I fully admit to being a very amateur gardener.

With a lot of dedication, a little luck and willingness to learn I generally am assured of a bumper crop of tomatoes each year, regardless if this one variety is supposed to produce fruit in 65 days, this one in 75 days and this one in 85 days. They all come at once!!

And one trick I learned is to never plant a solo tomato plant. Plants, flowers and trees require cross-pollination.

The same is true between analogue and digital. We must stop thinking of them as separate but part of the means in which we tell our story, the church’s story and the story of Jesus Christ. They do not exist separately but work in tandem to cross-pollinate.

After all, we want to be able to leverage the social networks of our parishioners to grow the church. The best means of encouraging growth is getting them to interact with your church on digital platforms.

Each week we have a captive audience of people who want to hear what we have to say. Seize this opportunity to always direct parishioners back to Facebook, Twitter and your website. Have announcements slides with your social media accounts, email announcements each week with links to
your social media accounts, always include web addresses on all printed material and ask people to sign up to Facebook events like you would any other sign-up sheet.

This ensures your parishioners move from analogue to engaging with you digitally. It also ensures that those engagements will be seen by their family and friends.

This cross-pollination will  help your church grow, both in digital footprint but also with analogue visitors on Sunday mornings.

There is a very fine line between public and private and on Social Media which can be razor thin. Many of us have signed up for Facebook, Twitter or other platforms as private individuals. The terms of service of those platforms also clearly articulate that the content we post and the individual user controls who has accesses to that content.

However, when social media is used for professional purposes, the line between personal and professional can be blurred. When using “private” accounts to promote the churches and institutions to which we belong, that which may have been considered private becomes public. Once that line has been crossed, we cease to be private individuals expressing opinions. Our private opinions and accounts become extensions of the church or institution that we represent — for good or for ill.

Many professional clergy and church leaders use personal accounts to help further the overall reach of church’s message. It is a great way of living the Great Commission and being a visible sign of Christ. And I would encourage people to continue to live as outward visible signs of God’s reconciliation with the world. But acting this way also needs to come with a caution.

If you use your personal account for church business – or any business for that matter – – actions in your personal life can have consequences for the church or institution you represent. You cease to be just an individual, but a representative. This is important to keep in mind when you delete, censor, debate or silence comments you don’t like.

If you blend your personal and public lives, your actions no longer just represent you, but they represent your specific parish and the church in general. It is always best to take a step back from the keyboard or device before posting something in the heat of the moment and ask how your words reflect the church. Am I living and posting in a way that reflects the image of Christ? Is the Kingdom of God served by this tweet or comment?

As we head towards the season of Lent, now more than ever is a good time to reflect upon our social media practices, how we engage with colleagues, parishioners and the wider world.

Your church’s digital communication is like connecting with a friend. If you call infrequently, you tend to drift apart. If you speak too often, you might feel like the friendship requires too much of your attention. You may consider changing your phone number or letting the call go to voice mail.

The same tension can be found online. While you want to stay in contact with friends and share events from your church and life, you also don’t want to spam your Facebook feed with too much too often.

Consistency is key. Your church’s communication plan should consider the frequency in addition to the tone of your communications. Consider when content will be posted, and how often (daily, weekly or a few times a week), and what sort of content will be shared. Just as infrequent posting says something about your community so does posting too often.

This can be a challenging task. Luckily, there are tools to help you schedule your social media posts so you can plan ahead instead of constantly considering when and what to post.

The first tool at our disposal is the native built-in scheduler on Facebook. This simple tool lets you load a series of posts ahead of time – say before a vacation or the busy Christmas season. This tool can be found in the drop-down menu next to the publish button on your page. Instead of publishing the post, simply schedule it.

Hootesuite.com has been my go-to for scheduling and managing social media accounts for years. I use the free version, which allows me to manage multiple social media platforms at once including Twitter and Facebook and schedule posts across multiple streams. The free version allows you to manage three different accounts through one convenient dashboard.

