3 Ways to Create a Successful Blog for Your Church

by: Tim Peters

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When it comes to reaching people on the Web, few online tools are more advantageous than a blog. A church communications blog can help you better disseminate your message, create stronger connections with church members, and drive more people to your church website. Yet many churches continue to shy away from setting up blogs either for general fear of the unknown or because they just don’t know where to begin.

Here’s the good news: Setting up a blog for your church doesn’t have to be intimidating or complex. In fact, setting up a blog for your church is quite easy. The hard part is getting – and keeping – your content rolling so you can enjoy all the benefits a blog has to offer. Here are a few practical tips for launching and maintaining a successful church communications blog.

Three Steps to Make Your Church Blog a Success

#1 Get Senior Leadership Buy-In

In order for your blog to be successful, church leaders must be on board. How do you get them on board? Use the facts. Explain the benefits of having a blog in a clear manner. Tell them a blog is no different than standing on stage on Sunday and speaking your message – it just happens to be online. Let them know a blog is another forum for making your church’s voice heard and getting your message across to more people.

Once they understand the benefits, they’ll want to know how the blog will function – and what role they will play. The key here is to let them know they will be involved without placing significant burden on their already-heavy workload. Set aside a chunk of time for the staff to brainstorm blog content ideas and create a blog-posting calendar. Let senior leaders know they will not be required to write blog posts (unless they want to), but they can still contribute ideas and direct the content of the blog.

#2 Encourage Contribution

While you don’t want to place the blogging burden on senior leaders, you will need help. You don’t want to go it alone. The more people who contribute to your church blog, the more successful it will be. More contributors increases the likelihood your church blog will keep chugging along and not fall by the wayside in the months to come. The key to getting people to contribute is making it as easy as possible.

Install a simple way for staff members to submit blog content ideas or even posts they’ve written. Create an easy-to-remember email address (for example: blogideas@abcchurch.com) where staff members can submit their suggestions or drafted blog content. You can even share that email address with your congregation members and let them know they can submit content (personal stories, upcoming events, etc.) to be considered for posting on the church blog. The more people you have involved, the more content youwill have to post. The more content you have to post, the more effective your blog will be at enriching your church marketing and helping you reach more people.

#3 Select a Content Curator 

To keep your content rolling, you need a Content Curator. Having a Content Curator is essential to ensure your church blog is posting regularly and your messaging is consistent. This is a very important role. The individual who takes on this role must have strong writing, editing and organizational skills. They will receive and review all the content submitted from contributors, edit and revise it as needed, and post it on the blog.

The Content Curator will also be the person who spearheads the church blog. Your Content Curator will work to recruit volunteers and contributors, and generate ideas for future blog posts. They will monitor the blog, respond to comments and keep track of traffic. They will also be responsible for communicating to church leaders and church members the existence of the blog. They need to let people know the blog is a platform for highlights, devotionals, stories and more. They will work to help spread the word.

Setting up a church blog is advantageous for any church that wants to continue to grow and expand. It’s a great way to reach more people with your message, and draw in new church members. But you have to do more than just create a blog – you have to nurture your blog. By getting senior leadership buy-in, encouraging contribution from staff members and making sure you have a reliable content curator, your blog will give your church a powerful and resounding voice in the online space.

How does your church staff generate and maintain blog content?

Read more from Tim here.

Tags: Attention, Awareness, Communication, Tim Peters

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Organizations Lose $1.3 Trillion by Not Engaging in Social Media

by: Thom Rainer

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I was shocked. Two presidents of organizations began using Twitter in the past two months. These are presidents I know well, leaders who for years saw no value in Twitter or other social media. As one told me, he had moved over to the dark side.

These leaders are not alone. Only 20 of the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies engage in Twitter. But my guess is that many of them will be moving to “the dark side” as well. The evidence is building rapidly. Your organization is at a distinct disadvantage if it does not embrace social media with enthusiasm.

A new study by the highly regarded McKinsey and Company should move even some of the deepest skeptics. Their research found that, while 72 percent of organizations use some form of social media, very few embrace it strategically. As a consequence, the productivity lost in these companies could be as high as $1.3 trillion. That’s a lot of zeros. In fact, if those dollars were the gross domestic product (GDP) of a country, its economy would be the 14^thlargest in the world.

The McKinsey study notes that organizations lose both interaction within the company and connection outside the company if they do not engage social media with enthusiasm. Collaboration opportunities are lost and intimate customer connections are forfeited.

While I’m sure the organization I lead could improve greatly, we strategically embraced social media several years ago. Allow me to share four principles I have learned to this point.

