I have previously written about the importance of documenting your organizations online assets. It is so important to keep track of the many usernames, emails, and passwords that it takes to manage the day to day operations of a ministry's communications.
There is one other key things to remember. Be sure you separate your personal online identity from your organization's identity.
Here is what I mean. So many online services, especially the free services that ministries tend to rely on, require the use of an unique email address for the username. When starting out, it is tempting (and very easy) to use your personal email address (or even your ministry email address) for these services.
For example, we use Posterous.com to podcast our MP3 sermons and to post our weekly bulletins to Twitter and Facebook. Posterous, in particular, requires a unique email address in order to set up an account. So, in order to setup my organization in such a way that doesn't permanently link it's online services (and therefore identity) to my personal identity, we created a generic email address to use specifically with Posterous.com.
To further clarify, I didn't use my personal email (jason@gmailhotmail...) or my ministry email (jason@calvary...). We used a generic email (communications@....) to setup the service. Furthermore, we used this same email for our Feedburner account.
This ensures that should something happen to me (I quit, get sick, change roles, move, die, lose all my fingers in a tragic typing accident, etc.) our ministry organization can continue to do what we are doing now without having to change everything.
If you don't know how to create new email accounts for your ministry domain, or can't, don't worry. There are plenty of free online email providers that can be utilized (Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc.). I prefer Gmail as it can be configured to access the account via the web, POP, or IMAP.
Posted via email from Cooper-ation | resourcing for ministry
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