Explore purposeful digital ministry in the latest MyCom Church Marketing Podcast episode with host Ryan Dunn and expert guests, breaking down branding, community building, and engagement strategies for effective online parish outreach.
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In this episode
Discover how digital ministry has transformed from a niche to an essential part of church outreach. Dive into our latest MyCom episode for insights on purposeful digital ministry that bridges real and virtual communities.
Tap into practical strategies and insightful discussions featuring Charles Vogl, Dr. Kelly Price, Mike Kim, Nelson Musonda, and Dana Malstaff.
Related episodes from Pastoring in the Digital Parish
- Engaging and empowering Facebook Groups with Dana Malstaff
- Understanding our online behavior with Kelly Price
- Building relationships through branding with Mike Kim
- Evangelism through social listening with Nelson Musonda
- Loneliness and digital community with Charles Vogl
Episode transcript
Ryan Dunn [00:00:08]:
Welcome to the Mycom Church Marketing Podcast, your resource for outreach, communications, social media, and new technologies to bring your congregation into the digital age. Hi, my name is Ryan Dunn. And in this episode of my comm, we're holding a crash course in being purposeful in digital ministry. For a number of years, I've worked as the minister of online or digital engagement for United Methodist communications. That that used to be a very unique role. I don't think it's so unique anymore. Honestly, most people in ministry are engaged in the work of digital engagement. In fact, Reverend Jim Keat, who is another person with a title like online minister like me, he released a video titled There is No Such Thing as Digital Ministry.
Ryan Dunn [00:01:06]:
The title is alarming to someone who kind of makes a living in digital ministry. And considering also that Jim is someone that I often look to as a resource, I really found it startling. Well, the title might have been a little clickbaity. Jim probably wouldn't disagree with that. The gist of the video is that digital ministry is so ubiquitous. It's so widespread that it's really indistinguishable from all the rest of ministry. Digital ministry is just a part of ministry in general. And that's an idea that I can get behind.
Ryan Dunn [00:01:41]:
Certainly when we were in pandemic lockdown, we all readily saw that digital ministry was a key part of all ministry. And I maintain that this is not abated, even though lockdown regulations have. Most of our population are using digital means to get information into and part develop relationships. We engage in community with the help often of digital platforms. For those of us in ministry, though, this can be a little bit scary because we actually have little to no training in digital ministry or web marketing or online community building. Recognizing that in 2020, I helped to build the pastoring in the digital parish podcast. And I did that podcast for a number of years. And I learned so so much in talking to other practitioners of online community building and digital marketing and even theologizing the church in digital spaces.
Ryan Dunn [00:02:38]:
As we sunset now that podcast, I wanted to carry some of those learnings into the future and hopefully provide something helpful for those of us concerned with ministering in digital spaces. So this episode of my comm is gonna pull some clips from pastoring in the digital parish. We're gonna hear some voices from both inside and outside of the church who will help us bring a sense of purpose to the ways in which we connect with people and build relationships and build purposeful discipling communities with the help of our digital or online assets. So this is gonna be a crash course in being purposeful about ministry and digital spaces. I've got 6 clarifying questions for this crash course that we're gonna work through. This crash course is brought to you by Rooted Good. Your church, your community, your future. The Good Futures Accelerator provides churches with the tools to create mission driven uses of church property and new revenue streams.
Ryan Dunn [00:03:44]:
Learn more at rootedgood.org/ good futures. Okay. Let's get underway with question number 1. What is it that people need? I spoke with Charles Bogle, who is the author of The Art of Community. Charles puts forth a convincing claim that we are in the midst of a different kind of pandemic. It's a pandemic of loneliness. Charles talks about making it clear about how you or your organization might communicate how you help people meet their needs or how you offer them value. He notes that this is part of building a sense of community identity that can be called a brand.
Ryan Dunn [00:04:24]:
So as Charles talks about branding here, he's talking about our communicated identity, in this case, in digital spaces.
