For context, go to WorldVenture to view the three-part video, How to Form a Digital Team, a video series from WorldVenture highlighting the importance of your church or ministry using your digital platforms for making disciples. You may take this post and make your own out of it. This is okay. Do whatever works for your audience, your team. This video series and this blog post are part of a larger series called, The Church on Mission.
This post goes with today’s resources available at worldventure.com (click here).
The digital report serves two purposes for your online ministry.
- Shares with ministry leadership both the digital discipleship value and data of the online ministry as observed by the digital team and the exported data or observed data of the online platform you are using for the live feeds.
- The report encourages the leadership, the congregation, and the digital team to continue with serving online even through what feels like unfruitful periods of ministry.
The data is important, but not as important as showing the digital discipleship value, like comments. Your team may not be techie and your leadership may find more encouragement in the digital discipleship side than the numbers side. You might be a data person, but not everyone can picture people when they look at numbers.
The report can be done in Microsoft Word, Google Doc, or Pages. For this post, I will be using Microsoft Word as an example. A pdf form is accessible here for your use, or email me for the Word format to edit.
You can also create an excel document with just the data, or simply export the data from your social media platform. Pay close attention to the data that is most important to your ministry, like views. The rest of the data is useful for knowing how to post to your ministry or church digital platforms, like days which are popular for posting. Since I encourage the use of personal social media in making disciples online in addition to any disciple-making tools your church or ministry adopts, that data is not so useful to your team.
First, create the folders and sub-folders in your computer with how you would like to organize the reports. Second, open a blank document like Microsoft Word and name it “(name of your church)” with dates of report. You can use the pdf form I have provided which lays out how the report should look.
For Grace Church, we use Monday through Sunday in our weekly reporting.
Note the line, “As read on…” because the views or other data present on Facebook can change by the hour as more people view the page.
Add a line for an update on the Digital Team. As the leader of the Digital Team, you want to encourage the leadership over you to continue to pray for the team in your ongoing efforts online. Also, let them know the dates you are meeting with the team for prayer. It’s okay if members of the congregation or leadership wish to join your weekly, bi-monthly, or monthly prayer and strategy meetings. It’s a great way to bring in new teammates or to encourage more prayer support in ministry.
For this report, my church uses Facebook primarily as their preferred digital platform. Facebook is ideally set up for ministry with groups, Facebook Lives that have a comfortable chat section with newer comments easily found, and rooms that allow for small group meetups by video conferencing. If you are a digital team, you might also include the next sub-section, “Social Media Tips” in case you are helping a church learn how to manage their own digital platform. Otherwise, you can skip that part and go on to the stats.
The rest of the report should be formatted as follows:
- Start with the Facebook or Social Media subscribers, followers, or likes. Use symbols to show whether the count is up, down, or unchanged.
- Set up the section for Facebook or Youtube Live Feeds.
- Separate the services out.
- Keep Youtube and Facebook separate.
- If you have assigned digital team members to the service, add their names.
- How many comments should be followed in the next bullet point of notable or meaningful comments. I normally choose comments that express thoughts of the sermon, how the pastor is connecting with the person, prayer requests or praises, etc.
- Copy and paste the service section if you have more than one service streaming.
- The next section should be notable Facebook posts. These are posts that have gotten a lot of reactions, shares, and/or received some notable comments. If there are meaningful comments on these posts, refer to them in the report.
- If you have one or more Facebook groups, list them here as the pdf indicates: Name of group, purpose of group and group link.
- List how many members are in the group and use the symbols in Word to indicate up, down, or no change.
- List group posts, comments, reactions, and shares that are meaningful.
The purpose of the group is to show how the Saturday or Sunday service is connecting with your community and the world. The report must be laid out with a focus on connections. You can include other live streaming ministries in this report. By converting the pdf I’ve provided in Word, you can alter this report to better suit your needs in ministry. Or, again, email me for the Word document.
If you have any questions, please email me.
