's questions. Get ready to be inspired and equipped to make a meaningful impact in the digital space. 

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Transcript

Jesse, I got a pretty big introduction for you that I think I got off of somebody where I stopped. I stopped the snot out of you, man, and everything looked clean. There was no there's like, no permanent record. There was no drug convictions.


Welcome to the Elemental Leaders podcast designed to help you grow more effective in your leadership. Visit us at Elemental Group dot org for more resources and free downloads. Welcome to the Elemental Leaders Podcast. My name is Paul Baldwin. I'm your host of this show. I'm here with the infamous Dave Workman. He's our president, a long time pastor all around, swell and handsome guy.

And we are excited to do our interview with Jesse Carbo. With Jesse. Welcome to this show. Hey, guys. Good to be with you. Thanks for having me. Jesse is the founder and lead strategist at the Digital Missions Project. Jesse and his team helped churches with the Google ad grant, and they work to create strategies that allow them to reach people in their community, in their neighborhoods.

Jesse started the digital marketing agency in 2008 to support his family while church planting in Orlando, Florida, and continues to use this knowledge and skills to help effectively help churches. He lives in Miami, Florida, with his wife of 27 years and four kids. He has served as a youth pastor, worship leader, church planner and most recently as an executive pastor of a multi-site church and has served as the executive director of a local church planning network, too.

So Jesse's kind of done it all. And so, Jesse, we're super stoked to have you on this episode. Did I get that intro right? Can you kind of edit that, adjust it, throw anything out? That was a pretty grand intro. That was awesome, Paul. I don't think I could have asked you to write a better intro than what you wrote, so that was awesome.

Oh, I didn't even think about that. I didn't think about that. I should have said God to judge you. That's awesome. Well, listen, before we really jump into what you're doing right now, let's talk about the path that God has taken you. Give us kind of a time lapse history of Jesse Kabul. Sure. Grew up in Miami, Florida.

My parents immigrated from Cuba in the early sixties, and they both got saved during the Jesus movement in the seventies. And they met each other through some church activity and got married, started church planning without realizing what they were doing was church planning. My dad at his core is an evangelist, and so he's like leading people to Jesus left and right and they're doing Bible studies in the home and, you know, churches are forming.

And my dad was a hippie, you know, riding the motorcycle, had the to mentioned mustache, like the whole thing. And he wasn't really into the institution like a true hippie, you know, really kind of like against the man type of thing. And, you know, he started, you know, doing lots of ministry in the local jails and prisons. They started out a drug treatment center for women coming out of jails when I was 17 years old, that was at a camp.

If I'm honest, I was there because I was trying to get away from, you know, my house. I'm 17. I'm trying to, like, get my independence. You know, I'm like a whole summer away from, you know, my family and I can be my own man. And and it was during that summer, you know, really sense like God's spirit was calling me into vocational ministry and I had this internal struggle with the Lord and I was like, Lord, anything but that.

Like, I've seen how difficult, you know, even though a lot of great things have come out of my dad being in ministry, you know, he wasn't part of like a megachurch and had like a six figure salary with a staff, you know, it was raw, it was organic, it was was messy. I just said, Lord, I tell you what, okay, you know, your God, you have authority over my life, but like, I'm not going to pursue it.

But if you bring it to my doorstep, I'll open the door almost in reverse, like we're usually asking God to open the doors. And I'm kind of telling God at 17 years old, in my arrogance, I'll open the door if you bring it to my door. Right. So that was the summer like 1992 and in February of 93 was my senior year of high school.

And I met this girl and I was like, Oh, this is my wife. Like this. This is the girl of my dreams, you know, she is my wife now, by the way. And I followed her to her church. There was this new youth pastor there that summer. I ended up becoming his intern. And I and the Lord, I think, has a sense of humor.

And he says, I just a year ago, he's here for I'm bringing an opportunity to your door. And I answered that I got to be a part of that youth ministry serving as an intern. He ended up leaving to go plan a church I planted with him, which is where I led worship and where I was a youth pastor.

We ended up planting another church in central Florida, and to this day, we're still very close and friends and and that's how I got into ministry. And so, you know, 15 years as a youth pastor, served in church plants and in large kind of mega style churches. And and then around 2006 really felt like the Lord was calling me back to Miami, you know, began to see a need.

