concept. Well, we'll talk about the different phases that we're in, but that's kind of the gist of like gathering Israel. Uh, since we last
spoke, and if you haven't seen the last episode, I encourage you to go watch it and and to to get the fundamentals of what we are with Greg. It was a great
episode. Um, since we last spoke, we've doubled the number of geographies that uh that that we're in. And so I have a
little bit of a I tried to make a little like heat map here um to kind of show. So in January, this is where we were. We
were in three countries and then expanded March, May, and now July. So,
we've gone, you can kind of see. Is this spurred primarily from people saying, "Hey, I want to donate to where
I went on a mission." Or is it just by price? Uh, well, kind of. Yeah. So, many people
contacted us and they said, "I served here. I want to buy ads in this specific
region or my grandson is there or my brother or whatever." That is awesome
and we want to facilitate that. Um and so some of the geographies we jumped into because we got requests uh uh in
that vein um to try to help out those those different places. The church itself actually asked us if we would
take on some of these geographies to really experiment with this and yeah and see what data we could find.
And so we're doing that on the church's behalf in a couple places too. Um it's interesting now we have
conversations with the church regularly uh to to com try to compare data. um
they don't release everything to us, but it's helpful to see I'm I'm I'm realizing that I'm still just showing my
my screen on and we're realizing it's it's helpful to just kind of compare with each other and see okay so what is
your conversion rate with this and how are your ads doing there and the the church has been doing this also and uh
trying it in Europe and in Asia and these things and they're they're encountering different results. It's
interesting for us to hear their successes and their obstacles. Um, and we're starting to hit some of the same
obstacles that the church has had. So, for instance, the church says that advertising
via social media in Europe has actually been awesome. And it is and and this is
a bit apocryphal, but a little bird told us that the number of baptisms in Europe
has increased significantly in the past five years to where it's doubled in the
past five years. Um, and I was actually just there in uh my family was there in
uh Prague and Vienna and Hungary. Well, we're in in Hungary in Budapest. This little branch, three people are
confirmed in one on one Sunday. And we thought, hey, go Europe, you know, go
Europe. And the missionaries were positive. They were optimistic. They were excited. The mission president, we we talked to him. He said, things are
going great. Things are are fast. And he was a missionary there decades before. He said, "Oh, we're, you know, the
church is growing gang busters here." So, something's happening in Europe, which is very exciting. and the the
digital outreach program of the church has said that a a small part in that is online advertisements that it's helping
to reach people. Um, okay. They've also talked a little bit.
Yeah, that's very exciting. That's very exciting because the stereotype is kind of like, oh, Europe is uh,
you know, a little bit secular and it's dead, you know. So, it's really fun to hear that there
might be there might be other opportunity there that's that's just kind of springing up. Okay, I'm going to
reshare my screen here so you can see. Yeah, you can keep it you can keep it there shared even when we go away from
Oh, thank you, Greg. Hey, I'm just a baker. All right. You know, I'm just like, for example, I mean, I'll cut this
out here, but I'll hit hit us back here like this, but all I have to do is click us back
here. Got it. Okay. Okay.
Um, yeah. So, then we also now have the impact report for any donor. So, if somebody donates to the cause, they're
added to our impact report list where we send out our data. Um, we we don't want
to just take people's money and run off with it and say, "Trust us." Uh, we want people to see the data, see how it's
going. We also want collaboration. And if people have ideas, we're just Latter Day Saint dads doing this. Um, we want I
if people have ideas or innovative ideas to how to how to improve it, we want to hear them. So, we send out our impact
report. This is a little sampling here. And this might be a little small. I hope that people can see this. Maybe I'll make it a little bigger.
But in um this is for the month of June. Sorry, we're a little bit behind here. We're getting July all updated. But in
the month of June, you can see the number of referrals that we captured compared to the cost that we spent.
Okay. And so if you look across there, we're getting we're getting referrals for less than $2 consistently.
