Over the past year, I have had the opportunity to work with the Campus Crusade Legacy Project to develop their social media strategy.  We spent several months defining a vision for their online presence and then a few more months getting it all online: a website, a Facebook page, and a YouTube channel.  Now that the sites are up and running, I hope you will take a moment to check out some of these stories and be encouraged.

Campus Crusade Legacy Project website

Campus Crusade Legacy Project Facebook page

Campus Crusade Legacy Project YouTube channel

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.

If this is true, then, maybe we shouldn’t be spending so much of our time becoming experts in a new technology until this evolution has happened.  In his paper (and subsequent book) “IT Doesn’t Matter“, Nicholas Carr makes the case that organizations should not be “first movers”, but should instead let others take the chances and then, once the best practices for using a specific software package are discovered, jump in and begin using it. This minimizes risk and allows the organization to focus on their business instead of the latest technology. Many would argue that ministries should follow the same pattern: focus on your ministry and don’t jump in to a new technology until it has stabilized and reached the mainstream. In many ways this makes sense: for those ministries who put a lot of effort into Friendster and now are wishing that they had waited and put this effort into Facebook instead, this sounds like a great idea.  And maybe it is for some ministries.

But ministries aren’t corporations trying to improve the bottom line. We don’t want to be risk-averse: in most cases running a ministry is a risky enterprise.  We need to go where people are, and, if possible, we need to go where they are going to be!  By moving to social media tools early, we learn how to use them, we can innovate new solutions by experimenting and then, when the tool becomes popular we are already there. And if, like Friendster, the tool only has a short popularity before something takes it place, we can learn from our experience there and use that experience to quickly move into the new environment.

So if you feel that learning how to use Twitter for your ministry is something you should take a “wait and see” attitude on, you risk not learning how to utilize a “micro-blogging” platform for your ministry. And even if Twitter is dead a year from now, the experience of learning how to use it will better prepare you for whatever comes next.  If you are wondering if you should get your ministry into Second Life, again I answer that you should at least begin working with it enough to understand its implications.

But, you say, you don’t have enough time or people to do all of this! Well, no ministry can do everything, but you have to have a strategy in place that drives your decisions.  This strategy should help you understand who you are, who you are trying to reach, and what methods will be used to do this. I will write on strategy in an upcoming post – right after I give my Internet ministry strategy workshop in Indiana later this week!