Physical presence is easy for a church but what about digital presence?

This is part of the Basic series. For other posts click here.

Most churches have some kind of physical presence, a building of some sort with a sign that tells people what it is and when they meet.  Even churches that meet in other peoples buildings like a school or coffee shop tend to have some notice or banner telling people they are there.  If then, as churches, we work hard to make sure people can find us in the physical world then surely it is as important to make sure we tell people about where we meet and who we are in the digital world as well.

This post looks at some of the ways in which we can begin to create a digital presence for our church communities and organizations so that people can find us, see what we do, know when we meet and learn about us in more ways than one.

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The right foundations will help you further down the line.

This is part of the Basics series. For other posts please click here.

Hopefully you have answered some simple questions here and here, you have got your head around web presence and now its time to make some decisions about what that will look like.

In the past I have skipped this and the previous 3 steps altogether and it has been the undoing of the project every time.  Not laying the right foundations can mean you build your web presence in the wrong place or make it the wrong size and you will find that over time it begins to either crumble or become another deserted property.

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This is part of the Basics series. For other posts click here.

Whilst writing a post in this series I realised I was using the term web presence without really saying what I meant by it.  So today I thought I would explain what I mean and why it is important to think in these terms.

Why not just say website?

The difference between web presence and a website is massive and it is much more important to think in terms of having a presence on the internet before deciding what that presence will look like.   The reason for doing things this way round is that you can have a presence on the internet without having a website because web presence is created in many ways.  Below is a diagram of Digital Mission’s presence on the web to show some of the ways in which this can be made.

We are present in all these places.

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Is your website suffering from disrepair?

This is part of the Basics series. For other posts please click here.

Last week I asked 3 simple questions about your website that you may not have asked before.  These questions hopefully got you thinking about what your website was for and how much you and others used your site.  This week I want to continue with this exploration and begin to look at how your web presence could be enhanced and become much more useful to you and others that visit your site.  So some more questions for you…

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Is your church website a bit of a ghost town?

I have been asking myself this question for a while now, in fact a number of people I know have been asking this question or something similar for a while now.

So, as Digital Mission begins to offer some advice and guidance on helping your church, group or you as an individual engage a bit more with the digital age, I thought that asking this question would be a good place to start.  I am going to answer this and some other questions by looking at a specific period of time (from January 2011 till now) to give a time-scale to my answers.

When was the last time you visited your church’s website?

Well I searched my browser history on both my laptops and I can tell you I visited the website once… and that was to get the postcode for someone.  I can tell you in the same period of time I visited Google (my home page), twitter and facebook daily and in various ways (website, apps etc) and I also visited various other pages at least a couple of times a week.

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