We also raised a lot more money. So that's why we're expanding to a lot more geographies. Um then there's also we we
try to plot this out so that people can see the progress that we're making and keep updated on it. Keep us accountable
and trying to make the system as as efficient as possible. The impact reports also going to have personal
stories. So these are some recent baptisms or temple attendees. What we're finding is that our recent baptisms that
we're getting from the program then invite their families and then you know
their friends and it kind of expands out from there which makes sense like duh like of course we knew that right but
when you see it happen you think you know bringing one soul to Christ
isn't just one soul to Christ even though that the the value is is great in the sight of God but it in they
invariably invite their friends and their family and and it's really fun to see a whole generation of people being
blessed from one small seat. It's really it's really kind of cool. These particular uh so now what we're
going to have is we're contracting with local videographers to interview some of these people. And
this is all separate from the ad donations. Don't worry. Don't worry. This is all we're all using our own money to do this. But the um we're using
local videographers to interview some of these people and ask them about their experience so that we can see how
they're doing and so that we can communicate it back to our donors. So I'll show you here um
on here on YouTube. This is one little
story that we have from Okoroo. We interviewed him about his experience going to the temple for the first time.
So, he was found through our digital ads thanks to the donors and he went he got to go through the
temple for his father. And so, we're going to be allowing
the donor and participants to see
what they're doing. And I think it really really just connects you to the work a lot more.
So, it isn't just throwing your money out in the ether. So, it's a little more meaningful. Um, so then and here's the thing I'm
really excited to talk to you about here, Greg. So the basic model is that we're buying
ad space and that that ad space is bringing eyeballs. Um, a a lot of the
the lifting that we do, a lot of the the uh elbow grease that we put into this thing is keeping ads fresh because you
have ad fatigue. You put That's why Nike comes up with a different campaign every six months.
That's why McDonald's has a different campaign. Like back when I was a kid, it was just the Golden Arches and and
Grimace, you know. But then you or is that burger? No, that's is that McDonald's? Am I getting
the wrong Maybe I'm getting the wrong burger joint. But that's why they have to update it because people they get to
know the ad and they get fatigued. So you have to keep it fresh. So we're we're we're encountering a lot of that.
We have to keep it going and that requires some innovation and it requires a little bit of of labor. So what we
want to do is we want to build the engine. So the all the donations we're getting
right now are for the ad the gasoline that we put into the engine and we use
that gasoline to continue funding these ads and it's great. It's bringing in thousands of referrals every week and
we're sending these off to missionaries. What we want to be able to do is to have an engine built so that when ads start
fatiguing or we need new content, organic content that it'll be easier to
do without hiring personnel to do it. We have software developers who are going
to help us with automation and scaling. We don't want this to just be in Africa or South America. We we want to hit
everywhere on the planet. We want to blanket the world with this and we think we have the system to do it or the model
to do it. We just need to build it out. So an invitation to anybody out there who wants to be perhaps an investor in
that engine, you can go to gatheringisrael.org. You can contact us about it. If you want to be a more involved participant, all our financials
are auditable. We'd love we'd love your help with that. Um, but so what we're
what we're finding is that missionaries are often discouraged because they get,
get this, too many referrals. Let me say that again, too many
referrals. When I was a missionary, we got like two referrals and it was the
most exciting thing in the world. They came into Noah and the whole mission like gathered around like, what is this?
It was like a It was like the monolith scene. in what was it 2001 Space Odyssey. We're all gathering around
these referrals like what is this crazy thing right here? We've never gotten referrals before and now we're hearing
from some missions they say we have too many referrals and we don't we we don't have time to follow up on them all. That
blows my mind. Right. So, and the church confirmed this. They said, "Yeah, there's some people who really, you
know, they get a lot of referrals and so they're not So, what's what's the solution to that?" So the reason why so the solution to
that is is that a lot anything on the internet is going to inherit noise. It's
going to inherit data noise. So if you get a thousand referrals invariably
inevitably there's going to be some of those that are people who are just clicking on whatever they see an
American face or they see a offer for a free book or whatever and they're just like okay and they sign up. All right.
I'm not one of those people. I never put my information out there, but other people, they just sign up for those things. So, you have data noise. Okay.
So, one of the answers is to filter through the noise. That can be done using automation,
using this software that we're developing. So you can take a thousand
referrals and vet them all um using automation and you can catch you know
maybe a hundred of them that really don't have a good address or they that's not a real phone number or they didn't
even complete the form or whatever you have different steps of filtration that
you can do data filtration and you have to be very careful about this but you can you have different layers. So maybe
after that you ask uh are you interested in attending a sacrament meeting or meeting with the missionaries? You
understand they're going to come to your house, right? And at that point other people take an off-ramp. They say, "Oh,
wait. I didn't realize what this was." And they they exit. And by the time the the filtration is
done, you have higher quality referrals for the missionaries. So now when you hand these to the
missionaries, you get to say, "These people know that you're going to go to their house. they want to attend
sacrament meeting and they've already read the first chapter of the Book of Mormon or whatever. They've reached this
certain level. You hand that to a missionary and say, "Go see these people." And the missionaries say, "Oh,
booya, let's do this." Instead of just a name and an address that's kind of fuzzy
and they think, "Is this really going to be worth it?" So what we want to do is offer higher quality leads to the to the
companionships out there. And we're trying to use data filtration to to do some of that. And that will increase
trust in the referral system so that when we go to the missionaries and hand them these these places that say they
get too many referrals, when we go back to them and say, "Here's a hundred referrals," they'll say, "Oo, gathering
Israel referrals. Oh, yeah. Let's do that. We know those are solid." Does that make sense? Sure.