Charles Vogl [00:04:31]:
So, I'm glad you asked, specifically for this reason. And and let's be really clear, Ryan. I am not a marketer. I have never been a marketer. I don't pretend to be a marketer. When I talk about brand, I'm talking about something very, very specific, and that is simply the promise an identifiable organization makes. Mhmm. If I join a dragon boat society, their brand is a promise that if I get involved with them, I'll meet people who raise dragon boats, and I'll find an opportunity to raise dragon boats.
Charles Vogl [00:05:04]:
It's as simple as that. And when
Ryan Dunn [00:05:06]:
we talk about specific. Are you involved are you actually involved in
Charles Vogl [00:05:09]:
Well, I'm a Asian American. I live in the East Bay, and we have a dragon boat society in the area.
Ryan Dunn [00:05:14]:
A lot
Charles Vogl [00:05:14]:
of Asian people have moved to Northern California. And I know that when the book first came out, you know, my book was embraced by a community there that was coming together around shared values and purpose in the area.
Ryan Dunn [00:05:26]:
Yep.
Charles Vogl [00:05:27]:
But my point is it has nothing to do with selling more stuff. Now, obviously, if we have a promise of value, people hopefully will find us because they want the thing. And if it's a ministry context, if you're trying to find, a ministry that speaks to families with young kids who, wanna be educated in a certain faith tradition, then there better be a promise of value there. Otherwise, you're not gonna find them, and you're truly not gonna stay. Right? So and most organizations are promising some kind of value whether they know it or not. Right? And if you haven't named it or you haven't thought it through, then you're hoping you get lucky, right, when the people you're looking for hear about you or show up. And that's all I mean by a brand in my work. And in my work, we use the term community very specifically, and that is a group of people who share mutual concern for one another.
Charles Vogl [00:06:29]:
And, Ryan, if there's a group of people and you don't share a concern with them, you're probably not in a community with them.
Ryan Dunn [00:06:36]:
Okay.
Charles Vogl [00:06:36]:
And we can talk more teal detail about what communities have, shared values, shared purpose. Usually, people are growing together in some way. But, nonetheless, you know, the the foundation is, hey. Do you care about each other? So when we talk about brand and community, all we're talking about is some organization that promises value, and that can be ministerial. Right? Not all ministries minister in the same way to everybody. And if they try, good luck with that. Mhmm. And then are the people involved in your ministry finding experiences that are leading them to create the relationships where they care about other people in that ministry? And are those experiences helping them understand that people care about them? And, fortunately, Ryan, as I literally travel the country, talking about this, I find that people are spending a lot of time and a lot of money trying to create a lot of experiences that don't deliver any of that.
Charles Vogl [00:07:33]:
And it's unfortunately because they're often trying to brag figuratively or literally how many people showed up to get pizza. And focusing on how many people came to get pizza is very different than when Ryan showed up. Did he find the things that let him understand there are people who care about what he cares about and, will care about him or do do or does care about Ryan at some level.
Ryan Dunn [00:07:57]:
Now in order to communicate well who we are, we need people to pay attention to us. To do that, it helps to understand why people are in digital spaces and what kind of things they're doing when they're in these digital spaces. Doctor. Kelly Price of East Tennessee State University specializes in consumer behavior and brand building. So Doctor. Price will help us frame question number 2, which is why might your people be in digital spaces and what are they doing there? What have you noticed people are looking for when they're like surfing around online?
Dr. Kelly Price [00:08:35]:
Yeah. Yeah. And and and and why are they doing that? Right?
Ryan Dunn [00:08:39]:
Yeah. Absolutely.
Dr. Kelly Price [00:08:40]:
Motivation is the reason for the behavior. Okay? So I mentioned a second ago this external and and internal influences. And what I mean by that, because that leads to motivation. External influences are things like that and that impact us and impact our behaviors, purchase behavior and all other behaviors, but we're talking about purchase here, or consumer behavior here. Those are like culture that you grow up in, the values that you have, things like that. The people that are around you, we call them reference groups. Your reference groups like your friends, your parents, you know, things like that. But we also have these internal influences that are formed.
