As I was looking through the followers’ list of one of the Guild’s Twitter followers (and after doing some searching of my own), I came to the conclusion that many of our Lutheran schools are missing out on some great opportunities to spread the word about their ministries online.  I’ve spend several hours over the last months scouring Twitter for Lutheran schools with little success in locating very many.  Of the ones I have found, several have tweeted a handful of times, with no new updates for months.

Twitter is a great way to share news and information about your school with the world.  Twitter can easily be integrated with your school’s website or even manually updated.  Anyone can learn to use Twitter in under an hour and updates take just a few seconds because of the 140 character limit.  Best of all, Twitter is free.

In the late 1990s it became vital that churches and schools had websites to establish an online identity, but that is no longer enough.  Now, it is crucial that your school have a strong Web 2.0 presence as well.  Twitter is just a small part, though.  Social networking sites like Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, etc seem to be appearing daily.

Does your school need to make use of all of these?  Probably not, but some consideration should be given to each of them.  Perhaps YouTube would be a good way to share PR and marketing videos with the community or maybe some students or classes could post a series of video Lenten and Advent devotions.  Flickr could be use to share student work with families.  There are an infinite number of possibilities.

What’s important is making it easy for current and potential families and students to find information about your school and to help them understand the ministry being done there.  To paraphrase Scripture, it’s time to be the light of the world and put our schools on a hill so that all can see what is being done there, not for Earthly glory, but for the glory of our Lord and Savior.