So, we've heard a little bit of that skepticism from people in the missionary department say, you know, some
geographies just get too many referrals. That blows my mind. That blows my mind. But apparently in some places it's true.
Not everywhere, obviously. So, we're expanding into other places to and we're finding that Africa sounds like it's
kind of sat some places in Africa are saturated, but Asia, no way. Europe, no
way. North America, no way. So, um, the different phases of our project kind of
outlay like this. We prove the concept. We're we formalize the ads and we're
tracking our results. We have visibility all the way to baptism. We have visibility all the way, which is
something that I've never seen before. I don't know if anybody even has. Um, we
want to automate. We've now automated the lead management system. We launched proprietary software just
let's back up for everyone and and go go through what you mean by you you have what did you say transparency or you
have the ability to see everything through the process. Yeah. So explain that. So for about 10 years, I
would take out ads on social media just myself using my own money and and
hopefully people were clicking on it, but once they did, I didn't know where they went, right? They would click on my
ad and it would lead them away from my social media page over to the church's page. And then after that, I had no idea
what happened to them. Um if they actually met with the missionaries, if they actually got a Book of Mormon, if
they actually got baptized, I would have no way of knowing. Um, and so it was really discouraging because you're just
kind of throwing a message in a bottle endlessly out in the ocean and hoping
that somebody hears, you know, what you're saying. Now that we've formalized
the process with gathering Israel, um, we can see those results all the way to baptism. And the really exciting
thing is is that now I think back on the 10 years of ads I took out and I'm like I bet you actually there were a lot of people getting baptized because the
because the conversion rate is actually pretty good. Um, so gathering Israel is
this phase one where we can now see not only when they click on the ad, but we
can see them being taught and we can see if they accept commitments
and we can then very frequently contact them afterwards and we can we can call
them the day of their baptism and say, "Hey, h you know, how you doing?" And they're they're usually I I think every
time they're extremely open. They're like, "Hey, this is wonderful. Hey, you're the guys who took out those ads. Thank you. Thank you. Um, so it's really
exciting that we get to track this all the way and those and some we take some of those stories and feature them in the
impact report so you can see some of the people that that are being affected by this that are being found.
That's awesome. Again, the thing about that is it's just, you know, if you're going to make a donation and you're going to get that
kind of feedback, right, you're going to be able to see different these different stories and say, "Wow, I really am
making a difference. This actually does count." Yeah, you skipped one venty
coffee. Yeah, Greg. Greg, you had to skip one venty coffee. I know that's tough for you. That's tough for me to do.
I know that's tough for you, Greg, because you really depend on that. I mean, the pumpkin spice. That's it is the pumpkin spice. We're
almost to that season. Yeah. Yeah. Um, you know those things are like 90% sugar, right?
Yeah. Yeah. I've never had one, but Yeah. Neither. Anyway, so so so formalizing
being able to track the results was always top of my list for priorities and now we can we can do that. The next was
automating the lead management. So we have developed over the past month or two proprietary software
um that that we've made that can allow for the collection of leads and the
upload of leads and all that stuff without human interference. It's now fully automated which is very exciting.
One of the guys in in the group, Thomas Lumbberg, he's a really tech-savvy guy.
I'm blown away at how fast they managed to turn around that automation. So, that reduces the costs of the of the
overhead, which your donations don't go to that overhead unless you want them to and you can we'd appreciate that.
Um, so then phase three is improving that lead quality.
We want to impre improve the uh products that we're giving to the missionaries and build the trust in the system so
that missionaries look forward to our um to our leads and follow them up. We were
very discouraged when we would give missionaries some leads and they wouldn't follow up on them. And finally
through the grape vine we we would hear back that well we're not sure that's really going to convert. it's way off in
the boondocks and what if what if it's a bad address and and this kind of uh skepticism. So that's led us okay now we
need to improve this lead quality. Um and we're going to do that through automating lead filtration.