Dr. Kelly Price [00:09:23]:
Those are learning or self concepts, memory, attitudes, you know, those types of things. And those lead into why we do things, the reasoning of it all. There's a bunch of really boring theories that I could go into, of course, but I I have to tell you one of my favorites. It's called the Maguire theory, and it's been around since 1960 ish or so. And what this theory says, and this is very applicable to church, is that there are 4 main categories of why people do things. And one of them is affective. That's the feeling, you know, the the feeling we have about something. The cognitive, which is what we believe about something, what we're thinking.
Dr. Kelly Price [00:10:07]:
And sometimes those two things can clash.
Ryan Dunn [00:10:10]:
But
Dr. Kelly Price [00:10:10]:
we also have something called preservation, a preservation motive. And that means we're just trying to maintain what we're doing. We're kind we're kind of keeping things where they are because we like it. And then the last one has to do with growth, and growth is we're doing something to grow ourselves. We're doing something to make things better or or whatever. So you have these 4 main categories of why people are thinking about doing things, you see. So that's a motivation and discovering those motives. You know, I think one of the most interesting things about consumers is that they don't realize often that they have motivations.
Dr. Kelly Price [00:10:47]:
Yeah. Yeah. That we have these latent versus manifest motives. The the latent ones are the ones that they they don't really want to admit, and the manifest ones are the ones that they will admit. You know? Like, oh, I I need that brand new bright red sports car. Well, you know, you may not acknowledge you wanna feel younger, but you'll say, oh, well, I need it because, you know, it goes fast or whatever. Yes. So those motivations can can vary quite heavily.
Ryan Dunn [00:11:18]:
Alright. We've talked about branding a bunch now. We've talked about consumer behaviors and all this sounds like the world of commerce. Right? It sounds like that more than it sounds like the world of church or ministry. Mike Kim is a branding consultant and coach, but he formerly worked in professional ministry and he sees how marketing principles apply to what we do in ministry. In fact, he gave me a definition of marketing that I quote time and time again. And it's this, marketing is an invitation to relationship. If we're gonna make that invitation, we have to let other people know who we are, and that is what makes branding so relevant.
Ryan Dunn [00:11:58]:
Branding is how we effectively communicate who we are as ministers or as ministries. Question number 3 then is, what is our brand? Mike Kim is gonna help us think of how we might answer that question.
Mike Kim [00:12:14]:
I talk a lot in my coaching business and even with organizations about a personal brand, the power of a personal brand. And what I mean by personal brand is the identity that each of us carry as individuals, as leaders, in many cases as ministry leaders, and in my case, as a coach and a consultant, that's based off the combination of 4 things. Right? I'm not just a cow. I'm not just a Nike shoe. Right? I'm a person. And so these four things are what make up our personal brand: our ideas, our expertise, our reputation, and our personality. I'll say that again: our ideas, our expertise, our reputation, and our personality. And if you really think about any coach, motivational speaker, author, celebrity, athlete, and yes, even a minister you can see that these four things are what make up who we view them as.
Ryan Dunn [00:13:18]:
Mhmm.
Mike Kim [00:13:18]:
Right? There's some preachers and pastors who are better preachers and pastors than they are authors. There are some whose ideas we like and others we don't like, right? We'll argue about that in the ministry space, we'll argue about it theologically, right? And then there's some guys, we just some guys and gals, we just don't like their personality. Share stuff. Be authentic. Share share family. Share beliefs. Share the struggles. Share the solutions.
Mike Kim [00:13:46]:
But all of it is an extension of your ideas, your expertise, your reputation, and your personality.
Ryan Dunn [00:13:52]:
Thank you, Mike Kim. I had so much fun going back through these old episodes and rediscovering some of these really valuable, important ideas. If you wanna hear these full episodes, I'm gonna put links on the episode notes to this my comm episode, which can be found at resourceumc.org. And resourceumc is another one of our sharing points from United Methodist Communications. And I think that this would be a good time to tell you about UNCOM. At United Methodist Communications, we've been telling the story of God's work through the UMC for 85 years, supporting church communications, equipping leaders, and spreading messages of hope. Ministries like the MyCOM podcast here are how we live this out, offering practical tips and inspiring stories to help you navigate the ever changing world of church communications. We strive to keep resources like this podcast free of charge, but but we need your help.
