On our previous letter, we promised that we would be practical. We started a roadmap toward digital faith communities and talked about creating an online presence and a simple tool to share the Gospel online.
Today we will talk about building trust.
One of the most important aspects of the digital ministry is building trust. There is much content out there that invites people to engage with it. But the content alone does not build trust. Visitors consume the content and move on. Building trust online is important if we want to engage people in conversations, share the Gospel, and invite those who respond to it to join a faith community.
How do you build trust online?
Building trust online is not going to be an easy task, but it is possible.
MC2 has laid the path with the well-known strategy known as Prayer Care Share which is well explained in our training. But how do you do prayer care share online?
Remember that online visitors despite their profiles and avatars are people both online and offline. Praying and caring for them is the language that is understood by all cultures.
A friend of mine every day opens social media and the first thing he checks is the list of people who have their birthdays. Then he writes to every one of them a personalized birthday greeting. This has impacted their relationship by building trust to move on to sharing the Gospel in the future.
This past Christmas, we started working with our GCM staff in Croatia and other staff in Burundi, in creating a social media calendar with premade posts for 365 days. The idea is to design PCS series through very interactive posts, sharing truth but not preachy, that encourages people to engage with the posts and with us.
This tool will ensure regular posts and fresh content.
Having fresh content every day helps in mainly 2 ways:
- Build trust and help create an identity as a community that cares and wants to be involved to help those in need.
- The algorithm of most social media platforms likes frequent posts and brings our future posts in front of the right visitors.
If you want to learn more about the calendar please contact Rudina: at rudina.bakalli@cru.org.
How are you showing prayer care share online?
