Part 1 focused on first assessing the needs of your community.
Part 2 focused on assessing the strengths of your church and finding areas of overlap between community needs and church strengths.
Here are some practical suggestions for building a strategy to blog for community impact.
- Provide content that meets the identified community need. The goal is to become an expert in the community on the identified community need. Posts should focus on that need and not the blogger. No one wants to listen to your rants and raves unless you’re a celebrity.
- Blog consistently. My first blog had about 10 posts and then I ran out of stuff to say. It went months between posts. Get staff and key leaders writing remarkable content regularly. This way your blog becomes a library of resources regarding the identified community need. This will also help with search engine optimization and make it easier for your church to be found online. Your posts will provide content for others to link to. Think of links as people sharing about what you are doing. Links are the internet version of word of mouth.
- Encourage conversation. What makes blogs powerful is that they are social tools of communication. Comments are the mark of a good blog. Don’t moderate comments. It will stifle the conversation and prevent future comments. If your target audience is commenting, you will continue to learn and will often find fodder for future posts.
- Tell stories. As stories emerge from serving in the community, use the blog to tell the stories of life change. This adds credibility to the blog and will encourage people to participate in future events. This is another element of making your blog personal and social. Use stories to communicate the truths of your posts.
- Include media. Words only make for a boring blog. [We're pretty bad at this on plantingspace.com] Spice things up with pictures and the occasional video interview. Interview a key leader in the community and post the video to the blog.
- Write succinct posts. Blogs are typically poorly written. Keep your posts short and succinct. If you have to scroll it is too long. When possible stay under 300 words. If you have a long post, simply break it up into 3-4 posts. State one key point per post. This is the same with media. Video posts are becoming more and more common. Please don’t post a half-hour long video. The average YouTube video is 2.7 minutes. That’s a good standard to use for length.
CAUTION: The blog is a tool for enhancing your missional ministry. It is not your missional ministry. I doubt that if Jesus were around today he would be a full time blogger. Incorporate your blog into your overall strategy. The blog is a tool to communicate and bring awareness. It is not the missional ministry itself.
Next week: Benefits of Blogging for Community Impact
Tags: blogging · church planting · missional · new churches · Outreach/Evangelism1 Comment
[...] Part 3 focused on developing a blogging strategy. [...]