Website Assistance and Social Marketing for Churches
Even as some of us deny websites and other social media outlets, and overlook the fact that our congregations are actively engaged on the internet, newspapers are going out of business, civic engagement is at an all-time high online (especially, according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, “the wealthy and well-educated”), and nearly half of U.S. adults are using a social networking service. As far as the “digital divide” goes, 79 percent of U.S. adults are now Internet users — a 67 percent increase from 2005 — and 59 percent of Americans have accessed the Web from a wireless device. Clearly, we’re past the point of “oh, our folks don’t use the Internet or social networking!”
So, why our reluctance? The answer consists of four parts: 1) a misunderstanding of how to use the medium; 2) difficulty measuring results; 3) ignorance; and 4) the “we’ve always done things this way” inertia effect.
Luckily, conquering these objections isn’t difficult. It just takes education, logical thinking, and flexibility. Here are some tips:
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Help your congregation understand they shouldn’t get hung up on the technology. What’s important is understanding that this is a medium for communicating with people, not at them. What’s also important is helping them understand that social media is not some magic bullet that’s going to solve all their problems (or create more), but rather another important tool in the communications toolbox.
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Just because you build it doesn’t mean they’ll come. Any social media initiative must be accompanied by a communications plan that will let people know what you’re doing and encourage them to participate. If you create a YouTube video or Facebook page and fail to promote it, you — not the medium — should take the blame when no one shows up.
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Measuring results in social media is no different than measuring results with any communications activity. How much did you spend in time and resources? What did you get back in outreach and evangelism to your community? The difficulty sometimes comes when organizations don’t clearly define their success metrics before beginning a new initiative. You need to understand your goals (Donations? Members? Comments?) before you can know if you succeeded.
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Ignorance is one of the easiest things to cure: just educate your congregations or key communications people. There are lots of resources that provide enough demographic data to convince even the most hardened skeptic that the Internet has now reached the point of near-ubiquity. Unless you have some very special, very niche audiences who have been resisting the Web, chances are your people are using this stuff.
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Finally, breaking past the “we’ve always done it this way” objection is tough, but it can be done. It may take time and some small-scale experimentation (and expectation management) to get there, but as we’ve seen over the past decade with the internet in general, eventually most folks will come around. They have to. It’s the way things are. Wishing for things to be different is a recipe for irrelevance at best and eventual defeat at worst. Just ask most of the “old media” industries how well fighting the changes worked out for them.
