Vision 100 IT takes us back to School

Thanks heaps to the Vision 100 IT team. This evening I spent a good while (along with leaders from a bunch of churches) thrashing through how to best use our various IT systems to manage our data and communicate with our church, and beyond.

Here are their six things on 'How to do IT well':

1. The pastor has to own IT. It's about consistency of vision and communication.
2. Have regular content, up to date content.
3. Get your 'Key Person' - you need that person. To update content.
4. Key Systems - get a sense of what you need and how to write that. Regularly oversee it with your key person.
5. Coordinate/Integrate all of your communication.
6. Make it Look Good - if it looks crumby people will think its dodgy. Quality of photos matter. It all matters.

Some Advice on using Social Media

• If your ministry or church isn't on Facebook, it's not on the Internet.
• All of your staff have gotta be on there.
• For members and visitors to see your involvement in ministry, in your particular ministries, then they see how you work and where there are opportunities to serve.
• Don't think of Facebook as a commercial front door, think of it as a window on your gathering, a window into your church. Incidentally, that way it actually becomes a commercial front door.
• Embrace the change: make Facebook for your church. Make your website for your visitors.

Some Warnings from the Graveyard of Social Media.

• Don't blindly link between social media--Facebook to Twitter linked, but then only commenting on one of those. Death.
• Facebook events are potentially where your ministry dies. If you don't invite people, post the image, include times, places, etc. then there's no point having it.

Some Best Practices in Social Media (esp. Facebook)

• Events: Fill out the detail first, when you begin.
• Don't put stuff into your page which is likely to change and get outdated unless you're confident it will get updated (so write a procedure). Provide links to your website, which will be updated.
• If it's announced up the front, then it should feature in your social media.
• Feed (some of) your new website content to your Facebook page.  
• Write a procedure to creating events on Facebook (or doing other things). Procedures for social media are a good and helpful thing (especially for delegating, quite apart from helping you out).
• Interaction. Do it.
• Give your posts personality.
• Twitter. Time is the filter on Twitter. Whereas popular posts stick around on Facebook.
• So e.g. rosters posted to twitter won't really get caught by many people.
• Organisations on Twitter must post regularly.