Ryan Dunn [00:14:46]:
When you give to umcom@umcom.org/donate, you're not just funding a podcast, you're fueling critical denominational communications ministries. Your dollars will be transformed into trustworthy, dynamic news that tells the authentic story of The United Methodist Church. So if MyCOM has helped your ministry, we paid it forward with a to make your impact today. We're back with our crash course in purposeful digital ministry on the my comm podcast. We're up to clarifying question number 4. So in review, the first three were 1, what do people need? 2, do you know why they are there? And 3, what's your brand? And now question number 4 is this, are you listening? That's the question. Are you listening to them? Many of us have a bad habit of engaging in digital spaces, especially on social media platforms with a bit of a hit and run mentality. So we get online, we drop a nugget of knowledge or of help or of some kind of care, and then we just cut a bail.
Ryan Dunn [00:16:12]:
Nelson Musonda talked with me about social listening. In a way, it's eavesdropping on the cultural conversations of our digital spaces.
Nelson Musonda [00:16:22]:
You know? Yeah. So start from church, know your audience, your members. Make sure you ask them when it comes to your spiritual needs. What are your challenges? When it comes to raising kids, you know, Christian kids or when it comes to a Christian home, whatever it is. What are your challenges? Okay? Let people tell you what their challenges are. Okay? And then as a church, as a leadership, you go out and find those solutions for them.
Ryan Dunn [00:16:53]:
I wanna put some practicality behind this with some stuff that I read. David Spinks is the author of the Business of Belonging and the cofounder of CMX. And he does a lot of work in community marketing. He wrote a post about focusing on practice over purpose, and he offered as an example, climate change communities, climate change communities, they often flop. And it's not because people don't care about climate change. It's just that once they join these communities, they don't know what to talk about. The communities are very high on purpose, but they're low on practice and I'll bet a lot of our church communities might feel the same way. They're high on purpose.
Ryan Dunn [00:17:33]:
They're kind of low on practice. So he has an exercise that helps define community practice. And I bring it up here because it actually helps define our specific targets in building online spiritual community. Now he calls it finding your members turpentine. He instructs us to take, like, 30 minutes to write down 25 questions you believe your members are gonna ask, and he offers these questions as jumping off points for you. What do your members wake up and think about every day? What are the little annoyances that they have to deal with? What are the raw materials of their work? What details do they tend to obsess over? What are the questions that only your members would know to ask? There are plenty more, and you can look that up. I'll even link the article on the on the show notes page. But this practice roots your online community in your users' or your members' reality, and it gives personality and vision to the people that you hope to form relationships with.
Ryan Dunn [00:18:37]:
I found it very useful. Moving on to question number 5 in our digital ministry crash course, I would put the question like this, are your brand in your community staying on task? In the very first season of pastoring in the digital parish, I spoke with the founder of boss moms. Her name is Dana Malstaff. What surprised me with our conversation is that she shared how just protective she and her admins are about their Facebook group. If you're gonna be a part of their space, you have to be on task or target. Their group exists for a specific purpose, and they're upfront about communicating that purpose and inviting others to connect over that purpose.
Dana Malstaff [00:19:20]:
Well, I do think one one of the most important things is the rules. Okay. Right? Is the boundaries. They did this study, where it was a dog and their owner. Right? And they put him in a field, and there was no fence, and the dog on average stayed with the owner. Right? But when they put them in a in a field and there was a fence, the dog would play. It's, you know, the same thing with kids, boundaries are very important. Like, boundaries don't keep freedom away.
Dana Malstaff [00:19:45]:
They they invite freedom. Right? Because we know where our parameters are. And and so boundaries in your group are really important. So very early on and our and our rules have have, you know, morphed over over the years. But from very early on, it's like, don't come in here and teach to people. We want you to ask questions.
