2064 The Electronic Frontier: Growing UU via the Web
Presenters:
Gini Courter, UUA Moderator
Denise Davidoff, President of the Church of the Larger Fellowship President
Deb Weiner, Director of Electronic Communications, UUA
Erik David Carlson, founding member of the Church of the Younger Fellowship
Lynn Ungar, CLF's Minister of Lifespan Learning
John Peterson, Director of Communications for the Interfaith Alliance
Prepared for UUA.org by:
Margy Levine Young, Reporter;
Jone Johnson Lewis, Editor
This workshop talked about what four organizations are doing with electronic communications to promote UUism: the CLF, the CYF, the Interfaith Alliance, and the UUA itself.
Speaker Handout: Powerpoint Presentation 
Peterson, Director of Communications for the Interfaith Alliance, emphasized hospitality as the key mission of the Internet – welcoming the stranger. He emphasized creating web sites that invite a return visit and provide lots of information to encourage trust and relationship. Be sure to make it easy to find basic information. An advantage of the Web is that it is anonymous, so that they can explore your congregation or denomination without risking anything.
Ask the visitor what they want and what format they want it in, so that the visitor can control their options. Always allow for space for questions for feedback, as an invitation to community. The challenge is that you must reply – the visitor needs a response from the community. Polls and petitions provide ways for visitors to engage, too. If you collect information from visitors, you must have a clear privacy policy that defines what information you collect, how you secure it, and what you do with it.
Once people have indicated an interest (perhaps registering at your site or signing up for an e-newsletter), you can push information out to them. You can email a newsletter to visitors, or email calendar updates and meeting announcements to your members. People want numbers and statistics (How many UUs? Who are they?), but they also want stories (Who are the people here?). They want images that show life, not just an impersonal computer.
Peterson pointed out that people find you by typing a word or phrase into a search engine like Google. When you create your pages you must include identifying information about each page so that people find the relevant pages. (See event #2028 for more information about search engines.) Be sure to include all the text that you have on the Web – all your sermons, lectures, lesson plans, photos, audio recordings, and video clips. If you have material that might be of interest to visitors or members, it should be on the Web.
You need to determine who will monitor your chat boards, update your site, and write the materials that you plan to post. You'll also need to determine what's done by staff and what volunteers to. Be sure to include compelling images, not just of buildings, talking heads, or pictures of panel discussions. Think about branding – use your web address everywhere, on your letterhead, newsletter, business cards, church signs, church ads, and the phone book, so that your message is consistent.
Deb Weiner is Director of Electronic Communications at the UUA; her staff group is in charge of the UUA's web site and email newsletters and discussion groups. When the UUA was setting up uua.org, Weiner recounted, they wanted to help people find UU congregations, and every Sunday, hundreds of people come to uua.org and search for a congregation. Almost all of our 1,040+ congregations have web sites, and we link to almost all of them from uua.org.
For congregations and districts, having a good web site is key. The site needs to be welcoming to the new visitor with an attractive, clean style. It should have lots of pictures that make it personal, make good use of white space, avoid too much glitz (like sound or long Flash animations), and have a memorable web address (URL). Your site needs to be timely, match the style of your congregation, be truly inviting; and provide basic PR information (who, what, when, where how) about your services. Keep pages fairly short, so that people don't need to scroll way down to find what they are looking for.
Prospective members need to be able to find everything that they need to know when considering whether to visit. Existing members need to be able to find out about activities and publications, but this material doesn't need to be on the home page, because it can be confusing to visitors. You may want to have a separate site, or a separate section of the site, for members and these pages may be password-protected so that it can contain more personal information than you'd want to put on a public site.
A UU from the San Diego, CA area pointed out that San Diego area cluster of congregations has a regional site at www.uusandiego.org  , which was professionally designed. It is entirely directed at visitors, with links to the member congregations.
Weiner also pointed out that your congregational board needs to have policy about what should be on your web site, what its privacy rules are, and what its mission is. Although volunteers can be very helpful, congregations who don't have qualified volunteers need to come up with a way to pay for web design and help with getting a site set up. Visitors have become sophisticated enough that bad designs are no longer good enough – they drive visitors away. The content can be generated by your staff and committees, but the design may need to be professionally created.
Many congregational members don't see the point of spending money on a web site, but it's the primary way that congregations are finding new members. Web content is also a wonderful resource for members who are housebound or in nursing homes, or who have vision or mobility issues that computers can solve or ameliorate. The older age group may not understand the need for a web site, but you can identify advocates in that age group who have seen the point of the Web because they use it to communicate with their grandchildren.
The look of uua.org will be changing within the next six months, as the web site moves to a new design and database-driven technology. A good reference for simple, effective web design is a book called Don't Make Me Think, by Steve Krug, and it emphasizes how people's attention can be distracted by too much on each page.
Church of the Larger Fellowship (www.clfuu.org )
Speaker Handout: Powerpoint Presentation
Lynn Ungar is the Church of the Larger Fellowship's Minister of Lifespan Learning. The CLF is a "cyber" organization, with many services provided on the Web. The CLF religious education pages include resources, curricula, other publications, online courses, and shared interest and covenant groups. The online covenant groups allow people from all over the world to share experiences and create intimacy of connection, even though facial expressions and voice inflections are lost and we can't bring a casserole when a group member needs support.
Publications include "Between Sundays" which are lesson plans for short children's RE sessions. "Quest" is the CLF's worship publication, available both by mail and on the web site. "uu&me!" is now an insert in UU World , but it's also on the CLF site as an online magazine for kids. "Coming of Age" is a source of information for congregations that are running these programs for youth. "KidTalk" is an online magazine for children, or for parents to share with children, to introduce them to UUism, UU history, UU principles, world history, and other topics.
An ongoing project of the CLF is to move curricula from printed books to material that's available on the Web. They are weaving together the resources that they have, and adding materials where there are holes. Online courses are groups of people who move through the material as groups and discuss the material online.
You don't have to be a member of CLF to access these resources, although the CLF would love you to join!
Church of the Younger Fellowship (www.uucyf.org )
Speaker Handout: Powerpoint Presentation
Erik David Carlson is a founding member of the Church of the Younger Fellowship, which reaches out to young adults aged 18 to 35. Jonathan Craig is also an active participant in CYF. Young adult UUs crave spirituality by often don't attend church. They tend to create community where none is provided and may be loyal to UUism even if they don't show up at congregations. They are comfortable with technology and using it for keeping up with friends and loved ones, including their UU communities.
The CYF strategy is to use existing communities where young UUs meet, including FUUSE (at www.fuuse.com ) with almost 1,500 members. The next step is to provide communities that are missing, creating online worship space where members can meet in a password-protected, members-only site. This creates a safe, private space for worship and connection. A Member Map shows a world map, with a dot on the map for each CYF member, and mousing over a dot shows information about that member. The Member Chat feature is crucial because young adults are used to online chats in real-time (that is, with almost instantaneous communication). Chat discussions are coordinated to occur with online sermons and worship services.
CYF strives to provide genuine UU spiritual experience, with a CYF Chalice that lights with a click, provides an opening reading and stays lit until you leave the site and click it to click after a closing reading. Members can enter Joys and Concerns that are shared with the entire community, and people can respond privately or publicly. They can participate in UU services with a text, audio, and video archive, along with a capability to stream services live. The Religious Library contains the complete texts of the Bible, the Koran, the Eightfold Path, the Tao Te Ching, pagan resources, and other sacred text. The Koran even has Arabic audio so that you can listen to the text and you read it.
CYF also tries to create support for local congregations, so that members get involved with projects that are happening locally to our members.
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