Co-ordinated Online and Local Team Outreach

When a missions team leads local outreach campaign in a town, city or area, a website can greatly enhance its effectiveness. However, it is unlikely that a typical team will contain anyone with either the gifts or the time to create such a website from scratch.

Happily, there is an alternate way forward – a site can be built this way:

• The team's parent HQ builds a central core evangelistic website which is culturally appropriate. This might include a presentation of the Gospel, Q & As, testimonies, answers to felt needs, or other Bridge Strategy topics. The Bridge Strategy is a major key to reaching people with no interest in the Gospel.

  In Christian ministry, testimonies are frequently written using Christian jargon and assumptions, which make them highly inaccessible and boring to non-Christians. See Angie's Story – a testimony-writing tutorial.

• Central to this concept is a 'front-end' homepage for the site, with customize content and branded for the particular town or area of the outreach. (There can of course be multiple front-ends, if outreach is taking place in a number of areas.)
• These front-end pages carry an appropriate introduction to the team, news of meetings, and related pages – all designed entirely for non-Christian readers (and therefore with a high X-Spectrum number). Information can be as specific as house-meetings being held in individual blocks of flats. Communicating news of progress of the ministry to Christians is not the purpose of such a site and should not be attempted here.
• These front-end pages can be built and updated using 'content management' by team members themselves. This requires no technical experience: updates are made through a password-protected browser page by typing or pasting content into text boxes. Photographs can easily be uploaded too. A single training session will equip designated team members to operate this.
• The site front-end is has a memorable neutral-sounding URL which identifies the town or area, and can be made known widely through contact cards, press releases, newspaper advertising, radio interviews, T-shirts, car stickers, and many other means. If the town of outreach is for example Bangalore, the team URL could be something like www.findinghelp.com/bangalore or preferably a subdomain* such as bangalore.isfindinganswers.com. Since the system makes it easy to have multiple front-ends, there could be many others, such as kerala.isfindinganswers.com.
• From the point of view of the user, there is just one website - the locally-orientated one as defined by the front-end gateway that he or she entered. The transition to the core material should be seamless. This is probably best achieved* if the core material also resides on the subdomain.
• A 'contact us' area within the front-end will allow contacts and inquirers to write to the team, and ask questions in the safety and relative anonymity of email, as well as request personal visits. This contact page should be an online form, not a clickable 'mailto' email link. This allows people to send a message from any computer, for instance in a library or internet cafe. It also enables a message to be sent by someone who does not have their own email address, who might wish to request a reply through post, telephone or text message.
• A bulletin board could also enable people to discuss issues, ask questions, and provide answers, building a sense of community into the site.

Here is the strategy in visual form:

The TruthMedia team use this strategy, by creating a custom front-end to their Power to Change site, in partnership with groups of churches in a town or area. A large partnership like this has the resources to spend on advertising – on billboards, press, radio, or TV.

This strategy is potentially very powerful, as the Web is used increasingly even in non-Western countries. Sadly, cross-cultural mission agencies have often been very slow to use the Web for outreach, although almost all use it for representation to the Christian public.

Internet cafes

A further avenue for locality-based outreach can use Internet Cafes. A web outreach team in Poland uses this method.

Teaching computers

Teaching computer use can be a major indirect evangelistic opportunity at community level: more. Homework clubs for children are a related area of service.

*If a subdomain is used (which has advantages - as it may make it easier for a seamless navigation between the core material and the local content), all the core material may be duplicated on each subdomain. If this route is chosen, it is important that duplicate versions of the core material are excluded from search engine spidering (using a robots text file). Search engines do not like to find near-identical content at different URLs, and may penalize a site accordingly. Of course, the local variable content must not be excluded from search engines.

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