1. Embracing social media begins at the top. While social media is a great equalizer, an organization will not embrace it corporately unless the leader of the organization gives his or her tacit permission. My enthusiastic involvement in social media sent a clear message that it was important for the entire organization.

2. An open attitude for the organization is worth the risk. When a large number of employees are active in social media speaking on behalf of the organization, the risks are obvious. We still encourage blogs, tweets, Facebook posts, and other social media interaction. The rewards are greater than the risks.

3. Guidelines are good, but they must not be too restrictive. We do have social medial guidelines, but we understand that too many rules go counter to the openness of social media. We feel that our balance is pretty good. We have many employees engaged in social media; and we have spoken to unwise engagement only four or five times in the past five years.

4. We often make heroes of those who engage in social media well. On many occasions, an employee has engaged in social media in such a way that we think it’s worth telling the story about what he or she did. Those stories eventually become part of the organization’s culture and, consequently, encourage others to do so as well.

Leaders and organizations will ignore social media to their own peril. Ryan Holmes, author of the article about McKinsey’s research, notes: “It seems noteworthy that the report’s conclusions have been echoed of late from the most authoritative of places: Wall Street. In the last year, the world’s largest enterprise software companies–Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, Adobe, and even Ellison’s own Oracle–have spent upward of $2.5 billion snatching up social media tools to add to their enterprise suites. Even Twitter-phobic CEOs may have a hard time ignoring that business case.”

Large corporations, small businesses, nonprofits, churches, and a plethora of other organizations are increasingly realizing the critical need for social media. Ultimately, it gets those in the organization closer to each other, as well as connecting to those whom the organization wants to reach.

The case for organizations embracing social media has been anecdotally powerful for years. But now McKinsey presents overwhelming objective data that cannot be ignored. I can only presume that many will still ignore this clear and powerful evidence. And their organizations will likely suffer as a result.

Read more from Thom here.

Tags: Attention, Awareness, Communication, Social Media, Thom Rainer

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Leadership Matters, but So Does Preaching

by: Thom Rainer

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God uses pastors in many diferent ways. He uses them to cast vision. He works through pastors to set the tone in churches and to be examples for others to follow. Unfortunately some churches won’t follow good leaders no matter what. They would rather die than change. And they usually get the former for forsaking the latter.

Still, leadership matters. Leadership is critical. And the most visible aspect of leadership for the pastor takes place in the pulpit. For better or worse, the people in the church are watching and listening. Most of them do not expect the pastor to have the oratory skills of a well-known pastor. They do not expect him to have the exegetical insights of some of the most brilliant preachers in the land.

But they do have expectations.

They expect pastors to be prepared in the pulpit. They know, for the most part, who’s winging it and who has prepared. They expect the pastor to teach them about God’s Word. In many ways the preaching event is sacred. The people want to hear from God and His Word. They expect the pastor to open the Bible and teach them what God says.

And they expect him to make the Bible relevant to their lives. While they may be fascinated by some esoteric doctrine, they ultimately want to know how God would have them apply His truths to their lives.

One of the most common complaints I hear about the beleaguered pastors from church members is, “I’m just not getting fed.” Now I realize that some of those complaints are self-centered. I also realize that some people will complain about everything and anything. And some people would find fault if the apostle Paul himself were preaching.

But the comment is telling.

“I’m just not getting fed.” That means they are hungry. They are hungry for God’s Word for their lives today.

That’s what I’ve seen in my research of the dechurched. They were hungry, and they were not being fed. Sure, they could have and should have found a church where they could be fed, but the reality is that they are dropouts. And it is clear how important the role of the pastor is in stemming the tide of church dropouts.

In the research for Essential Church, we found one out of every seven dropouts said the sermons did not capture their attention, and about the same number say that the church was not helping them to develop spiritually. Of the dropouts 8 percent stated bluntly that the pastor was not a good preacher and 7 percent said that the sermons were not relevant to their lives.

Taken individually, none of the responses was overwhelming; but taken in the aggregate, they are saying something powerfully. Preaching matters. The content of the sermons matters. And the life application of the sermons matters.

Any church or pastor who does not take seriously the role of preaching in his church is missing it. Just look at the dropouts as at least part of the evidence.

Adapted from Essential Church (B&H Publishing Group, 2008).

Read more from Thom here.

Tags: Awareness, Communication, Thom Rainer

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The 5 C’s of Social Media Dominance – Part 1

by: Jon Acuff

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Lately I’ve been spending a lot of time helping leaders navigate the waters of social media.

I don’t consider myself an expert, especially since I haven’t put in the 10,000 hours of expertise yet that folks like Malcolm Gladwell talk about. I still end sentences with prepositions for instance.

