Thinking strategically, part 3: inventory resources

Continuing my series on creating a strategy for internet ministry (see part one and part two), we now focus on determining what resources you have available to implement your ministry. This is important to understand before you create the actual strategy because it will allow you to get a realistic view of your limits.

Resources generally take one two categories: people resources and financial resources.  Inventorying all your people resources would include listing the names of the people you have and what skill(s) they could contribute.  The skills you need will include both technical and non-technical.  On the technical side, you will want to identify those who know how to do programming, web design, computer graphics, and those who have run web sites before. On the non-technical side, you will want to identify artists, writers, and those who excel at social interaction.  One way to do this would be to conduct a survey to determine who would be willing to help and what skills they have.

Financial resources need to be identified as well. You will be using financial resources to pay for different services and/or to buy software components.  You may also be using these resources to hire out for the skills you did not identify in your existing people resources.

Besides people and financial resources, you may also want to think about other organizations with whom you can partner.

As you are developing this list of resources, you will want to ask yourself some questions:

• are we relying too much on volunteers to do most of this work?
• will our organization be willing to hire out for the skills we do not have?
• are those people we are identifying going to be able to do the work on this? In other words, will this project have a high enough priority in your organization that it will be made a priority over other work?
• your listing of resources should not be predetermined by a specific technology choice.

Once you have completed this step, you are ready to start working on the selection of the specific tools you will be using, which comes in the next two steps.

Tags: Series: Internet Ministry Strategy