How many times have you and I heard it: your website is your church’s new front door?
So we get a lot of questions from subscribers about how to best showcase their online schools on their congregation’s website. After all, we want the world to know our church is not only innovative and relevant, but that we deeply desire for people to grow closer to Jesus.
So here’s what some of our congregations are doing.
Let’s start with our friends at Nativity Episcopal Church in Scottsdale, Arizona, where the Rev’s Susan Snook and Wayne Whitney are overseeing their school – you can see the full web page here.
This is a clean, easy to read web page. It uses some clip art that draws us into the copy. The page goes on to list the courses, showing the photos and a brief description of some of the classes, before offering people a way to contact Wayne to be enrolled.
Trinity Episcopal Church in Belleville, MI and their Interim Rector, the Rev. Eric Williams did something rather daring, which you can see here:
Trinity posted the link to their course right on their website. The benefit here is that their members can sign up directly for the class and avoid the invitation process of enrolling people in their school. The concern is that anyone in the world who wanted to could sign up for this class – which opens the school to hackers – as well as the possibility that Trinity would be charged extra for members it does not know or want.
At my parish, St. David’s Episcopal Church in Southfield, MI, here’s what the web page looks like:
The page goes on, like Nativity’s, to invite interested folk to either send an email to the school’s administrator or to go to the churchnext.tv website and take a free course on How to Take a ChurchNext Class.
Our the Rev. Dave Drebart and our friends at Trinity Episcopal Church in Binghamption, NY have designed this web page, which is a bit more basic and introductory, but certainly gets the point across:
Emmanuel Lutheran Church in Livonia, MI and their adult education coordinator, Judy Cook have designed this page that takes a similar tact:
Judy lists her email address after this course listing and asks anyone interested to email her. This is the simplest way to design a page.
Finally, The Rev. Claire Nevin-Field and her folks at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Philadelphia have designed this web presence:
This page uses a recommended format in which current students can quickly access their school, inquirers can take a free course, and those who would like to be enrolled can contact the administrator.
We can’t stress enough the importance of showcasing your school on your website. Showing the world that you have an online school is impressive on several levels – it shows you are innovative, relevant, and desire to help people grow in their journey with Christ.
Here’s a link to a template we’ve designed that, in addition to the sites listed above, can help you design the perfect web presence to showcase your school.
there’s a lot to learn from commercial marketing wisdom, and a lot that can be adapted for our purposes. We’ll learn what marketing means, how to do it, when and where to do it, and just how important it is.
