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The best way to get your church attendees to get familiar with your community website is to simply require them to use it. If there are upcoming church events, tell the attendees to register for it on the website. If you want to provide resources, tell everyone that it can be found on the website. Once you start to integrate your website into your church, people will regularly head to the site in order to access and find information. This can transition into them getting involved with the other interactive elements of your site like your blog and online forum.
Build a Great Design and Get Set Up with a Reliable Web Host
If you want people actually come to your website and revisit it, you need to create a great design for it. The website does not need to have the most impressive visual design but it needs to be functional and provide a great user experience. To get started, you should opt with WordPress for your platform and find a reliable WordPress hosting company to get set up with. Many WordPress hosting companies also provide themes that allow you to easily design and build your site, so these tools will help you get your website to where it needs to be.
Require that Your Attendees Need to Use the Website
The best way to get your church attendees to get familiar with your community website is to simply require them to use it. If there are upcoming church events, tell the attendees to register for it on the website. If you want to provide resources, tell everyone that it can be found on the website. Once you start to integrate your website into your church, people will regularly head to the site in order to access and find information. This can transition into them getting involved with the other interactive elements of your site like your blog and online forum.
Publish Content on the Church Blog on a Regular Basis
Aside from putting important information on your website, you need to engage your audience with great content. Create a blog on WordPress and come up with content that your attendees will appreciate. Make sure that it caters to a wide audience as writing for a specific group will end up alienating a lot of people. This can be done by creating diverse content that targets different groups whether it’s teenagers, women, husbands, etc… You also want to avoid content that’s overly preachy and more focused on offering advice to your church attendees.
Continue Conversations with Forums
Rather than ending your content at your blog, you want to ask for attendees to talk about the topic you’ve written about. You can use any one of the many forum plugin for WordPress and set up a basic forum for your church. To make sure that people get involved, include a link to the forum and ask for their feedback. Also, avoid a complicated registration process as that can deter many people from posting in the first place.
Set Up a Subscription Box for Email Updates
In order to start an interactive community, you need a way to keep in touch with your church members. The simplest way to do this is to set up an email newsletter and put up a subscription box where users can sign up to receive updates. The email newsletter can link to your latest blog content and invite users to participate in the hot forum topics. You will need to use a multi pronged approach to really capture the attention of church members and get them involved in the online community.
Reach Out With Social Media
Social media is the next best way to stay in touch with your church members. Make sure you put up social media follow links on your website. Social media is a little bit different from email because you want to make posts that are engaging. You want to get followers to respond, share and like your posts. By getting involved, they are spreading the word about the church and showing other church members that they are engaged in a conversation with you. This can influence other church members to join in on the conversation. The reason this happens is because many of your church members will already be following each other on social media.
Get All of the Staff Involved
Starting an interactive community website for your church will need the backing of your entire staff. Don’t leave the community building to just a few key people. Get the entire staff involved in the process. Let them publish blog posts, add updates on the site, lead forum conversations and contribute ideas for growing the community. Your online church community will take off far faster by doing this. Leaving the job to a few people will function more like an administrative task than a team effort.
Those are some solid ideas for starting an interactive community website for your church. It’s not easy to get church members to get involved with your online church community with all the other distractions they’re facing. That’s why you need to put in a strong effort to capture their attention and keep it. The great thing about starting the community is that once you get some traction, you’ll find that the community will start growing organically and really start taking off.