And I started asking pastors that I knew here in South Florida where our pastors gathering. And the common answer was nowhere. I just started calling guys and saying, Hey, can I take you to lunch? And like, Yeah, let's go Tuesday, let's go to lunch down here. And and I do sit across the table like, bro, what's up, man?

How are you? What's going on? How can I pray for, you know, pastoring pastors and then, you know, you do that. You do that again and you do that again. You do that for eight years and you look back. And then that network ended up being like 300 plus pastors in the city. So then when you had an event, you said, hey, we're bringing it sets are bringing down version.

We're bringing guys into Miami that had never come to Miami before because Miami is kind of this like place that no, you know, nobody really goes to. It was a no brainer. Like, Yeah, I'll be there. You're asking me to be there. I'll be there. It's really a phenomenal thing because again, you know, I spent eight years in Miami.

And one of the things I learned quickly was a couple of different realities about Miami. The first one is that churches just die there. If you go and plant a church there, it's just going to die. It's a graveyard for churches. The second thing was that churches are a bit territorial or they just don't play well together. It's not that they're rude to each other or antagonistic to each other is that everybody's kind of doing their own thing.

So the fact that you reached across the borders, made a phone call, gave some time, was really just unheard of. Dave I'm listening to Jesse and just I've got like 1800 questions that I want to ask now. Yeah, let me let me jump in here because I'm fascinated, Jesse, that you have this heart for people who are far away from God.

You have a very mischel approach to your life and very pastoral to even to the point of wanting to pastor pastors. So I guess my question is, how did you make the pivot to the whole digital missions project, particularly the Google grant ad piece, which probably most people don't even know that that even exist or what? What's that all about?

So what was it that drove you to make that shift and what keeps you passionate about that now? So some of that is rooted in some real, practical circumstances. In 2008, we decided to move from Palm Beach County to Orlando to plant a church. What I was not paying attention to was that in 2008, there was an economic hurricane about to unfold in the United States.

But in faith or naivete packed our bags and we packed up our three, almost four children and moved to central Florida. And we started planting a church. We quickly realized like things were tough financially. So I called my dad up and at that point, you know, my dad having an entrepreneurial bent, he had launched a business ten years before that that was doing very well.

He says, you know, help me in my business, you know, I want to get this business under his words were on the World Wide Web. You know, I want to get my business on the worldwide Web, you know. He says I'll buy a training course so you can learn how to do this thing called Internet marketing. You know, I watched the course.

I watched all the videos. You know, we got his business, a website, and I started helping as business like, oh, this is awesome. You know, I was at my chiropractor and I asked my contractor, Do you do any Internet marketing? He's like, No, I've been wanting to. I was like, Can I help you? And then one thing led to another.

So then the pressure fundraising as a church planner was like, Okay, I'm not so worried anymore because I could I could feed my family. So that's how I got started in digital marketing, that it was a practical need while I was a church planner. But then the curiosity in me, like I just kept learning and I stayed attached to what was going on out there and I would bring all of that into the church space.

Any church I was at, any ministry I was serving along the way to this day, I was like, What's out there? What's new? How can we leverage this? And then when COVID hits, what happens to all the churches now that they're all digital? And I don't mean online, just like point your camera at the stage, right? Because that's I think what most people think about online ministry is, okay, how do I connect a camera to like YouTube live or Facebook Live, you know, while the pastor preaches.

But we're talking about like even to the point of people going into the metaverse where there's like these little cartoon characters, but it's a live person on the other side of a screen, the keyboard walking around this digital community, but you're actually talking to someone live. You can share the gospel with them. And there are whole church is being planted in the digital metaverse.

So I'm just like learning and discovering and and then we took a sabbatical, post-COVID. And during that time, my dad in the drug treatment center that they had started, they were using the Google ad grant. And he said to me, Hey, why aren't churches using this Google ad grant? I was like, Man, that's a good point. I don't know why.

Like, so we started asking pastors and most pastors that we had talked to had never heard of it. So my dad being, you know, an entrepreneur and kind of a step of faith, we said, let's start something, let's help churches with this. And so, you know, step one was let's get the idea. So we we bought a booth at an exponential regional gathering up in Nashville.

Every pastor that would walk by were like, Hey, have you heard the Google ad, Brad, $10,000 a month to help your church grow. And every pastor, for the most part was like, Nah, I never heard of it. Never heard of it. But before we left, the leaders of exponential. So the vice president happened to be there at that gathering.

