3 steps to successfully delegate your church website strategy

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Pastors and lay leaders have enough to worry about.  Your church website strategy shouldn’t be one of them.  Learn how eliminate stress and increase your effectiveness by delegating your church website strategy.

A leader is only as good as his or her team.  As leadership educator John Maxwell says, “Few leaders are successful unless a lot of people want them to be.”

As a pastor or lay leader, you must guard your ministry to ensure that the flock to which you have been entrusted is cared for, but you also must be careful not to hold so tight a grip on your ministry areas that your leaders can’t grow and thrive.

Below are four steps to successfully delegate your church website strategy.

1. Give responsibility for your church website strategy to the right person or team.

You must choose the right person for the job.  As Jim Collins says in the management classic Good to Great, “[Great organizations] start by getting the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the right seats.”

Being the right person isn’t enough.  You need to have the right people in the right seats, that is, you need to identify and shepherd your volunteers not based on your needs, but based on their giftedness and ability.

How do you know that you have the right person for your ?  Use the acronym ACE.  Your ideal staff member or volunteer should have three important qualities:

1. Ability.  They must have the technical skills and available time to commit to the job.
2. Character.  They must have demonstrated Christian character and proven themselves to be trustworthy, reliable, and consistent.
3. Eagerness.  Last but not least, they must have an eager desire to put their hand to the plow and serve your church in this way.

2. Set up clear expectations and metrics of success.

Depending on your own leadership and technical ability, the person who you assign to this role may be responsible for implementing your vision with the training and tools that you give them, or they may be responsible for creating your church website strategy from the ground up.

From day one, your website or media team leader will need to know exactly what is expected of him or her, including how you will be assessing the success or failure of your church website strategy.

Some areas to define metrics of success include:

• Leadership ability, defined as growing the communications team spiritually, technically, and numerically.
• Increase in traffic, reach, and exposure through your website and social networks.
• Increase in total giving and online giving.
• Sermon downloads, blog views, and resource downloads.
• Number of first time guests who indicate that they found out about your church through your website.  (Need a connection card for your church?  Download our free template.)
• Increase in church members moving to greater levels of commitment through your website (small group signups, event registrations, etc).

Setting up clear expectations also includes setting a fixed end date for their service, at which point you will assess their effectiveness in their role (see below) and give them the opportunity to continue with their position or take a season to rest or to explore their gifts and talents in another ministry area.

3. Regularly assess your team’s effectiveness in their role.

Sit down with your staff or volunteers regularly to listen to new ideas, track your metrics of success, and give feedback and discipleship specific to their role.  Spending time with them will bear fruit for them, but it will also bear fruit for you in the area of leadership ability and social capital.

Look for both leadership growth and ministry growth.  If a volunteer or staff member is growing as a leader, his or her ministry should be successful as well.  But ministry growth doesn’t necessarily mean that the staff member or volunteer is a good leader.

Make sure your leaders aren’t relying on their own ability and forgetting to sow into their team.

Is your church ready to start a digital ministry strategy?  Find out with our free 2-minute assessment.

Our digital ministry readiness assessment looks at eight critical areas of digital ministry and helps you identify your strengths and weaknesses in the area of your church website and communications strategy.

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