why you need a "ministry website"

When we first launched our student environments here at Grace Community we developed a website for the ministry. We wanted an online presence to be the face of Relevant Student Ministry. We just got done launching our site for Aqua College Ministry and we could not be more excited to take the step one more time. Why does your student ministry or college ministry need a website? Here are some of the things our website did for us...

• Connect with outsiders / when people are looking at a church or a ministry they go online first. Our websites allow us to make a good first impression and provide a quick picture of who were are. We love our social media presence also but a well crafted website provides credibility that social media does not provide. Our simple goal is to help outsiders have a good first impression of our ministry if they are looking.
• Event promotion / we have never done paper registration for any event at our student or college ministry. We direct people to our website for event promotion and registration all the time. It is one place where people can get all the info they need. We even have people pay for events online and it makes our life so much better!
• Communicate with parents / we post an update each week for our parents of teens on our website so they can quickly go and know what we talked about in our environments. We we also know that many times it is the best way for parents to get an idea of what we are about in our student or college environment.
• Branding / yep it is very simple...in our culture if you do not have an online presence you miss a huge opportunity to bran your ministry. Branding is just helping people understand who you are and what you are about. Use the web to your advantage.

Check out our sites for teens and college students. They are far from perfect but they have been great tools for our ministries here at GCC.