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Strategic Digital Outreach

Photo Blogging

Important: see the wise comment from Mike Boyink before running out and implementing this idea. As I said in my response to Mike, I’m going to give this some further thought.

In the meantime, check out Mike’s newly designed website, where you can regularly read insightful commentary on the state of web design today (and many other topics).

Recently, I’ve been having fleeting questions run through my mind about how a photo blog might be used for outreach purposes. Until a couple of hours ago, I would have said that there really isn’t much use for them in terms of outreach. But then I was reading a post by Jordon Cooper about how Bible colleges and seminaries could make better use of their websites. Jordon was lamenting the sterility of most efforts by Christian educational institutions to reflect the life of their community through photos:

Of course tools like Flickr and Movable Type working together make it a lot easier to show a day by day life of a community, from academics, to spirituality, to the social life of the community.

That made me think about how a church might be able to better present the life of their community to the public through frequently updated photo galleries which would remain largely unmoderated. What if a church were to establish an official photo team and ask them, armed with digital cameras, to take photos of congregational life and post them to these galleries on a regular basis. Would this serve to present the life of the community effectively? Just thinking out loud. Anyone know of any churches doing something like this?

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 01/03/05 at 05:19 PM
The Collective Voice!
.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) continues the discussion:

Ooohph.  One the one hand, I agree—most church websites are devoid of showing people…like the building is somehow more important.

OTOH, Be careful, as this is a potential rats-nest of issues.  We talked around it alot at RP where we used the large rotating header images.  “What-If’s” abound…what if you take a picture of a wife trying to stay obscured from a former abusive spouse?  What if you take a picture of a police officer who normally works undercover..what if..what if..

Dean had a post on this a while back:
http://www.healyourchurchwebsite.com/archives/000979.php

For RP I ended up using images that were 4-5 years old in hopes of mitigating some of those concerns.

contributed on 01/04 at 07:19 AM
.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) continues the discussion:

Great point Mike. I’m usually very careful about including photos of kids, but I hadn’t thought of the other possibilities.

Maybe there is a way to use a content management system to allow people to approve their photos before they actually go live. That would add quite a layer of administration (having to identify all the people in a photo, contacting them to show them the photo, get their approval, etc.). I’ll have to think about it for a bit. In the meantime, I’m going to add a disclaimer at the beginning of the post, pointing readers to your comment.

Thanks for your contribution!

contributed on 01/04 at 08:53 AM
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