From Social Media to Social Ministry by Nona Jones

Author:Nona Jones [Jones, Nona]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Zondervan
Published: 2020-06-02T00:00:00+00:00

RESOURCING

An obvious benefit of a Facebook campus is that you don’t have to budget for the rent, utilities, maintenance, and capital improvements inherent with a physical location. While the “hard costs” of a physical location aren’t part of the equation, I would encourage you to resource a couple of “soft costs.” Soft costs are essentially everything that isn’t nailed to a foundation or housed in a building. For the purposes of your online church, I recommend investing in marketing, communications, and ministry teams.

I find it particularly interesting that in most churches the largest budgets are dedicated to the operations that help “maintain the aquarium” when we’ve been called to be fishers of people. We spend incredible sums of money on the building, instruments, lighting, church programs, and accounting systems—things that don’t compel anyone to go out into the deep oceans of our communities to win souls. Instead, we spend more money on the fraction of people sitting in our seats than the mass of people beyond our walls. It’s no wonder, then, that church attendance is plateauing or declining in two out of three churches in America. As the people we’ve catered to move or pass away, our church income inevitably declines, which means church leaders have to start making budget cuts, and without fail, the first place cuts get made is typically in the one area where growth is its central focus: marketing and communications (MarCom).

We spend more money on

the fraction of people sitting

in our seats than the mass of

people beyond our walls.

Although the words marketing and communications are often used interchangeably, they actually sit on opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of goals. Marketing is focused primarily on opportunities for growth. Its goal is to use data to better understand the ever-evolving, emerging needs driving a target population to choose (or not choose) you when they need your service. A good marketer will take it a step further. They’ll uncover the psychological, emotional, and in our case, spiritual needs you must meet to help people see their need for you. The job of marketing is to help you stay ahead of trends so you can be the “market” leader in meeting the needs of your target population. Dying churches see their target population as the people in their pews. Thriving churches see their target population as everyone else.

Dying churches

see their target

population as the

people in their

pews. Thriving

churches see their

target population

as everyone else.

Communications, on the other hand, focuses on facilitating information-sharing within an organization. While marketing focuses externally, communications focuses internally. The goal of communications is to maximize the probability that a message will be received as intended, so a communications team should think about which platforms and channels to use to share different types of content. The communications team should know about emerging technology and tools to help reach more people with a higher level of fidelity. In the case of communications, success is often measured by how many people received the content that was shared and took the action that was intended.

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