Wil Ranney

The Foundation for Evangelism’s 2011 Culture of the Call Church is Collegiate United Methodist Church in Ames, Iowa. The Culture of the Call Church Award is presented annually to one United Methodist Church with a history of having people 35 of younger respond to God’s call to fulltime Christian service as a result of their being active in the life of the church. Director of Discipleship, Technology and Communication, Wil Ranney, took a moment to discuss their move into using today’s Social Media tools to communicate and build relationships with their congregation online…

The biggest challenge facing established churches in online ministry is internet literacy amongst our oldest members. Often times, decision makers will have these great wizbang ideas that never catch on, because they can’t seem to get the critical mass involved that it takes to form a vibrant online community. Since our elders make up the majority of established congregations, they must also make up the core of our online ministries. The second problem is related to the first: you can’t just start a website or a Facebook page and expect people to use them. It takes a deliberate plan to get people involved, just like any other church program. The good news is that once online ministries are up and running, they often take less effort to maintain, as the community itself is empowered to contribute.

When I decided to go all in with Facebook at our church, I came up with several ideas that bore fruit.

First, I collected every member’s email address and added them to our contact directory (I use Gmail). With some folks, I helped them to get an email address set up, though in our church over 90% have an email account. Next, I allowed Facebook to look through my contacts so that I could send a friend invitation to every member of the church. About 30% of the people became my friend in the first week. Another 15% signed up for Facebook so that they could become my Facebook friend. Next, I invited all of my church Facebook friends to “like” our Facebook page (not group).  We quickly got to about 76 followers.

The next thing I did was give a presentation about online ministry to our largest, older adult Sunday school class on the topic of Online Ministry. I was sure to assuage their fears of security risks, to educate them about the life-changing ministry that’s happening online, and to encourage them that they too can do it. This netted about 20 more followers. Finally, I held a competition. I promised that if we got to 150 followers, that I would take a random new follower, AND the person who invited them, out to a nice lunch.

It worked!

In concert with my recruitment plan, I also had a content strategy, which included posting a recording of the weekly sermon online and getting people to discuss, amongst invitations to church events, spiritual questions for reflection. Something amazing happened though. Before I had a critical mass, nobody was joining the site on their own volition, but now that I do have a critical mass the number of followers has continued to go up with no real effort on my part. You might even say the Holy Spirit had taken over recruitment at that point. Not that I won’t ever do recruiting again, but it’s nice to know that a traditional recruiting strategy can pay dividends in establishing your online ministry.