Thinking strategically: identity

In my last post, I reviewed what I call the “foundational principles” for developing an Internet Ministry strategy. In this post, I will begin reviewing the steps involved in developing that strategy.  This strategy framework is based in part on the one originally presented in Planning Strategies for World Evangelization by Dayton and Fraser and updated in Media In Church and Mission by Viggo Sogaard. By combining that framework with my background and experience with churches and technology, I have developed a framework for developing an Internet Ministry strategy which can be used by ministries of all sizes who are working to use the Internet as a tool in their ministry.  I have created a worksheet for this strategy, which is available on my company’s website on the page developed for my “God In the Tubes” workshop presented last week.

The first step toward developing a strategy for Internet ministry is to develop a mission statement for your use of the Internet.  This mission statement should be fully aligned with your own organization’s mission statement but should be specific to the use of the Internet. In order to do this effectively, you must know who you are! You must understand what your organization is about and then, from that, you can determine how you will use the Internet. Remember, just using the Internet is not a strategy by itself. Some pointers about the mission statement:

• it should be able to provide direction for decision-making about the project.
• it should not contain the specifics on which technologies you will use or any of the exact methods.
• it should be in complete alignment with the mission of your organization. If you don’t have a mission for your ministry, then that is really the first step!

An example of a poor mission statement would be: “We will use the Internet to carry out the mission of our ministry more effectively.” An example of a good mission statement is “Our ministry will use the Internet to strengthen the faith of youth in the Los Angeles area through the development of culturally relevant online materials. Further, we hope to use the Internet to build and strengthen relationships between those youth and our partner churches.”

One key point to bring up here is that if you really have two or three separate goals for your use of the Internet (such as a church reaching “in” to their own congregation AND also reaching “out” to their community), it may be wise to develop two (or more) separate projects with two separate mission statements and then prioritizing which project should be done first.

Once you have developed a good mission statement for the project, you are ready to move on the next step, which identifying your target users. I will cover that in an upcoming post.

Tags: identity, mission statement, Series: Internet Ministry Strategy, sogaard, strategy