He came up to us and he goes, Hey, we have the grant. Would you help us with the Google ad grant managing it within months? You know, we found a Google ad expert. He's a business partner with us now. We built a team. A part of what we do with the elemental group is helping leaders and pastors look around and see what's in front of them.

And how can you use that to advance the Kingdom Initiative? Even something as simple as Google grants, it's really not that simple. I mean, the idea seems simple, but once you get into it, it's a bit cumbersome. As I was getting some information on the Digital Missions project actually came across this description. I believe it was a workshop that you did at the exponential conference.

Let me read it because I think it gives us some context as the most visited website on the planet, Google sees more than 99,000 searches per seconds, and most of these searches never leave the first page. Take Bob, for instance. This is great context. Today, he searched Google for the answer to how can I connect with my teenage son better or Pam?

She asked Google, How can I save my marriage? And then there's Troy, a 15 year old high school student who asserts, How do I get girls to like me? Millions of people every day are looking for answers and the opportunity for the church to meet and answer those searches has never been easier. So people are out there asking questions.

And you're suggesting that the church can now provide answers. You go on to say this. We're going to show you how to create a digital outreach strategy using the Google ad grants so that the most important answer to the most important question is shared with the most amount of people. Can you just be very clear about what you're talking about in that last sentence?

Every Monday with our team, we start by reminding ourselves of our vision, and that three year vision is to help 100 churches share the gospel with 10,000 people online. So that'd be a million people that would receive a gospel story. We have to be missionaries again. We have to go back to the fundamentals of what it means to be a missionary.

And what being a missionary is, is you have to go to where the people are at. You have to build relationships. You have to build trust. You have to learn and understand how to contextualize the gospel. So now let me make it super practical. How can you use the Google grant? Well, Google I ran pays for the Google ads.

If an ad costs five bucks a click and there's 100 people in your city searching for how to grieve, death or any prayer which I need. Prayer is a keyword that people are searching. Thousands of people are searching this all over the country every single month. And so somebody goes to Google, has any prayer. There's a reason why they need and your church is willing to pray for them.

And then you put an ad and they click on it and you receive their prayer request. Now you have an opportunity to engage in a relationship with them that could turn into a gospel presentation or a gospel declaration into their life. But you have to meet them where they're at. You have to engage with them and build trust.

And then you have to contextualize the gospel message based on what's going on. I'll do these calls with church churches. They're like, Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. We need social media marketing. Like, but this isn't social media marketing. This is search engine marketing. The technical term of search engine marketing. This is Internet based marketing. It's as if someone knocks on the door of your house and says, I have a question for you.

At that moment, you have that opportunity because they're wanting to ask you this question. You can answer that question for them as opposed to going to a mall where there's thousands of people and like walking up to strangers and saying, Hey, can I answer this question for you? Because you have no idea that they have that question and you say, I have an answer for you.

And they go, But I wasn't asking that question. Okay, I'm sorry to bother you. Move on. Right. And that's kind of what social media is. You're trusting the algorithms of social media to kind of match you up with people that have similar interests. But with Google ads or Google search, there's intent. Somebody is literally telling you what they need from you and you can meet them where they're at and answer the question.

And so if I have an opportunity to answer someone's life question, challenge, circumstantial issue that they're going through and they're going to Google saying, hey, who out there in Google world can answer this question for me? And they live in my neighborhood. I want to do that because that gives me the opportunity to do what we're called to do, which is to make disciples.

And so that's the beginning of it is here we go, like, let me pray for you. Here's an answer on how to grieve death. And then, you know, through some digital technologies, we can invite them to share their email and we can nurture them through some email campaigns and things like that. And it is a little cumbersome. There's a lot of steps, but conceptually it's a very simple, straightforward idea and Google pays for it.

So it's amazing. Just yesterday, Jesse, I met with a guy who over the years has built a website called Group Bible Study dot com. He has thousands and thousands of people checking out these simple Bible studies all over the world. I mean, yeah, literally every second someone's checking out one of his Bible studies and talking to him about it, he brings up Google AdWords.

I said, How's it working for you and how are you managing that? And he said, exactly that. It is cumbersome. It's a lot more work than I thought, but he does it himself and I could tell that was driving him crazy. So when you come alongside of a church to help them, what part do you do and how do you help them manage that?