Nelson Musonda [00:20:03]:
Mhmm.
Dana Malstaff [00:20:03]:
You know, don't you know, ask for help, and then in the post, and give help in the comments. That's my biggest thing. You know, ask for help in the post, give help in the comments. That's that's where it is. You wanna teach somebody about somebody, something, then do it in the comments. Because really the posts are the icebreaker. So very early on, we would have a welcome video that would tell them about that. Once we got more people joining every day and we wanted to make the the pinned post something different, we now do a daily welcome of everybody who's entered.
Dana Malstaff [00:20:33]:
We we get a lot of people a day. So you don't have to do that in the early stages, but a a welcoming to set the stage. Here's the rules, and here's how you engage, and here's how we'd like you to start. So give them that little nudge. Right? Maybe in your group, it's about introducing yourself and saying 1 or 2 things that you want and guide them on what you want them to say. Maybe you want them to ask a question about something they're yearning for. Maybe you want them to say what their, you know, favorite piece of scripture is, or maybe you want them to do so. Give them a prompt of what you want them to do first.
Dana Malstaff [00:21:08]:
And usually that can be something where you want them to ask for support and something where you, tell them to give support. And then what you do is, like we would do in in any kind of church situation, which is, you know, treat your neighbor how you'd like to be treated. It's the same thing is create a posting habit that you want to perpetuate because people will come in and they will see how it works, and they will fall in line with how it works. So if they see posts that have no comments, they're not going to comment. Right? If they see that there's a ton of engagement, it frees them up to engage. So if you see things that aren't getting comments and things like that, I've gone in. And if nobody's engaging in the early days, I would delete the post.
Ryan Dunn [00:21:49]:
Okay.
Dana Malstaff [00:21:50]:
And I would try something else. So instead of it looking like a barren wasteland Yeah. With nobody engaging, I would get rid of the stuff that didn't work, and I would keep the stuff that did. And then I would go and actually tag some members that I knew and said, I'd love your opinion about this. Right? And so part of what that is is in the early stages is treating it like a space where you want to get to know everybody.
Ryan Dunn [00:22:14]:
Now most of digital land is content. Content is key. And content might be like the questions that you ask on a Facebook group like Dana talked about, or it might be the Instagram reel you make for your youth ministry. It might be the food pick that you shared from dinner last night. When it comes to being purposeful in digital spaces, we need to ask if our content is purposeful. That's question 6. Is our content purposeful for our goals? And if we pull all of our learnings together, we'll see that the best digital content is content that provides authoritative user focused information. This is information that goes beyond telling someone about the, just the who, what, when, where of your church community.
Ryan Dunn [00:22:59]:
So basically, like an invitation to the next event. Instead, we wanna think about content that is made with the goal of enlightening the user in mind. In short, it's content that is valuable for the information that it provides to the user. I oversee the TikTok channel for the United Methodist denomination, and we generally rotate between a few different types of content on that channel. There are some repurposed informational videos, which provide a story about an interesting ministry happening in the denomination. Then there are prayer and devotional practices. We also have many short quote videos, sometimes featuring a smart alecky John Wesley bobblehead statuette. And then we have videos detailing United Methodist beliefs.
Ryan Dunn [00:23:46]:
And far and away, our most watched videos are those beliefs videos. Part of the reason for this is simply because this is the kind of content TikTok users expect the United Methodist denomination to provide. Let's face it. They do not expect the bobblehead Wesley videos. They do expect us to provide info about what makes us distinctly United Methodists. So this is useful information for the user because they're gonna seek out our challenge because they're curious about United Beth Methodist beliefs or because they are United Methodists who want to have their theological patterns or positions confirmed in some way, or even to find out a little bit more. And that brings us to an important note. The information about beliefs is what people expect for us to provide in that space.