But I have been swimming for a few years, and I’ve learned a few things. Lots of them by failing, some of them by floating into the right wave at the right time, a few of them on purpose.

So this week, as I work on creating the most intensive guide to social media I’ve ever built for the upcoming Quitter Conference, I thought I would share the 50,000 foot view.

There are only 5 words you have to understand in order to dominate social media. Here’s the first one, with the next four coming in the days to follow:

1. Content

If you had a nickel for every time someone told you that “content is king” you could have been the one who purchased Instagram.

This word has been bandied about so often on the Internet that it’s become a cliché, which is a shame, because content still runs social media like Jay-Z runs New York.

So what is content? Let’s demystify it.

Imagine you owned a store. You were having a grand opening. You spent hours and hours promoting your big day. You spent thousands of dollars inviting people to the ribbon cutting, doing everything you could to drive traffic to your location.

The day arrived, the parking lot was slammed full of people and it was a wild success …and then you opened the doors. And all the shelves were empty. In the excitement of promoting your store, you forgot to stock it. You’ve got an immaculate layout. The store isn’t just a store, it’s an “experience.” The design is unbelievable … but it doesn’t matter. People were expecting products. And as soon as they took a look behind the curtain, so to speak, and realized the store was empty, they left and never came back.

Content = Products.

That’s not just true for businesses, but that’s true for bloggers too. Even if you never want to sell a single thing via social media, if you want to build a community, you have to have a foundation to build it on. And that foundation is the content.

If you start with the promotion, the building will be well known and well ignored.

If you start with the design, the building will be beautiful and empty.

If you start with the community, the building will be temporarily crowded but eventually abandoned.

Content is king.

Content is currency.

Content is critical.

In the old school, “Who? What? When? Where? Why?” model of journalism, content is the “What?”

What blogs will you write?

What videos will you share?

What will you create?

Or, in the Facebook/YouTube model, what content will you enable other people to create on your platform? CNN didn’t start the “iReport” feature, which allows people at home to submit their own news, because they like lowercase letters. They started it because it turns the entire country into content machines. And content matters most. The times I’ve forgotten this have been the times I’ve made my biggest mistakes with social media.

Next, we’ll talk about the second word, “Context.” But the other words won’t matter a whole lot if we don’t get this one right first.

Read Part 2 of this series here.

Tags: Awareness, Content, Jon Acuff, Social Media

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Developing a Tagline for Your Church, Step 1: Clear Vision

by: Will Mancini

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If you are new to my blog, you may not know that everything I do in helping ministries begins with clarity first. In order to help teams with clarity and vision, I developed a tool called the Vision Frame. The Vision Frame is discussed at length in Church Unique.

Before developing a tagline, it is important for a leadership team to know, agree on and articulate the primary strength of your ministry (I call this the Kingdom Concept) and to articulate the Vision Frame. Think of the Vision Frame of “knowing who you are” before you decide to “get dressed” to present yourself to people in the world. The Vision Frame is your internal language and your clearest expression of identity and direction. Your tagline is what you want to tell people before they experience your ministry. Obviously they must be organically connected and meaningfully related.

At first seeing, all sides of the frame might seem like a lot, but its not. Look for language you already use. Many times a church communicates its strategy in it’s mission statement for example. As you separate out the key components of your DNA, each component will become more clear and more transferable in leadership.

GO TO  Step TWO: Decide on a gospel-centered promise.

Return to Church Tagline Series Overview

Tags: Awareness, Tagline, Vision Clarity, Vision Frame, Will Mancini

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Developing a Tagline for Your Church, Step 7: Final Decision

by: Will Mancini

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By now you are ready to pull the trigger.

Use your external ranked list as a very serious perspective for input, but not necessarily  the final basis. If there is a clear favorite from the external audience, I would highly recommend using it, unless there is a compelling reason otherwise.

If two or three of the external opinions are equal weight, then let the team or the senior pastor (or however your church makes decisions) make the final choice.

The goal is to create a collaborative decision that will create confidence and enthusiasm from the leadership team first and then the entire body.  The collaborative decision should:

1. Represent the strength of the church
2. Create a seamless experience with the church’s first impression
3. Be based on the gospel
4. Represent at least two weeks of thoughtful leadership reflection
5. Not create confusion with other organizations’ taglines
6. Weight the external opinions highly
7. Rally leaders and the entire congregation to deliver on the promise

Be looking for most posts on branding and marketing you ministry.