Um so once we figure out how to improve that quality, we then automate that process. And then phase five, we're
building the engine to allow us to scale this to any geography. We're we're opening into new languages. Um, one a
couple exciting things are or different languages in in that geography. So, one geography might have English and
Portuguese or it might have Chinese and English or whatever. Being able to
target those. So, we want to build the engine to be able to do that. So, if anybody wants to be a part of that, you can go on Gathering Israel. On Gathering
Israel, you can donate to the gasoline we put in the engine, which is the ad spend, which most people donate to. You
can also choose to donate to the operations, which we we would appreciate. it would expedite some of
the development of the of the process. But I just wanted to let your people know um because a lot of your people
were very gracious in donating to us last time. I just wanted them to know
that it's working. And um
here, let's turn that off. That it is working, that we're expanding, that we're getting more baptisms, that we
have commitments every day coming in from people who are connecting with the missionaries. The really exciting part
about this is that we really don't we really don't do the hard stuff. We're
finding people and handing it to the church. The church has a magnificent program with missionaries who find you.
They look you in the eye. They testify. You go to a congregation lo led by local people. They embrace you. They have
similar stories. You get min ministering companionships and classes and callings
and all these things. The church is like the greatest fellowshipping
engine on the planet. It's so good at this. And so if we can just find people and just connect them into that, they
they go off and they do they do great. So it's really fun to to to see it
handed off to the church and how well the church does. You know, it used to be that, you know, I know they've changed
this a few years back, but it used to be that you could really pinpoint uh your
advertising with with uh with Facebook. I mean, really narrow it down. I think
they've gotten much more generic in the last few years, but is there a way that you can do that? You talked about the process and the and
the the filtration process, but what about the actual reaching out process? Is there something that can be done
there on that end that says, "Okay, we are actually getting into the feed of the exact people that we're trying to
talk to." Yes. So, Facebook want Facebook wants you to be on Facebook. Facebook
makes money when you're on Facebook. And so, if you are bringing people to
Facebook or forming a group on Facebook or people on Facebook are liking you or
commenting on you, then Facebook likes you a lot more. Mhm. And so what so what we found is that if
we build the social media, if we build um capital with Facebook with likes and
shares and comments and things like that, then Facebook gives us a it reduces the
spend on our ads. It says, "Hey, people like these." It kind of helps with promotion. And then those people, if
they're if you're friends with that guy, who's friends with that guy, it it spreads it down the chain. So somebody likes you, people who are friends with
them will see what they've liked and it'll it'll spread kind of organically. Facebook wants you on there. So it was
being used as just a cheap way to advertise and it kind of figured that out and said, "Hey, wait a minute. Wait
a minute. Wait a minute. What are we getting out of this?" And so it wants to insert itself more in the middle. So it says, "Okay, well form a group, get some
followers, get some likes, and then maybe you like we'll talk type of deal." But we've managed to do that. We have over a 100,000 likes on Facebook
um amongst people that we've reached with Gathering Israel around the world. So, Facebook likes us and that's only
one of the mediums that we're that we're using. Um we want to get into there's the the church really does not use other
social media platforms. It's very limited in scope. And so we're going to try to, you know, see if we can't try
Instagram or try Tik Tok or try uh way or try Viber or try Telegraph or these
things and report back and just to let the church know if things are working or not. And maybe maybe the church will
say, "Oh, you're having success on Telegraph? Oh, let's let's try that." Um, so we're we're going to experiment
with those as well. And that is one reason why sometimes the ad efficiency will drop is because we're expanding
into new media and expanding into new geographies. And when you first do that, you get a dip in your efficacy. So
anyways, where do you where do you see gathering Israel going? Where could this go?
So I don't mean geog geographically. I mean with with the with the the process and
and the success. So, I see us baptizing our own ward by the end of the year.
I I I think I think by the end of the year, we'll be able to say we've baptized a ward's worth of probably
shorter than that actually, pro probably in the next few months. Um, we want to be we want to reach a stake. You know,
maybe next year we'll say we've baptized a stake. Um, and it's it's growing a lot
faster than I thought. Some of the guys working on this are quite smart dudes. I, you know, smarter, way smarter than I
am. Um, and using software, using artificial intelligence. Um, they're
using a lot of artificial intelligence to help with the the ad creation. We have help from friends like, uh, uh,
with organic content creation. Um, so really exciting is that these videos of
our converts, we can take those and turn them into ads
and then take those and clip them up and put them out there as ads and people can see that and so it becomes a
self-replicating process. So we find people, we get them to make an ad and
they push it out to other people who then get converted and make an ad. And so it that's a great idea.