Ryan Dunn [00:24:35]:
What kind of information might users expect you and your ministry to provide on your various digital platforms? I'm going to mention some digital ministry leaders and some content creators coming up here. I don't always agree theologically with all these leaders, but I do find that they create content and connections that are meaningful for people. And they provide examples that we all can learn from Ascension presents is one of those content creators. They're a digital imprint of Ascension press and Ascension presents started YouTube channel many years ago. The channel today has over 800,000 subscribers. The videos they make get thousands to 100 of thousands of views. They've launched chart topping podcasts out of this channel. And I think the impetus for their success in building this platform was that the topics of their videos were on point.
Ryan Dunn [00:25:27]:
It definitely was not the production value of what they've done because the videos are actually pretty low production. The presenters are charismatic and that certainly helps, but the presenters are not over the top kind of personalities. They're not comedians nor are they raging ranters. They're not trying to get rage views. Rather the topics their videos address are the true stars of Ascension's content. And here are some of their most watched video titles. One would be why be Catholic and not just Christian? Or how about pray with us the holy rosary? Another topic, what does the Catholic church teach about gender identity? Do all good people go to heaven? How do demons actually work? Or how about this one? Can I smoke marijuana? Now I'm not Catholic, but those are some compelling topics. In fact, that's how Ascension Presents first pulled me in.
Ryan Dunn [00:26:22]:
I'm not in their target audience, but I'm curious about the topics that they're presenting in their clear and concise little videos. Their videos make it very easy for me to get to know the Catholic church. So when we're talking about useful information for our users, this is one thing to consider. Does this make it easy for us to be known? Sermon videos and podcasts are kind of the base level of this kind of content. Sermons articulate our values. They hopefully provide something useful for the the the listener or the user. Also, hopefully, they address a topic that answers questions that the users are asking. The other portion of the useful content equation involves producing content that reveals to the user something about themselves.
Ryan Dunn [00:27:10]:
Oftentimes for us, this comes up in answer to a question like, do I agree with this point of view or not? People are seeking out this content in earnest because they're looking to interact or wrestle with their beliefs a bit. So the theological point of view is valuable to them. All this to say the content that groups like Ascension produces very user focused. It's more about connecting with and informing the user than it is about broadcasting something about the organization. In a Venn diagram, if you can picture this in your mind, a Venn diagram of these 2 types of content, user focus being 1 circle and producer focus being another, there's likely to be a lot of overlap. The call for the church of the future is to be intentional about this area of overlap because the digital world is a fickle space. And if users don't find what they want from you, then they're just gonna click on to somebody else who does provide something more akin to what they want. So that is how we're gonna begin to frame our question around creating valuable content.
Ryan Dunn [00:28:20]:
Alright. We are getting set to wrap up here. I wanna review our 6 questions for our crash course. They are number 1, What do people need? Number 2, why are they here and what are they doing here? Number 3, what is your brand? Number 4, are you listening? Number 5, are you staying on task? And then number 6, what is the value for the listener viewer user of your content? That is a wrap on this month's my com. Again, it's possible through the support of the rooted good program, your church, your community, your future, the good futures accelerator course provides churches with the tools to creatively use church property, to align money and mission and build financial resilience. Imagine empty rooms to shared working spaces, commercial kitchens to incubator food businesses, parking lots to weekly farmers markets. Your solution will be unique to your church and your community. Good Futures works.
Ryan Dunn [00:29:23]:
Learn more at rootedgood.org/goodfutures. I'm gonna post links for all the various episodes of pastoring in the digital parish that we utilized in this mycom podcast episode. You can find more mycom episodes and episode notes at resourceumc.org/mycom podcast. Of course, resourceumc.org is your one stop destination for leaders throughout the United Methodist church. So visit often for ideas and inspiration for leading the church into the future. Again, my name is Ryan Dunn. Big thanks to United Methodist communications for making this podcast possible specifically. Thanks to Renee McNeil for production and content support to the marketing team at umcom and Elaine Denson for technical support.
Ryan Dunn [00:30:10]:
My comm is a monthly podcast, generally premiering new episodes on the 3rd Tuesday of each month. So I will be back with you in October. I'm looking forward to it in the meantime. Peace.