Strong Organizational Support
Your congregation has bought into the concept of a church website – they understand that it’s an investment worth making, and they’re prepared to tell everyone they know about it. And your leadership has gotten up in front of the congregation and committed the time, money, and cheerleading prowess to the project to ensure it’s resourced properly. Congratulations.
Except that getting pregnant usually isn’t the hard part.
Your congregation can buy into the idea, but there’s a big difference between vocal support and following through on the commitment. Here’s where they need to step up and provide regular updates and content to the website maintainers, so they have something to put on the website.
If you take only one thing away from this series of articles, I want it to be this: the best way to guarantee the success of your church’s website is to have a “shepherd”. A shepherd is someone who has one job: organize and run the content aspect of the website. This person really needs just two skills. First, they need a decent comfort level with computers. Assuming you have your website handled professionally (more on that in a future post), it should be updateable by use of some web forms. They basically just need to log on to the website, type in some content, and click the “Submit” button. They don’t need to know how to build a website, or do much more than use Microsoft Word.
Secondly, they need to be comfortable nagging the crap out of anyone and everyone who has something that should be online. This means talking to the guys who are enthusiastic about it (Youth Group leaders/members, usually) and those who aren’t (any groups whose members are over 60). If the system managing the website allows it, this person should also be able to set other members up to make their own changes – i.e. updating their calendar, posting their own photos. This leaves the shepherd free to hand-hold the groups who need him/her to do all the updates for them. Generally, you should find that as long as the shepherd is enthusiastic about their job, and takes as their personal mission keeping the church website updated and maintained, they can find a way to get pretty much everything online.
However, that church leadership (Pastor, council, etc.) needs to have his/her back. If a group is giving them a hard time about it, for whatever reason, the Authority in this case needs to step in and make it happen. It is a lot of work to make sure you keep the shepherd in the loop with your group, but it’s necessary and it will improve your website in the long run.
The shepherd ought to be one of the first people you identify when you start crafting a website strategy, and they should start working on the ‘pipeline’ almost immediately. But no matter how good they are, they still need the commitment of the rest of the church to work with them on this. They’re a valet, not a chauffeur.