Lessons From Babel » research

Are you following “best practices” for online ministry?

Dave — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 17:28:31 +0000

Since many of you may be new to my blog and research, I wanted to make you aware of the “resources” section and some of the online ministry tools I have put there. The “resources” section is available both at my main site and my Facebook page.

One of my first projects in the area of online ministry was to seek an answer to the question: what makes online ministry successful? This led to the development of a research project to determine the “best practices” in online ministry. From November 2007 to April 2008, over 300 ministries took a survey and reported on how they were doing Internet ministry. From the data collected, a series of “best practices” were developed matching ministries who reported success with their Internet presence with answers to the survey questions. I presented the results of this research at the Internet Ministry Conference in October 2008.

How did I determine “best practices”? In the survey, I asked each ministry a set of questions that correlated with “success”. A “success score” was developed for each ministry. I then asked a series of questions about their online ministry practices in the area of technology, people, and process (my “Internet Ministry Framework”). By taking the ministries who score the highest in their “success score” together, I was able to find which practices they had in common and develop a set of “best practices”. The twelve best practices that I can recommend for any online ministry are as follows:

Technology

The specific software you use is not as important as content. While a nice looking site is important, it is the content that provides the value to the users.
Use interactive content such as blogs, podcasts, and videos as much as possible.
Do not build new features yourself if you can integrate with existing sites that do the same thing. For example: put your videos on YouTube and integrate them into your site instead of hosting the videos yourself.
Install data collection code on your site and analyze it!

People

Recognize your limits – gets outside help if you need it!
Use volunteers wisely, sparingly.
Have a team responsible for setting direction.
Designate one person to be ultimately responsible for the site.

Process

Planning may be the most important step in the implementation of an Internet
ministry.
Develop written goals and/or a mission statement to guide you. Refer to these as
you make decisions about features and technologies for your ministry.
Have a centralized approval process for site updating.
Allow for distributed updating of information that belongs to different parts of your ministry.

For full details on these best practice recommendations and more about the research project itself, download the report from the “Resources” section of either at my main site or my Facebook page. And while you’re there, take a look at the other resources available.

I am also looking to update these recommendations in the near future. If you have feedback or comments on these or other best practices, feel free to leave me a comment!

Full research write-up posted

Dave — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 14:50:39 +0000

For those of you who have been asking me for documentation related to my presentation at the Internet Ministry Conference, I have now posted a six-page report on my web site that details my findings. In conjunction with this, I also wrote a short summary of these findings for the Church Marketing Sucks blog.

Link to Church Marketing Sucks blog entry

Link to research page on genesys11

My next project

Dave — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 18:03:14 +0000

After I was done speaking at the Internet Ministry Conference last week, several people came up to me and asked “what is your next research project?” Several people suggested different areas of research, including a couple who offered up their own ministries as research subjects.

So, what is next? Well, there are two answers to that. First, my next big project is planning and teaching my course in Internet Ministry here at Biola. This course is being advertised for students at the seminary (Talbot), the School of Intercultural Studies, and here in the School of Business. Here is the course description:

The Internet is the greatest communication technology ever developed by man. It is imperative that the Church learns how to use it to its fullest potential. This course will study the use of the Internet as a tool for ministry using a combination of lectures, case studies, and hands-on laboratory work. Special attention will be paid to the effectiveness and limits of using the Internet as a ministry tool.

The course could take many directions and my hope is that several more research ideas will come from the course. Additionally, I may develop a textbook for these kinds of courses as there does not seem to be any yet. As I develop and teach the course I plan on blogging about it – so stay tuned.

The second answer to “what is your next project?” is that I will probably continue to dissect the data from my Internet ministry survey and continue to break down the results. These will also be posted to my blog. If you have any ideas on what sorts of data analysis you would like to see, please let me know by commenting on this post or sending me an email!