Building our online presence

This afternoon I joined a Webinar sponsored by the New Church Leadership initiative of the UCC. Here are some thoughts in the wake of that event.

While we don’t want to abandon other efforts to get the message out about Pilgrim, it does seem prudent that we make a special push in the next few months to bolster our web presence. This is an initiative we have talked about a lot, and Cindy, Brien and I met about it and came to some agreement about how to proceed. In every case, what we discussed locally was supported by this national webinar.

* We need a web page which gives easily accessible information about who we are and what we are doing and how we can be found.
* We should be active in a social networking site and Facebook is growing as the most robust vehicle for that sort of community building.
* We should be producing original content which we post frequently which allows folks to feel like a part of the community even if they don’t physically come to the church. [We are doing this on the blog.]

Some other suggestions from the webinar which we did not discuss include:

* Producing video content that we would post on YouTube
* Contact through twitter is more personal and not something adaptable to evangelism

So I would like us to have a conversation among those of us who are online which addresses some questions about our online presence.

1. How much is our online presence for the purposes of communicating within Pilgrim and how much do we want to be creating content which is for non-Pilgrims?
2. To the degree that we are creating content for non-Pilgrims, who are the people we are trying to reach. Certainly we are making information available to those who are looking for Pilgrim or for a UCC church, but beyond that, do we reach out to a particular group of people?
3. Who will be responsible for creating this content? We want our professional staff to be supported in creating content, but if this is going to be an expression of who Pilgrim is, it will have to come from as many Pilgrims as possible. What do we need to do to enable Pilgrims to create content?

Your turn!