01.04. How to Have a Big Ministry on a Small Budget
Pray – Get God’s Ideas First
Pray - and ask the Lord what sort of Internet ministry He wants. Ask Him about:
The Timing
The Spiritual Tone
The Target group
The Technology
The Name
The Branding
Find Your Spiritual Passion
What would Jesus do with your website?
How would Jesus treat visitors to the website?
Does the website convey a sense of the sacred?
Does it reach out and welcome people?
Does it extend God’s Kingdom in some way?
Does it meet a need that Jesus would want to have met?
Have you got a word from God about it?
Put Ministry First
See your website as a ministry that changes lives and NOT just as a brochure that advertises a church or a corporation.
Put the ministry aspects first and foremost.
Give people a way to be transformed.
What changes do you want to make? Salvation, education, sanctification etc.
Tell stories.
Touch hearts and touch minds.
Think outreach - remember the seeking non-Christian, jargon free.
Be Specific As Possible
The more specific the focus the more people will visit your website! (Look at the Alexa top 500 to see this)
Very general websites get lost in Google (e.g. a website about “God”)
Unique specific websites rise to the top of the search engines for their keywords
Unsuccessful: Buying groceries online
Successful: Buying vintage wines online
The power of ‘the long tail’
Plan – Do a SWOT Analysis
Strengths – internal assets and strengths
Weaknesses – internal liabilities and weaknesses
Opportunities – external openings and opportunities
Threats – external competitors, physical, legal and technological threats.
Plan – 5 W’s and H
Who?
What?
When?
Where?
Why?
How?
The Learning Curve
Allow 3 – 6 months of trial and error to learn about the technology and the market.
You will probably completely redesign the website at the end of this time.
No sacred cows.
If it works do more of it.
If it does not work, then stop doing it.
Learn WHO really wants what you are offering.
Learn HOW they want it delivered to them.
Learn WHAT things need to change in your website design and structure.
Make no major investments during the learning phase.
Be Realistic
Unrealistic: To be the next Christian MySpace (unless you have a few million dollars to spend on a server farm and bandwidth). Realistic: To have an online ministry to thousands of NFL fans.
Specific
Unique
Under Your Control
Low Bandwidth Demands
Not Requiring An Army of Volunteers / Staff
Low Legal / Administrative Burdens
Low Fixed Costs
Where Many Folks Fail
Sites requiring lots of other people to do some work: Wikis, MySpace clones, large specialized forums.
Sites requiring constant moderation and legal alertness e.g. youth discussion sites, chat rooms, video upload sites.
Sites requiring video or audio streaming or any complex technology that can go AWOL at 2 am in the morning.
Sites requiring their own dedicated server – a server is a lot of hard work.
Keep It Simple Stupid
Simple for your users to use and for you to maintain.
Simple and clear in its concept (not too big and fuzzy).
Simple in the amount of work that needs to be done by users if it is to be a success.
Simple in its structure so it can grow without becoming ‘messy’.
Simple and clear in its ‘ethos’ so that you do not have conflicting groups at war with each other.
Outsourcing High-Cost Services
Minimize technical load, bandwidth cost and legal responsibility by ‘outsourcing’ to free or low-cost services.
Use a web-hosting service so you do not have to manage your own servers e.g. 1and1.com.
Use Yahoo groups for your egroups.
Use Gmail and Google Apps For Your Domain rather than being responsible for people’s email.
Put your video content on YouTube and let them pay the bandwidth fees and just link to it.
Don’t Re-invent the Wheel
9.9% of the time the service or application that you require has already been done and is out there somewhere - and is often available for free.
It is better to spend 3 hours searching on Google than 3 months writing code.
Go to forums and ask other people what they use to do X (the task / function you want done).
Sometimes you can add two products together to get the result that you want.
Effectiveness is more important than uniqueness.
Start Lean
Start with just a few services on your website and then add others as traffic grows.
Focus people on to the main things.
No one now comes to a website because it has so many bells and whistles, instead they are confused and distracted rather than impressed.
People leave websites that they see have many unused forums, etc.
Undisciplined areas full of spam posts look terrible.
Do what you can easily maintain, moderate and keep active and professional looking.
Zero Cost Online Ministry
Chat room ministry (in existing chat rooms).
Newsgroup ministry.
Blogging –Blogger.com or Wordpress.com.
Writing articles for ezines.
Running an egroup such as a Yahoo group.
Volunteering as a moderator on someone else’s website.
Uploading Christian videos to YouTube.
Uploading ebooks to Christian ebook collections.
You produce the content and let someone else host it!