You know, we start off by asking, what's the goal? Right. What what is it that you're wanting to accomplish? And I'll use the example of your friend who has the group Bible study. This is why I want to promote this group Bible study. So we'll see what the group Bible studies about and we'll find all the keywords and then we'll go do the research and find out what are people searching online on a regular basis, on a monthly basis that matches with that particular Bible study.

So let's say the Bible studies about relationships or marriage, we'll go find all the keywords on marriage and relationships and then build out a Google ad campaign. And so we can build out the actual website landing page that promotes a Bible study that's connected to the ad and write the ad and all of the copy and then monitor it on a weekly basis to make sure and see how it's going and when it needs to be optimized or updated.

We do that work as well, so it's all the behind the scenes technical stuff to make sure that when someone types in something to Google about relationships or marriage, that Bible study gets promoted and that, you know, one of the one, two, there's usually one, two or three sponsored ads at the top of a Google page. There's some exceptions.

There's like different rules, different things. But that's the goal is that that would get promoted to top. How does that work? What are the costs involved? Because a lot of the churches that we work with, we can tell they have limited resource is. So our costs are broken into two categories. There's two sides of the work. One side of the work is the creation of the landing pages, because it's like the design.

And what we always try to do is match the design of the page to your brand. So we grab your logo, we grab your colors, we grab the font that you use, and we match that particular landing page. But then there's also copy, you know, what are the words that we're putting and the words matter. We can just throw any words.

It's got to be like the right words in the right way. There's some technical back end coding stuff, so there's that side of the work, like the landing page creation, the copy and the integration of some tools. So that when someone does submit their name and email or phone number, we're following up with them. So for example, our our prayer campaign, we have a weekly email that goes out to that person for 100 days, right?

So we integrate that. So there's that side of the work. The other side of the work is the Google ad creation, and that's all within the Google ad dashboard framework. There's descriptions, there's keyword research, there's there's just a bunch of stuff that goes into site creation. There's all these things you have to do and get it right. There's also the Google ad grant has some rules and we you know, we stay in compliance with those rules.

So when you take those two sides, if you only need us to run the Google ads and you have a team that can build landing pages and all that stuff, and it's $500 a month. But if you don't have anybody to create landing pages or your team is maxed out and you want us to do the landing pages and the email creation, all that stuff, and it's $1,000 a month.

That's probably the simplest way to do it. And then people can reach us on digital missions project dot com. One of our goals is to help a thousand nonprofit ministries or churches get the grant, even if they never work with us. The hardest part is starting. Honestly, that's the hardest part is like if you know about it, then it's like, Yeah, but what do I do?

There really is no super clear, comprehensive, simple, step by step. So we created one. We created a video course, five videos each videos, 3 to 4 minutes each. It walks you step by step how to apply for the grant. And we give it away. We give it away. Once you 1000 churches, take this course and apply for the grant.

Then once you have the grant, if you need our help in managing the Google ads, then then our service comes into play. Now, from a business perspective, let's talk our way. So let's say you sign up for the highest tier of $1,000 a month. It's $12,000 a year. What is the average family in your church gives per year?

Right. So if you take that number, let's say it's $5,000 a year that the average family gives in your church. That means that if we can bring three new families to your church who are going to be givers. Right. Because not every new person who shows up to your church ends up being a giver. But if we can bring three new giving families to your church through the work that we do, then it pays for itself.

So there is some business acumen to our process and our thinking and our pricing going. We do believe that by the end of the year we can bring you at least three new families that are going to end up being givers, ultimately pay for what you are investing to see this happen. But however, I would say we resist the notion that this is a strategy to get butts in seats primarily, not ultimately.

Sure. Ultimately, we do want to see online engagement turn into an in-person relationship. We're big fans of incarnation of ministry. However, this has to be approached like a missionary endeavor. So one example I use is this If we decided to do missionary work in the poorest neighborhood of New York City, would you then expect if we go spend a week in the poorest neighborhood of New York City, would you expect those people that you just spent a week with sharing the love of Jesus with?

Would you expect them to show up to your church on Sunday? Of course not. Of course you would not expect them to show up to your church on Sunday. Mentally, we know that there's a difference between like missionary work and then like local church discipleship. And so what we say is that the digital space is a mission field and we have to go to this mission field and reach people with the message of Jesus.