Another solution that has recently appeared on my radar is Buffer.com. The free version of Buffer is wonderful for scheduling posts but the dashboard only manages a single Facebook account. Despite this limitation, Buffer is a great solution for a church as it can schedule posts for your Facebook page, Twitter and Instagram accounts. If you happen to manage multiple Facebook pages, Twitter or Instagram accounts, you will need to upgrade to a paid version.

By scheduling posts in advance, you only need an hour or two a month to create consistency and an active social media presence. Much of the work of sharing content and promoting events can be scheduled in advance, freeing you from being tethered to your phone or computer daily. Think of it like mailing a letter, once you have placed it in the mailbox, you can walk away knowing it will be delivered, freeing you to focus on other areas of ministry while keeping your social media accounts consistently active.

“Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you” — Matthew 28:19-20

Matthew gives us a call to action and we measure our success by the number of disciples brought to our Lord.

By applying the same principles to our online communications, we can ensure we effectively achieve our Lord’s call to action.

Having a website for your church has become as much of a requirement as having a listing in the phone book. They’re essential for people to find you.

But once they do find your website, what action do you want them to take?

Do you want them to look at your Sunday service times? Sign up for your newsletter? Volunteer for a ministry?

What you want your visitors to do can help you get the results you want from your web presence. Having a well-defined call to action on your website means you can direct your users toward your desired action and measure how well you achieve your goal.

Driving people to your action is best achieved by a simple, clear call on your site.

A distinct button that says, “click here to register” or “visit us” is a good example of a call to action. When a user clicks on the link, you know that your website has achieved its goal.

Measuring the success of your call to action is easy with Google Analytics. By adding a tracking code, you can track how many visitors came to your site, and most importantly, how many of those did what you wanted them to do.

You can track visits to a given page, clicks of a button or downloads of a file, or you can define your own custom events to track.

By identifying clear and measurable goals for your website, you can design your site and content around driving traffic through your calls to action.

Once your goals are clearly defined, measuring success is just a matter of setting up analytics and tweaking your site until it is performing the way you want it to.

The end of 2015 is at hand. Budgets and plans for the coming year are being drawn up and leadership roles are being considered. This is an excellent time for a comprehensive survey of your parish’s communication plans and tools.

A good place to start is to review the current contracts you have with communication companies. What do you still need? And what should be re-evaluated?

Your current Internet, telephone, or web hosting plan may not have been updated for years and you may find much better deals are now available. A quick call to your service provider can yield better service, higher speeds, or cost savings in the hundred of dollars. Take a few minutes to make sure your plans are up-to-date and compare providers to get the best deal.

Next, look at what platforms you use to communicate the message of Christ to the wider world. Does the parish have a Facebook page or Twitter account? Have these been dormant or underused for some time? Who is responsible for maintaining the online presence of the parish? Is this a team effort or the responsibility of just one person?

The person (or persons) responsible for your external communications is an important selection and should be considered with equal importance as other parish roles.

This person is the voice of the parish, but as with many other positions, requires the support of the entire vestry. To maintain an active social media presence, the rest of the parish must commit to participate. Your selection of platforms to maintain may depend on this commitment.

Now is the time to cull or re-commit to the accounts that underused. While reducing your communications channels can seem like a step backward, it is better to focus on a few things well than to spread yourself too thin. Having a good, robust website and active Facebook page is better than having many platforms that are infrequently updated or underused.

Finally, ensure that the parish has control over all accounts and products. A well-intentioned volunteer who has been maintaining an account or website may leave and the parish would lose access to these accounts. The parish should protect itself from this all-too-common occurrence by ensuring that accounts are registered and paid for by the parish and not a single member, including the rector.

Adding an annual review of your communication strategy is a good practice to ensure you head into the new year with a message that is focused on the Great Commission and tools that are efficient and effective at spreading the Good News of Jesus Christ.