Low Cost Online Ministry
Get a low-cost web hosting provider such as www.1and1.com ($4.95 a month).
Get a domain name from a reseller such as godaddy.com, enom.com, or 1and1.com.
Get a LINUX website.
Use LAMP (Linux, Apache, MYSQL, PHP) software which is often Open source, free, and powerful.
Get images from everystockphoto.com.
Media on the Cheap
Use Audacity for podcasting.
Use other people’s bandwidth for free / low cost.
Upload to hosting sites (do not host your own).
Get a virtual server if you have a lot of media.
Host your media on Gospelcom media server! (Some cost recovery)
Stages for a Website
Prayer
Planning
Web hosting package
Register Domain name
Branding
Initial site design
Upload content
Search engine optimization
Advertising & Free Publicity
Visitors Arrive
Get Feedback / Web Statistics
Evaluation & Improvement
Redesign
Getting Ready
Web Hosting: http://webhostinggeeks.com/
Bluehost, Yahoo, 1and1.com are OKDomain names: enom.com , godaddy.com, tucows.com, Register.com
Get a domain name that is easy to remember even if it is a bit long.
www.crocodilesarecute.com is better than www.xcfgt.com
Branding
Don’t try to appeal to everyone
Decide on a ‘look’ that reflects your core mission and purpose
Be instantly recognizable to your key demographic so they say ‘Yes that’s me.!’
Decide of a color combination and a simple logo
Avoid kitsch – flashing gifs, Amazing Grace, video clips of the Passion – unless you audience likes kitsch.
Initial Site Design
Keep it simple, easy to navigate and use.
Put only what is working well on the site when you start off
Simple but credible.
Contact details, usage policy, privacy policy, statement of beliefs etc.
Always have a How To Become A Christian link somewhere.
Go easy on commercialism.
Uploading Content
Use a FTP client such as FileZilla.
Upload your files to the www/html/ directory on your server.
The main page should be called index.html.
The pages should be arranged in a hierarchy with the index page at the top of the tree.
The hierarchy should only go three or four layers deep at most.
The index page should have the key links to the most important material on the website.
Plan the structure well at the start as it is very hard to change later on as other people, and search engines will link to your content.
Short directory names, all lower case, and eight letters or less, are helpful.
Getting Known
WebCEo – great FREE search engine optimization software – submits your URL to hundreds of search engines http://webceo.com/ .
Put URL on email signature, business cards, etc.
Advertise (tactfully) in appropriate egroups and newsgroups.
Have a ‘recommend to others’ button on your website.
Email campaigns to opt-in recipients.
Feedback and Interactivity
Invite people to comment, feedback, leave prayer points etc.
Forms
Guestbooks
Forums
Message Boards
Surveys / Polls
Email Us…
Live Chat (only if you have a LOT of traffic)
http://www.resourceindex.com/ (has heaps of good website add-ons)
Web Statistics
Your web host will probably give you some statistics.
Or you can use a package such as Awstats.
Hits is not as important as unique visitors, length of time on the website and what pages they are mainly looking at.
Country is important if you are trying to reach a particular region.
Saving on Software
www.1computerbargains.com (for 501c3 organizations)
www.openoffice.org – free substitute for Microsoft Office
The GIMP – replacement for Photoshop - http://www.gimp.org/
Open Source Software – www.sourceforge.net
List of free HTML editors: http://www.thefreecountry.com/webmaster/htmleditors.shtml
Volunteers
Students
Interns
Retirees
People with at least 2 hours a week to spare
Clearly defined task.
Sense of the overall mission and its importance.
Some autonomy / respect
Fun – pizza, coffee
Relationship
Equipment that works for them.
Funding
PayPal: www.paypal.com
Ikobo: www.ikobo.com
Have a good ministry plan and funding proposal
Relationship based fundraising / Friend-Raising
Do not expect a salary during the first year (keep your day job)
Try www.gobignetwork.com for venture capital
Try Generous Giving Marketplace for grants: http://www.generousgiving.org/marketplace/
Marketing
Make your own business cards and brochures.
Do press releases for local papers desperate for news & to Christian news services e.g. ANS.
Send faxes to new outlets with big bold headings.
Try your denominational magazine.
Have a clear newsworthy concept that you communicate over and over again.
Show who you are helping and how you are helping them.
Get some books & articles on how to get free publicity.
Conclusion
A small ministry can have a big impact for Christ if it is well-thought out and tightly targeted.
It is possible to greatly reduce costs and start-up can be done on even as little as $100 a year.
Use the power of other people: networks, free advice, volunteers, free online services, free press releases, etc.
Cover everything in prayer – God is your greatest ally and can multiply your ministry!