I would suggest that you go through a two-step process when trying to determine which technology (or technologies) you will be using for your ministry. First, you will want to select the categories of technology you will want to use (website, blog, social network, etc.). This higher level choice will free you from trying to figure out exactly which “brand” of technology to choose and will give you the ability to pick it for its basic function. A great resource to use at this point is John Edmiston’s “Edges of Cyberspace” presentation, which lists several of the different types of technologies and ideas for how they could be used for ministry (Also check out John’s “articles” page for several other great tools for strategic planning.).

Once you have selected a technology category for your ministry, the next step is to narrow it down to a specific technology.  For example, if you decide that the category of “social network” is what you need to use for your ministry, you now have to choose between Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Ning, and other brands. Again, this is where you will want to be working with someone who knows what the choices are and can help you with the benefits and drawbacks of each one.

This step in the process should be documented well. You will be questioned about the choices made and you will need to be able to defend them. If you are looking for funding, then you will want to be able to show those who are considering donations that you have made a wise choice and you are not just picking the easiest solution or the one that you know best.

Once this step is completed, you can begin putting some concrete steps into your strategy.  That will be the next post in this series.

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.

1) define as specifically as possible the group of people to whom your ministry will be directed.  Think about things such as age range, location, gender, stage of life, etc., that will define who these people are. The more specific the better.

2) describe how this group can be engaged using the Internet.  You will need to understand what your potential users do online in order to design a strategy for reaching them.

Neither of these steps can be accomplished successfully without research. You cannot effectively reach your target group without understanding them and their Internet habits. Simply using intuition or a “gut feeling” about it is not acceptable. You will need to be able to defend your strategy to those who will be providing the resources for it.

There are several methods of research available to you, let me suggest three: surveys, focus groups, and utilizing third-party data.  If possible, directly surveying your target group is probably the best way to understand them. I did this with my church a couple of years ago and you can find the write up (and a copy of the survey used) here.  Another method is focus groups: if you can get a group of individuals from your target group together to discuss how they use the Internet, you will learn quite a bit about how to reach them. Finally, using third-party data (such as that from the Pew Internet Project or the US Census) will also give you some ideas of how to reach your group.  If possible combine two or three of these methods to help you fully understand your target group.

This step does NOT include a decision on which specific web site or software you will be using.  This is simply getting a full understanding of your potential users. You will be making those specific decisions in a later step.

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.

Before I had the participants work through their strategy, I presented some foundational principles for strategy that needed to be understood before they actually began working through the process:

1. The Internet itself is not the strategy. Too many times, ministries feel that just having a web site is a strategy.   It is not.
2. Know who you are. What you do on the Internet is an extension of who you are. If you do not know why your ministry exists (think: what do we do? who do we serve?), then you cannot successfully use the Internet.
3. Use research to drive your strategy. How do you know that those you are trying to reach will even see what you do on the Internet? Research can help you make decisions about what type of web site to build or what Internet tools to utilize. See this post about my experience researching my own church.
4. Set measurable goals. How will you know if you are being successful? You must set goals and be able to measure them.
5. Technology is not the hard part. Anyone who has implemented a new system can tell you: the technology is not the hard part. The hard part is change. See my write-up on the Internet Ministry Framework for more on this.

Once you understand these foundational principles, you can begin to develop a strategy. Over the next few weeks, I will unravel the steps involved in developing an Internet Ministry strategy.