Easy Tools, Free Tools

As you dip your toes in the water, you may find your congregants swimming up from beneath you, already in the water and excited to see you getting wet as well. A well-worn adage in the business world is that successful companies "fail often, fail fast, and fail cheap." This is the same advice management guru Clayton Christensen offers to struggling newspaper companies: Figure out quick and easy ways to try the new technologies.

It applies to congregations as well. It takes about five minutes to set up a basic social networking profile on a site like Facebook, for example. You can search the network for other members of your religious or personal life. If you discover that few others are on that network, then maybe it's not the right channel of communication. Try to figure out, then, what online or online-offline channels your congregants are currently using.

Another zero-cost investment is setting up a page on a photo-sharing website like Flickr or Photobucket. When a congregational event takes place—a picnic or youth retreat—ask people who are taking pictures there to upload some photos to that site, "tagging" those photos with a key phrase. Tags are simply a word or phrase attached to a piece of online content—whether a blog posting or photo or video—that make it easy for people to search and find that content. So if your congregation is called "The Hindu Temple of Greater Wichita," you might ask temple members to tag content with the phrase "wichita hindus" or "HTGW."

If a tag is well explained and congregational members start to upload content along with the tag, "a significant body of work develops that is associated with your congregation," said Lisa Colton of Darim Online. "If a fourteen-year-old girl goes camping on a youth trip and uploads her photos to Flickr, and I upload pictures with the same tag of my kids in the synagogue preschool, then after a while, you easily get three hundred or four hundred photos," she said. "These photos are taken from the perspective of the community—not from the perspective of someone who is trying to market the community. That's a good way to distribute power and responsibility in a congregation."

The other advantage, from a marketing point of view, is that a body of work assembled by a group of people capturing their personal experience of congregational life can feel more authentic and realistic than a brochure or even website developed by congregational administrators. "When you go to Amazon to find a book, do you read the publisher's synopsis? Maybe, but you probably pay more attention to the customer reviews and the number of stars the book averages," she said. "You don't know those reviewers, and yet you're more likely to buy a book that has five stars than a book that has two stars. People tend to trust their peers."

Similarly, a collection of photos uploaded by congregational members can give you a quick sense of what congregational life is really like. "If you see that 95 percent of the women are covering their heads or that the kippas are all black," then you know it's a fairly orthodox congregation, no matter what the website may say, said Colton.

Participants at the April gathering pointed out that posting photos in public, with or without caption information, raises potentially serious privacy issues. Is it okay for people to publish photos of other people online without their permission? Some people would be uncomfortable with the idea of having photos of children online, for example. Susan Elliott, the former communications director at St. Columba's Church in Washington, D.C., said the policy of the Episcopal Church is that while including captioned photos of minors in print newsletters is okay, those captions must be removed if the photos are included online. "Congregations might need to review their insurance policies as well," said Missy Daniel of Religion and Ethics Newsweekly.

Another option for a religious leader who enjoys writing is blogging. Helen Mildenhall reminded participants in April that people like personal stories. If you as a congregational leader feel ready to share your story, or just what you think and experience day-to-day, then blogging might be the right outlet, as it has been for Rick Lord.

Mildenhall referred to Pastor Tommy Nelson, a well-known Baptist leader and senior pastor of Denton Bible Church in Texas, who preached one morning, in a very straightforward way, about his own experience with depression. Nelson soon learned that sales of recordings of that sermon skyrocketed. "It came back down when I started talking about Paul again," he joked to an audience of students at Dallas Theological Seminary some months later. Mildenhall noted that Nelson's discussion of the issue was largely free of theology; it was his personal struggle that people seemed to connect with.

Campbell's research and the work of other scholars of the digital world confirm that online interaction very often revolves around stories and personal narratives. And as Brian Bailey, Web director of the Fellowship Church in Dallas and author of the book The Blogging Church, has written, blogging is primarily about telling your story, and the story of your church, to others.