For most of this week, I have been working on a news blog for our church. This has been a fun process, and it looks like it will be a tremendous success for our church. I still have a lot of work to do, namely making it look like the rest of the site, or making a new template for both at the same time, or bringing the rest of the site into Wordpress. I’m just not sure about all that yet.

This begs the question, why would a church want a news blog? For us, it’s simple, we’ve got a ton of stuff going on all the time and only pockets of people knew about what was going on. Yesterday, our adult minister posted about the Thursday Club, an Alzheimer’s respite program. I’ve been on staff for over a year, and I didn’t have a foggy clue that we organize such a program.

So, here are some of the benefits of operating a news blog, which is basically just a regular blog (don’t all blogs post “news?”):

• Increased communication of news with our members, visitors, and community
• Syndication through RSS is great. Now, posting one time can result in headlines being shown on the individual ministry’s page, Facebook, MySpace, Upcoming, Twitter and more.
• Syndication through Feedburner’s e-mail delivery is awesome. Now, for those who are interested in a daily digest of our news items, we don’t have to remember to send it to them directly - Feedburner does it for us!
• Since Wordpress is easier to use than our CMS, the staff are more likely to update more frequently! Woot!
• For those who are really computer challenged, I can set up Windows Live Writer to get them going!

I could go on listing benefits, but I’ve got to tell you that I’m thoroughly excited about this. No one else on staff is quite as excited as I am, but that’s how it is with all techno-victories - we celebrate alone: no ticker tape parade, no fiesta, no cheers of loud applause at the finish line, just the silent satisfaction of a job well done.

I am proud of our staff too, in the two days that I’ve been pushing them to write, I’ve had 8 of them post 13 news stories… not bad at all!

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1. Kevin Says:
   June 5th, 2008 at 7:36 pm

   Very clean, very nice. Good reasoning too! Perhaps a good follow up question is why does a church still need a website? Not saying it doesn’t, but you can take an entirely different approach!

2. Kevin Says:
   June 5th, 2008 at 7:42 pm

   Another good reason is to keep those who have moved away in the loop! Those folks get neglected much of the time even though they have a special place in their heart for your church. Chruch websites tend to be forward looking announcing what will happen. A blog can be more reflective.

3. Jeff Says:
   June 5th, 2008 at 9:36 pm

   I have to admit that I’m impressed with how well it seems that the blog is going already. I was very impressed to see Pastor actually posted a couple of items. Good work Mr. Wizard in a Box!! :)

4. Will Says:
   June 6th, 2008 at 10:52 am

   Woot indeed Matthew!! Great job and I’m excited about this new tools/resource as well…maybe not as pumped as you are, but for a lay/non-techno geek my level of excitement is above par. Anyway, I think we just skipped a couple of decades and are starting to catch up to 2001. Way to go!