This week I met with our Student Ministry staff to layout next steps for our website including the roll out of WordPress MU. We will be using WordPress MU as the foundation of our social media strategy. I gave them the following planning  exercise to help facilitate a strategic social media framework for their ministry.

1. Where do you want each student to be spiritually before they leave JHigh or High School? How does your programming facilitate the movement of your students from where they are now to where you want them to be? Place your programs, events, and activities along the spiritual formation time line below. Activities designed for attracting new comers would appear on the left. Activities designed to grow existing Christians deeper in their Christian walk would be placed more along the right.
2. Make a list of all of the places on the web where your ministry is represented. Include the church’s website, blogs, facebook, twitter accounts, etc. Indicate how you are using each site and its intended audience.

Each site in your web presence should fall into one of two categories (courtesy of Chris Brogan and adapted by John Dale):

Home Base: This is a digital property you own and control. It is where you direct all internet traffic. Why? Because this is the place where you can best promote your ministry and those next steps for those in your ministry.

Embassies: These are microsites on social networks where you are actively engaged. Just like a country does business in embassies located in other countries, you will fully engage in conversations in your embassies on other networks. The most obvious example of an embassy is a Facebook fan page.

3. Using the list you made above, determine which sites are part of your home base and which are embassies within your web presence.




4. What sites (if any) do you need to discontinue? What sites (if any) do you need to add to optimize your web presence for moving your students through the spiritual formation timeline?




5. What role does each of your sites play in communicating that ‘next step’ in the spiritual formation timeline?
   • How much overlap exists between each site? Is the overlap beneficial?
   • If someone is a newcomer, which of these sites do you direct a person to first?
   • What ‘action’ do you want each person to take at each site?




6. What role does of each your sites play in supporting your leadership and parents? What ‘action’ do you want each leader or parent to take?




7. Considering the differences between websites, blogs, and social networks (shown below), what changes (if any) are needed to maximize the relevance of each site?

Social Media certainly poses its share of gotchas. For individuals, it’s identity theft. For corporations, it’s managing public relations nightmares (such as those experienced by Domino’s and Comcast). For churches and non-profits, we share these risks and more.

Three risks that churches and non-profits should plan for are:

Misrepresentation: There is a legal term called ‘Agency‘. Agency implies that an individual is authorized to act or to make statements on behalf of the church. While that may be true for spiritual and pastoral matters, there is probably very few who are authorized to operate as agents of the church or act on behalf of the church in issues pertaining to public/media relations, position statements, contractual agreements, legal engagements or any other agreements on which third parties rely. Therefore, staff will want to protect themselves and their church by making a distinction between what they say in their personal conversations online and statements made by the church.

Noise: Your church will have a presence in social media whether you like it or not. For most churches, the youth ministry staff is likely the first to have created pages/groups on Facebook or channels on YouTube in your church’s name. However, what happens when each ministry wants their own blog, Facebook page/group, YouTube channel, or Twitter feed? How easy is it to distinguish between those setup by the church versus those setup by members or even those setup by staff for personal use. What happens if you have a disgruntled employee leave? Does someone else have access to those accounts? If your church doesn’t have a clear and coordinated web strategy where your website, social media, and/or blogs are working together to send a unified message, then your church will lose its singular ‘voice’. It will succumb to the noise of a disjointed web presence leaving your audience confused as to where they should get the latest news and events of your church.

Taxation: The church, which falls under section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code, cannot participate or intervene in any political activity or campaign  (i.e. give any hint of favoring one candidate over another).  According to Revenue Ruling 2007-41, 2007-25 I.R.B. 1421 (June 18,2007) (page 10-11), participation or intervention may include but is not limited to  linking to other websites containing political content that you may or may not have any control over. As churches expand their web presence to include third party social networking sites, they should take caution in how they handle 3rd party content for which they have no control. Examples of uncontrolled content include ads and similarly related content, like what you may see on Facebook (related groups) or YouTube (related videos).

Here are some best practices to minimize the risks to your church or organization:

1. Make a Distinction Between Official and Unofficial When Defining Your Web Presence. Ask your staff to include a disclaimer where needed on their personal blogs or social network accounts. Similarly, the church should include a disclaimer on any 3^rd party sites (such as Facebook, YouTube, etc) that disclaims any association with uncontrolled content (i.e. ads and related content). Include the church logo or at least the mark within your logo in all of the profile pictures on social networking sites to let your audience know who represents the church and who does not.
2. Protect Your Logo! Prevent your logo from unauthorized use by staff or members since it is an official and visual representation of the church.
3. Coordinate your Social Media Initiatives. Get organized and develop a process for each ministry to coordinate their social media goals with the overall church. I recommend using Jeremiah Owyang’s “Hub and Spoke” model for getting organized and designating the Communications and/or IT Team as the ‘hub’ (but not gatekeepers) for coordinating the social media initiatives.
4. Monitor Your Web Presence Daily. Google Alerts and HootSuite are great tools to keep an ear out for chatter about your church. Mashable.com also has a great list of recommended tools. These will not only help you react to any problems, but more importantly they will equip you to proactively engage visitors or individuals who are talking about your church.
5. Develop Social Media Policies for Church Staff. Include it with the required paperwork for new employees. Post it on your church intranet for existing employees.
6. Remove Related Content Where Possible. By default, Facebook includes a list of related groups on your Groups page. This can be removed. Likewise, you can also remove related video from YouTube’s video embed code.

Recently, we have been discussing the role of blogs in our web strategy. We have several staff who already blog (view list). We encourage that, but we also wanted to begin incorporating blogs into our church’s web presence. These blogs are different from our staff’s personal blogs. They are more refined in scope and will add another layer of rich content for our church family that our website does not offer. In preparation for that roll-out, it was important for us to understand the differences in these mediums so we know best how to utilize them. I created a helpful chart to guide our staff.

As you can see, websites, blogs, and social media each have their respective functions. By confusing their place in social media, we endanger our relevance and effectiveness with our intended audience. As for our church (Second Baptist Church, Houston), blogs will be used for spiritual formation by providing ministry resources, Biblical perspectives, encouragement, leadership development and/or ministry best practices. Each blog will have a defined audience whether it is for SBC members and visitors, SBC leaders, or Christians and church leaders worldwide.

We also have used blogs for special events such as our annual Beach Retreat (read more). We limit event based blogs to mission trips, Beach Retreat, etc. where the event occurs out-of-town and over the span of several days.

On a technical note, we are using WordPress MU and hosting them internally on our servers. Thanks to Clifton Griffin, we also integrated the WordPress MU  login with Active Directory to give our staff a single sign-on experience.