Kind of kind of really neat. So, you're saying people that have gone through the process that came from a a digital lead
from you guys to begin with? Yes. Yeah. Hey, I saw this. I clicked on it. I got a book. I spoke to the missionaries.
This is what I found. Yeah. And they're real people. And so, imagine you're you're cruising around
Instagram and and and an ad pops up, but it's a real person. A real person
saying, "I was just like you surfing around Tik Tok and I found this thing and it's the greatest." you got to go to
this church. It's really awesome and I'm from your same hometown. I live just down the street
and I I can vouch for this thing. Like that's the most powerful advertising in the world.
Sure. You know, and and and people will hopefully respond to that. So, it's very
it's very exciting. It we're getting we're building those efficiencies because we're we're reutilizing those
converts and this and it's growing a lot faster than I thought it would. So,
and you're getting donations. I mean, you're getting help there. You need more. But, and I hope that this this
video brings another round for you. I think it will. Um, but uh that that is,
you know, again, it's the connection. It's it's okay. I can put this in. I can see what's happening. I understand the
process. I see people are getting baptized. They're getting taught. They're bringing others to church. That
is what What could you do that is more fulfilling than that? Right. Right. And and and I encourage
everybody on the impact report to go look at the personal stories. Look into the eyes of the people who are finding
the gospel and and just think for a moment. There's there's somebody out there who didn't have the hope of the
restored gospel. They didn't have the Book of Mormon. And now they do. They have a church that they go to. And
think of the meaning. I think back to my first convert ancestor, Charles Barnes Jr. found the gospel in 1844 at King
Billy Square in uh Hull, England. And he was a kid, he was 17-year-old kid, and
he heard a guy, an elder, and he bought a Book of Mormon from him. And because that kid's decision, all his descendants
for centuries and thousands of people, including me, have have the restored gospel of Jesus Christ. And you think
every every person out there, every person out there is a soul precious in
the sight of God. And you can be a part of trying to just connect the church has the system. The church has the greatest
system in the world. It's just that we have to connect people to that system. Mhm.
And so that's what gathering Israel aims to do. Connected to the already existing fantastic missionary program um by going
into places that maybe the church can't reach or at a at a pace that the church can't match because we only have so many
missionaries. We want to we want to keep missionaries from knocking on empty doors. Yes. And that's the key, right?
You're taking away the time to find Yes. and you're putting giving them the opportunity to teach and that's really
their job. Exactly. So, if you So, if anybody if anybody wants to be a part of it, they
can go see gathering Isisrael.org. Any donations appreciated. Um, but even if you don't Even if you don't,
get excited, guys. We're going to break records for baptisms this year.
We're we could we could have 350,000 baptisms this year in the church. The
highest baptizing in the history of the church. Get excited. So missionary work is Europe. Europe is is coming back
alive again. This is the most exciting time in the world to to spread the gospel of Jesus Christ. Get excited.
That's awesome. We'll put that link in the description box so people can go and just at a minimum go look go find out
about this. It's an unbelievably exciting program and uh a lot of people
have already seen it in work, right? They've already donated. They've already watched what happens. They get the
reports back. It's it's very exciting stuff and Johnny, you've done an amazing thing with this. So, thanks for sticking
with it when you were just putting in your own $2 at a time or whatever it was. Yeah, my wife was laughing about it. We
were watching one of the personal stories the other night and I was just like, "This is so amazing. It's so beautiful. These people are like, "Oh, I
found the gospel." And she was like, "I remember when you were you were putting in five bucks on your dinky little
laptop 10 years ago from our dirty little apartment. We had three boys in diapers running around and here I am
like, "Hey, hey, somebody clicked on my ad." And she's like, "Look at this. Look, now there's actual people getting
baptized. It's very It's very exciting." So, thank thanks so much for letting me come on, Greg. Like, I appreciate this
so much. Thanks to your audience, too. Happy happy to do it. Happy to do it. Maybe we'll get another progress report
from you down the road. Sure. Thanks, John. I appreciate it. Okay, we'll see you, Greg.
