Churches are made up of many ministries with needs as diverse as the people they serve—and these needs extend to the church website. So how can these different ministries, with different needs, expect to work together on website content development?
Content Strategy can go a long way in fostering an environment for collaboration. Here are three steps that can help you establish this collaborative environment.
Content Strategy: What Are Your Content Goals?
The process of determining your website’s content goals can be collaborative in itself. Getting your ministry stakeholders working together early will ensure that your church website meets everyone’s needs. Additionally, it will begin a foundation for future web collaboration.
Get your ministries’ representatives together and ask some questions to help decide these goals.
- What do you want website visitors know about your ministry?
- What actions do you want them to take after visiting your website?
- What will make web visitors keep coming back?
Some ministries within your church may answer these questions differently and have different content goals. Others may find common ground. Whatever the case, everyone will appreciate having their voice heard and will be open to future collaborative projects.
Tactics: How Will You Achieve Your Goals?
Now that you have established your content goals, you must decide how you’ll accomplish them. Together, choose which strategies you’ll employ to make your content successful.
- How will you present your ministries to your users—audience-focused navigation and/or a landing page list [like this one]?
- What types of media will you use to show your ministry at work—blogs, videos, news articles?
- How will your home page introduce your ministries—links, banners, ads?
Resources: Can You Share or Combine?
Setting goals and determining tactics are great steps. But how will this content get created? Who will produce and maintain it? A blog is no use if it’s no one is able to keep it updated. A monthly video series is unrealistic if staff or volunteers are not in supply.
To help you create sustainable content, you’ll need to assess your resources. Using those same web stakeholders, build a list of all possible content sources between you.
People
Does Children’s Ministry have a volunteer who works as a videographer? See if he’s interested in creating videos for other ministries.
Skills and Gifts
Is your Women’s Ministry leader passionate about writing? Maybe she can help your men’s pastor create a blog and give him ideas for entries.
Existing Content/Workflows
Do your ministries create announcements for your weekly bulletin? Repurpose this content for your website.
Anytime your ministries can share resources or work together, good things can happen—in ministry and with web content.
How do You Foster Collaboration?
Have you joined forces with other ministries to launch an exciting project?
Hold a special service?
Create awesome web content?
Leave your stories in the comments.
[Image via Ranil Amarasuriya]
Wayne says
Amen to this! All too often, the church website is tightly controlled by the administrative office, with ministries given little or no say in the matter. This usually results in each ministry putting out its own website, blog or facebook page, and pretty soon the church has dozens of online resources that are not coordinated in any way
Far better for the church to realize that its web presence is a resource for all aspects of ministry, just like the church building itself. No front office would pretend to know everything that the preschool needs, or the music director needs, or the bible study groups need, in the physical church building. Similarly, no front office should be making sole decisions about the church’s web presence. The process needs to be collaborative from the start, with all ministries as well as member representatives, involved from the start.
Bryan Young says
Wayne, I’m glad you are in agreement with this post. It’s not hard to unify all the ministries under one website with all the great CMS options that are out there. In fact, the company that I work with, iMinistries, (http://www.iministries.org) has a ministry feature built right into the CMS. It creates a powerful way to organize and publish content that is specific to each ministry. They can have their own news, events, blogs, etc. built right into one single website.