Friends, I’m excited to share the new UUA Congregations Reaching Out Toolkit with you!
I’m always sharing great UUA resources, but this one is special as worked with the UUA Outreach Team on its development. It represents a fantastic collaboration and synthesis of many best practices and recommended outreach strategies. More on my contributions and link to the toolkit below.
I highly recommend sharing this resource with your leadership. Use it to help you realize your congregations growth and outreach potential.
About the Congregations Reaching Out Toolkit
The Congregations Reaching Out Toolkit is designed to help Unitarian Universalists congregations and groups accomplish the following:
- Discern who you are and compellingly communicate a cohesive identity online and in person.
- Use social media to identify, reach, and engage with specific target audiences.
- Create and promote outreach events and opportunities based on the needs of these audiences.
The toolkit is presented in three guides:
- Finding Your Target Audience
- Social Media Strategy for Outreach
- Planning and Promoting Great Outreach Events
“Together these present an outreach process of continually refining your public identity, sharing this through your online presence, identifying new audiences you want to reach, engaging with them via social media, and intentionally designing and promoting outreach-focused events. As the need for UU values has never been greater, we must turn up our efforts to turn our ministries outward to our communities, helping those values reach new groups of people inside and outside our congregations.”
My Role and Contributions
As for my contributions to the toolkit, first, I offered content feedback and strategy recommendations on an early version of the toolkit. Later, after the two principal authors on the resource changed staff positions — Carey McDonald moved from UUA Outreach Director to UUA Acting Chief Operating Officer and the Rev. Sarah Gibb Millspaugh joined the congregational life staff of the Pacific Western Region of the UUA — I accepted the task of doing a major edit and re-write of the toolkit.
Because of these various roles:
- I am directly quotedin the toolkit
- Offered additional tips and strategies for inclusion
- And re-wrote / edited large portions of the toolkit
If you recognize language from my training in parts of the resource that are not directly attributed to me, that’s because I wrote or edited that section. As I said, this resource represents a great collaboration.
I’m grateful to Carey McDonald, now Executive Vice President of the UUA, for the opportunity to work with the UUA Outreach Team on the development of this resource, and to the Rev. Sarah Gibb Millspaugh for giving it a home with the Pacific Western Region of the UUA. Thank you.
Get the Toolkit
That’s it! I hope you find this resource valuable. You can download the strategy guides that make up the toolkit here:
Make the most of this great resources: Share it. Print it. Discuss it.
Going to the UUA’s General Assembly conference? Bring it with you. It will make for great reading and conversation. Once you check it out, I’d love to hear what you think. Comment on this post, where I share this via Facebook and Twitter.
In this post, a call to action for congregations wanting to grow but not fully realizing that their front door and first greeting space has moved online. 
Friends, if your congregation is within reasonable travel to Southern New England please share this event reminder with your congregation. My workshop will be focused on MEDIA and MINISTRY for all ages. I’m designing it with a wide range of participants in mind — religious educators, clergy, volunteer teachers, youth advisors, youth, young adults. 
