The Digital Essentials Course

Raising support is hard and it’s gotten more complicated.

When the main funding source of missionaries flipped from a few churches with big budgets to a bunch of individuals with smaller ones, the number of partnerships a single missionary unit fosters exponentially increased. And with the increase in the number of partnerships comes an increase in partnership churn. And with higher turnover, ministry partnership development became a constant and ongoing responsibility in order to stay afloat in the field.

We all want better information, faster.

While there are far more tools available to communicate with ministry partners, their personal expectations also rose considerably. The form of consumerism spread through social media and other digital outlets exacerbates the human condition. It wasn’t all that long ago when ministry partners would pray for missionaries they support perfectly content not knowing what was going on across the globe.

With exceptions of course, many ministry partnerships live or die on the same axiom as any other marketing effort—out of sight, out of mind.

The good news is there’s a way forward and I’ve seen it done to great effect.

With this course, you’ll learn which tools and platforms are worth your effort and how to use them with tact that undermines the status quo of digital discourse.

• Make it easy for people to follow along with your journey
• Guard against supporter churn by increasing the personalization of your communication (without spending all your time)
• Set up systems that automate regular communication that help keep your work top of mind

The majority of the course covers some underutilized but super powerful features in MailChimp to power your email newsletter and automated messages including:

• Setting up a list for optimal personalization
• Designing each step of a subscriber’s journey
• Getting the word out so people subscribe (without being annoying)
• Sending consistently
• Automation sequences every missionary should be using
• Syncing your data between databases

I believe email is the best platform to spend your limited time communicating with supporters and building ministry partnerships. But it’s not the only piece of the puzzle. This course will also cover wise uses of other tools like Facebook Groups, video, and even snail mail.

Course format

The Digital Essentials course is an email course. That means, rather than setting up another profile on a website with login credentials you need to remember, the course comes to your inbox.

Once you purchase the course you will get the content and worksheets sent to you by email on a weekly basis. The goal is effective implementation and I’ve found one lesson per week gives you enough space and time to take thoughtful action.

Cost

I’m offering the course at a discount while I gather feedback. If you’d like to be part of the beta group, sign up below for $40.