How can a website help a missionary?

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Keep in touch!

Ben and Allie are excited to be living overseas. They have a great sending agency, the people they are working with were warm and accepting and they really feel God's blessing on this new chapter in their lives. But life overseas...can be lonely. Even though they really enjoy what they are doing, they sometimes feel isolated from their culture back home and the places, experiences, friends and family they love. An interactive site can go a long way of easing that feeling of isolation. Interactive sites not only let the people back home know what you are doing, it gives them the opportunity to interact.
• GoGrow has pre-built tools to help you communicate easily and inexpensively.
• Extended features including live chat and two-way video conference available at extra cost.

The world is growing smaller...one website at a time.

Network

Jenna thinks big; she loves God and has some amazing dreams for what can be done. Jenna is also smart; she knows if she tried to tackle everything she'd like to do, she'd quickly be overwhelmed and likely quickly experience burn out. But Jenna is in it for the long run. What can she do? She's got a great little website, but she knows it can be something more. By creating space on her website for other organizations in her area, she can give people administration access to just a small piece of her site. Soon, with the input of many other people around her, her site has become a hub of valuable information for many in the area. As Jenna orchestrates much of the communication, she starts to become aware of how to network people and compliment their strengths. Jenna's impact might one day be much bigger than even this big dreamer dreamed.
Using your site to network other ministries can:
• Empower and encourage those around you
• Introduce your site's visitors to great ministries
• Allow people to administer small slices of your site
Your GoGrow site can be a resource which highlights current events and promotes other ministries, offering them a place to speak.

Publish newsletters

Keith and Barbara have been sending support letters for years. They like to share what God is doing in their community and know the folks back home like to be updated. They like the idea of having some sort of website, but aren't too sure about giving up the tried and true newsletter which has been such a great tool for so many years. Then Barbara has a great idea. One month, in addition to their regular letter, they enclose a small card asking the people who would like to go paperless to request so online. As it turned out, a significant portion of their supporters still wanted to receive paper copies but Barbara was delighted to be able to reduce their printing cost, stuffing time and postage by 30%.
Online news can:
• Reduce paper and toner cost and wear and tear on copy equipment
• Distribute information that is fast and green
• Save postage expense and delivery time
• Save time maintaining the mailing list when people are able to (un)subscribe and update their contact information themselves.
• Draw readers in with links to additional content or outside resources.
GoGrow sites make staying in contact a lot easier.

Consolidating content on your own site

Stan and Beth are excited to be on their first assignment. They are both quite techy and regularly blog, post photos and video and have accounts on popular social media sites. The problem is, the content they are posting is fragmented, with little snippets on multiple websites (such as Flikr, YouTube, and Facebook). With GoGrow they can post all of their content on their own site so people can find their blog posts, photos and podcasts all in one place. Stan still likes Facebook and Beth really diggs Twitter, so the content they post there is automatically displayed on their GoGrow site.
Local content hosted on your site can mingle with aggregated content from other sources:
• Look at all the sites where you post and ask what you'd like displayed on your site.
Ask us if you'd like to populate your GoGrow site with content hosted on Flikr, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube or any other remote site. We'll investigate and let you know if it's possible and what any extra expense may be.

Scheduled content publishing

Jane loves to write. It seems she has a gift of taking her everyday experiences and wrapping them in an eternal perspective. Many people have commented how inspired they feel when they read her work. She really enjoys it, but finds it difficult to take the time to write well. But she also understands that regular updates are critical to establish a blogging audience. GoGrow allows scheduled updates that work on her time. When inspiration hits, Jane can create one, two, or as many blog posts as she has time for. She can then tell her site when to publish them — one a day, twice a week, three times a month — whatever works best for her. She won't ever need to worry about remembering to publish. The site does all that automatically.
• Present notes for a sermon series or Bible study one per week.
• Complete and post your bulletin mid-week and the site will publish it automatically on Sunday morning
• Offer a clue-a-day treasure hunt for kids.
By scheduling content, you can upload a lot all at once and tell your GoGrow site to publish or unpublish a little at a time.

Be a local resource for those you serve

Latrice has been teaching ESL in Romania for two years. She found her GoGrow site has been a great way to stay in touch with friends and supporters at home. But as she got to know her students better, she noticed many struggle with anger and bitterness as a result of growing up under government oppression. She adds a page to her site which outline the basic steps for overcoming the past and another on how to forgive those who have harmed you. She uses this as a reference point for after class discussions with her students. She finds they enjoy adding comments, allowing them to practice their English and also begin the healing process.

By knowing the group you serve, you can create a targeted list of resources specific to your community:
• Network area churches by providing meeting times and contact information
• Meet practical needs by helping people locate social service agencies
• Post resources uniquely relevant to the people you serve
A GoGrow web site can extend you ministry in the field as well as helping you stay connected to those back home.