Web Presence

Churches should stop thinking JUST about their website and start thinking about their web presence.

I'm going to keep this blog short, but it could scroll for hours.

Q. Why focus on your web presence?
A. Because a website is not enough.  A website may be little more than a brochure that no one ever finds and no one gives away.  Speaking in Solomon terms it may be merely vanity.

Q. What do you mean by web presence?
A. All the ways in which your cause, community, and corporation can benefit from being online.

Q. Whose job is it to think about this?
A. Everyone's (staff and church body), but the senior leadership has to lead.  However, there better be someone on point!  Someone with delegated authority who knows their value added is to champion this specific area of concern.

Q. Why should we think this way?
A. Because whether you realize it or not you have a web presence and it is going to define and impact your church whether you want it to or not.

Here's a quick story.  We had 27 people from Europe visit our newest campus in North Miami last week.  They came because they found us online.  That's 27 people who swelled the ranks of our usual 100 person crowd in this brand new campus. 

They added energy to our worship gathering.  They blessed us. We blessed them!  I wish I had been there, but I was at Pines.  Sure, they found our website, but the website could be found so easily because of our web presence (all the other things we're doing online).  What is even better is that our web presence lived up to the live experience (according to them).

What if you spent $15,000 on a great website that over-sells who you are or is out-of-date?  What if your hyper cool website is not in search results because it is all flash and invisible to search engines?  What if you are in a high density area with lots of churches and you show up 11th in a search because no one on your staff blogs and comments on other blogs and links back to your website?  What if your people are online and they don't know how to help your church's web presence?

This last question is the one that is at the top of my mind now for Oasis Church.  Our people are online.  Are we helping them connect people back to our church?  Are we doing all we can to help them create, extend, and enhance our web presence?

Comments

[Jean-Guy]

Great post Kevin, it's very important not to think of the website as a static medium that might give out some information for a few people but as a growing community. It's weird how the message this week was all about community and growing in our faith and now more about it.

Building an online community doesn't require much more than a website that gives people what they need, that is continuously updated and also fun. I am very proud to show people the visitoasis website and say this is the church i go to and i believe that others are doing the same.

Keep up the great work !!

God bless

[Keith Rowley]

Great point, but this is hard when most of the key people in your Church are too busy to spend time online, and still others don't really "get" the whole blog etc thing.

As the person at my church in charge of our web presence I struggle with this quite a lot as my contribution is simply not enough by itself.

[Kevin McCord]

Hi Keith,

That's very true. A lot of very useful things don't get done because of how busy we are. I'm not really hoping my pastors and staff start spending more time online as much as I am hoping we'll have a solid understanding of how we as a church are already online and how being there can help or hurt our mission. Time online will increase naturally as people find effective tools and mediums to get their work done. They need examples and sometimes a push.

Part of what I do is to simply put ideas out there consistently and patiently until one or two stick. There are things I instigate and things I just do myself. I'm always building the case for us to look online no matter what we are discussing or trying to accomplish.

I am very fortunate to have a senior pastor who gets the value even if he doesn't understand the technology all the time.