Promoting Church Events Online

From fundraisers to social events to conferences; churches host a lot of events. Many events benefit the church coffers, others drive membership, and hopefully all help the local community. The question here is how can your website help? The easy answer is content creation and propagation. This article will give you the more detailed answer that integrates your content with the tools and services you need for promoting church events.
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Starting a Social Media Sunday

Thanks to articles and podcasts, I learned of a phenomenon called “Social Media Sunday”. Carolyn Clement started this great yearly event. It focuses on promoting a church’s social media presence, and familiarizing a congregation with how they can help bolster that presence. Yet the most controversial aspect is the encouragement of congregation members to actively engage and share with social media during parts of the service. Despite your concerns about social media, there are ways you can better integrate it with your regular Sunday services; and this article explores how.
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Digital Tools for Non-Traditional Churches

The first electric general-use computer, ENIAC, was announced in 1946. Of course, this room-sized computer looks very different from today’s computing devices. Consequently, what churches looked like in 1946 is vastly different than what we see today. This forces us to re-think what churches look like, and what they need to succeed. In this article, I explore three examples of non-traditional churches and the digital tools that can both promote their presence and enhance the experience.
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Hunting for Social Media Engagement

Believe it or not, the tactics and strategies used in hunting can be applied to seeking out new website visitors on social media outlets. You will see that these best practices used in the woods can help you get an edge in finding, knowing, and establishing worthwhile relationships with your social media audiences.

My father is an avid hunter, and growing up with him meant spending lots of time in the woods and learning to hunt. I enjoyed many hours walking in the great outdoors, learning about various animals, and developing a great appreciation for nature. I never envisioned that I could apply those lessons to websites, but inspiration comes from all aspects of our lives. In this article, I will relate to my time spent studying the whitetail deer.

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Church Social Media: Measuring Success

Measuring success; we all want to do it. So how do you know if your efforts on social media are bearing any fruit? Can you justify the hours your are spending posting a steady stream of updates to the multitude of social media platforms? This article explores what measurements exist, what they mean, and some tools you can use to monitor your success.
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Church Social Media: Social Media Authentication

Did you know that social media could be used for something other than announcing what you had for breakfast, or sharing funny pictures of cats? Online identities can be used across the web and increase how often users interact with your church’s website. If you have sections on your site where you hope users will interact with you, include social media authentication to give them less hoops to jump through and give you more community activity.
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Church Social Media: Getting Help to Create, Curate, and Disperse Content

Social media content often looks like it comes from a fire hose. Watching your feeds scroll by with new posts coming every few seconds or minutes may be very intimidating. You may wonder how can your church produce so much content? Even more daunting, how can you be heard in the crowd? This article will explore how to overcome these obstacles and help your church’s online outreach flourish
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Church Social Media: Social Media Foundations

What social media foundations can you lay at your church to make your online ministries more effective? By creating good processes and having the discipline to adhere to them, you will bolster interactions on your various platforms, and boost traffic to your websites. This article contains tips on creating and recycling content, defining and sticking to a schedule, as well as curating and automating your publishing process. The end result should be a vibrant and flourishing online church community.
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Church Social Media: Getting Started

Social media is a buzzword that has been circulating for a while now, and I think it is about time I write a series that really digs into how your church can harness its power. If your church dabbled in social media before and got no results, that singular and probably disjointed venture left a bad taste in your mouth. Perhaps you have yet to do anything because you are afraid to venture in. Many churches think it will consume too much time, and pastors and leadership shy away from it. The worst scenario is that you think it is a waste of time, with no measurable or tangible results. Regardless, please give church social media another glance as we look at it from a more integrated and strategic perspective.
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Because of You: Honoring Disciple Makers

If you are a Christian, without a doubt someone has stepped into your life to help you along with your journey in faith. As that faith matures, many enjoy a look back on their progress. With those reflections, we internally thank those that helped us. Someone, pastors, church staff, volunteers, parents, friends; someone invested in discipling you. This article will explore the idea of using technology to publicly and privately offer thanks to those that helped you grow.
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Copy and Paste with Pride

The difference between inspiration and plagiarism is a fine line. However, walking that line helps you create inspiring and engaging experiences as quickly as possible. This article will feature a few ways you can safely draw ideas from around the Internet. In other words, copy and paste with pride.
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Walking the Tightrope of Content Desires

Your church website strategy is a balancing act; defining the tension between the church’s wants, the user’s needs, and the content displayed on the site. Your church leadership has a certain set of objectives and missions they expect to execute via the website. Your website visitors expect yet a different set of needs to be met. Stuck in the middle is your content, which you mold and craft over time to meet everyone’s desires. Read on to see how this might be accomplished so that everyone considers it a win.
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