Now, because we can target people locally. Yes, that will turn into some relationships coming online. Do we abandon the call? Do we abandon the opportunity and the responsibility to spread the message not only in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria and around the world? Right. So Acts x18. So today I can do that from my computer here in my office. I can preach the gospel in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria and around the world.

Now I'm all for getting on a plane and going overseas. I think that's important and good. But if Google is going to give me $10,000 a month, then I'm going to go to Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria and around the world digitally to preach the gospel. And that's what we're inviting churches to consider and ministries to consider. That opportunity is available to us to do it now.

Jesse One of the questions that I have been kind of hanging on to here for a few minutes is what's the difference between digital engagement and content delivery? Because a lot of folks would say, hey, as long as we're got the video on the stage, as long as we're getting content out there, then we're doing our part with respect to digital engagement.

But that's not what digital engagement means. Can you tell us the difference between the two? I think because of the context being church, you know, the goal is to do ministry and what we're accustomed to is like inviting people say, and I'll use the platform of like a small group or a community group, you know, let's put everybody in a room and some chairs around a circle.

There's a topic, there's a some scripture to read and there's some questions to ask. And everybody chimes in, and there was this kind of ministry engagement that took place. And yeah, we live in a we live in a different world where sometimes that engagements a little bit slower. Maybe we don't think about it this way because we're so used to it.

But like email is both content delivery and engagement. If I send you an email, I'm sending you content. If you respond, now there's engagement. And so when it comes to marketing, if a pastor creates a bunch of YouTube videos even that are different than his sermons, right? Like just some raw YouTube content or tiktoks or Instagram reels or whatever.

And the reality is, this is where probably some churches need to stop and think and go, why? Why are we doing that? Like, what's the point of doing that? What I would say is you should be doing it because it builds trust and credibility and authority and it provides an onramp for engagement. So content delivery should serve the purpose of building trust and giving people easy ways to engage.

And you've got to have systems and structures for how to follow up with that engagement. Have you ever gone to a Contact US page on any website and hesitated, actually leaving a message because you know intuitively no one's going to get back to me. That's interesting. Like in the business world, you know that to be true. But in the church world, it's it's like 100 times worse.

Like, have you ever called the church office and nobody answered? Or have you ever left a message at a church office and nobody ever called you back? Happens all the time, right? But these are just some practical things to put in place of if you do a good job of creating content. We also need to do the job of figuring out how to have easy on ramps for engagement and then making some, you know, putting some systems in place so that we are actually responding.

We have a technology that allows us that if somebody calls my phone number and I happen to miss the call, it will text them back immediately and say, Hey, I'm sorry that I missed your call. How can I serve you? And then they can text me. Well, I was calling because of this and then I'll get that message back so that when I'm done and I'm available, I can respond to them or call them back.

And so then there's a system in place to optimize the engagement. I think we're missing people. I think we're losing people because there isn't really like good systems and structures in place for engagement. I don't know if I answered your question, but no, absolutely. Jesse Dude, you are a missionary at heart. You are a pastor at heart. You're just a really, really good guy.

We want to introduce as many people as possible to you so how can we get people connected to you? Where do they go to find you? How do they get their hands on some of these free resources to even get that Google grant conversation started? Yeah, I would say go to the website Digital Missions Project icon and they can find us on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, LinkedIn.

They can also find me on social media. Jesse, Jesse Carbo Radio on all social media platforms. They can also email me. Jesse So we at Digital Missions Project dot com, but the link to the free course is right there on the homepage. Digital Missions Project Icon. Jesse Man, we love you, dude. You are immediately a friend of Elemental Group, and we're so grateful that you gave this time to us.

Thanks for doing what you're doing. I'm just absolutely blown away that you've taken a tool that's just been sitting there for a while and you've turned it into an incredible tool for outreach for the local church. Thanks, bro. Appreciate your message, you guys. All right. Digital Missions, Project Comm. And of course, you can always connect with us at the Elemental Group.

Elemental Group dot org. We would love to come alongside of you, coach. You. We are free resources on that website as well. Thanks for joining us today. We'll see you during the next episode of Too Soon. You've been listening to the Elemental Leaders podcast. Visit us at Elemental Group dot org for more great resources.