Have You A Members Only Club!

Members are important to any church website.  They have signed up to coming back over and over again.  They’ve said to you that they believe in what you are doing and want to see more of it.  Within a church environment this is ofter the members of the congregation, the church, the assembly and so on.  They are the people who come along each week to church and want to find out what’s going on!

Treat your members well

Most churches have at least 50 people that can be considered members.  I know some have less and many have a lot more.  But regardless of the size the members are an important audience for your church website.  They’ll come back often to the site if you provide them with relevant interesting information.  For example photos of what’s happening in the church or perhaps details of the next alpha course along with a down loadable invitation for them to give to their friends.  However they won’t come back if you just feed them the same information as a general site visitor gets – location, service times, vision etc.  They want material that is aimed at them!

The great thing about members is they’ll spread the details of the website to others.  It’ll be easy for them to send a link to their friends at Christmas to tell them about the Nativity or at Easter to tell them of the church easter egg hunt.  If they are familiar with the site (because they come to it often) they’ll send the link rather than write an email with the details.  So the cool thing about looking after your members is that you’re also giving them the tools to evangelise and tell others about God.

Members are generally pretty easy to please.  You probably already know the things you need to tell them about but in case you want a few “getting started” thoughts:

• Events listing
• Speakers and topics
• Duties (door, coffee, Creche etc)
• Youth work

and so on …

The key thing about handling members is to make it easy for them to join and simple for them to log in.  Get this right and all your church members will sign up, especially if others tell them of the good stuff they can get by signing up – photos of kids etc.

When designing the material the core types remain the same: dynamic and static.  In this case the static material will probably change but just not too frequently – like lists of who’s doing what.  The dynamic material will of course change often and the more the better.

So in summary:

• Get your members to sign up to your church website.
• Check that they managed to get logged in and if they didn’t step in and help them
• Build great logged in area resources to encourage people to log in
• Check that people are logging in and if they are not then ask them why.
• Remember that for every person that logs in there is an opportunity for them to share their site with their non Christian friends.