Return to Church Tagline Post Overview

Tags: Awareness, Final Decision, Tagline, Will Mancini

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Developing Your Church Tagline, Step 6: External Testing

by: Will Mancini

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There are many ways to test your top five taglines. The most important thing is that you DO test it. It will be tempting to feel the excitement of your internal process and just skip this step.

While marketing companies produce very sophisticated testing techniques, here is a simple one you can do at no cost.

#1  Create small cards that you will use to record a response from at least 50 people. Use card stock and make a standard size note card. On the note care write, “Possible taglines for ABC Church. Please circle the phrase that is most attractive to you if you were to attend a church:“ and list the top five options with no numbers, just bullet points.

#2 Ask each person on your team to get 4-6 responses from people outside of your ministry. Encourage them to ask neighbors or other acquaintances for their input. Remind them that everyone loves being asked for their opinion.

#3  Make sure you get at least 50 responses but don’t be afraid to get hundreds. Because this is a very informal process also make sure that the folks recording answers don’t represent too limited of an age segment.  The main idea of this step is to get SOME outside input rather than relying TOTALLY on internal opinions.

#4 Tally the data and create a ranking of your top five list from the external audience responses.

GO TO the final step SEVEN: Make your final decision

Return to Church Tagline Post Overview

Tags: Awareness, External Testing, Tagline, Will Mancini

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Developing a Tagline for Your Church, Step 5: Top 5

by: Will Mancini

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Now its time to identify your top five ideas.

I recommend a two step process. Make sure you have had at least two weeks to reflect on your list of 100 or more ideas. The team should have a copy of all of these.  This is important as the creative blitz may produce excitement around ideas that won’t last. A great tagline will get even better in the first few weeks after some reflection.

Step A: After one week, have everyone list their top three ideas. Use this to create a ranked list with the highest rank at the top, but with all of the ideas still on the list.

Step B: Take one more week and encourage active reflection on the list. Now you have had at least two weeks from the brainstorm. Take a final vote and ask people to select their top choice.

Use this process to create the top five list.

GO TO Step SIX: Test your tagline with people outside of your ministry

Return to Church Tagline Post Overview

Tags: Awareness, Tagline, Top 5, Will Mancini

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Developing a Tagline for Your Church, Step 4: Collaborative Awareness

by: Will Mancini

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When developing a tagline for your ministry it’s important to consider the taglines of two other kinds of organizations in your ministry environment. Think of this next piece as a step toward ministry environment awareness. There are two kinds of organizational taglines to consider.

1. Collaborative environment: Other ministries similar or proximate to yours.
2. Competitive environment: Non-ministry alternatives that compete for attention and time of potential members.

For a local church, the collaborative environment (we are being kingdom-minded by not calling this “competitive”) includes other churches in you area that are trying to position themselves and build awareness.  Many churches find two to three others in this category.  For a competitive environment, think of any place that people may go other than attending church. Do you live near a waterfront community? What is the competition saying? Do you have lots of kids sports around? What promise are they trying to make?

Why is this scan important?

Before you begin reducing your brainstormed list, you want to know what’s happening around you so you can differentiate your “voice” and messaging. If you use a tagline similar to another ministry it may create confusion. For example a church once advertised itself as “the church that rocks.” Right down the street was a big sign for the “Church on the Rock.” Inadvertently, they were building awareness for the church down the street. (And as you might guess the promise didn’t fit.)

Keep your list from your collaborative awareness is a place for the team to see or reference for the next step:

GO TO Step FIVE: Reduce your list to the top five taglines

Return to Church Tagline Post Overview

Tags: Awareness, Collaborative Awareness, Tagline, Will Mancini

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Developing a Tagline for Your Church, Step 3: Team Brainstorm

by: Will Mancini

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With your new two-word brand promise in place, its time to engage a team brainstorm to list many, many, many and then many more tagline ideas.

The key here is, as you might have guessed, quantity. Most teams don’t spend enough time creating a high quantity of ideas. Remember in brainstorming, no idea is a bad idea and half-baked ideas might lead to break-through ideas!

Now the key with this brainstorm is that you want to think, “outside of the box, but inside of the brand promise.” That is you want to list ideas that flow out of your particular promise.

For example, if you brand promise is authentic excitement you might list:

• Discover something real
• Experience something real
• No perfect people allowed
• Life so good, life so real
• Know genuine life
• Stop being bored
• Lighting up true life
• Lighting up real life
• Unreal community, real life
• True excitement
• Live actually
• Fellowship of excitement

If you don’t have a list of 100 ideas you don’t have enough ideas.

GO TO Step FOUR: Review Taglines from other Ministries and Competitors

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Tags: Awareness, Tagline, Team Brainstorm, Will Mancini

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