The World Wide Web offers great opportunities to UU congregations for finding new members and communicating their message to the community (and the world) while improving communication among their own members.
While not everyone has access to the Web, or uses the Web, the number of those who do is growing dramatically. From August 1996, the hit rate at the UUA website grew to an average of 8 to 9 thousand hits per month by the end of the year, and by May 1997 had almost doubled that. By May there were over 3000 hits per month in the "congregations near you" listing -- and UUA will provide a link from there to your congregation's webpage if you have one. This is good exposure. And by including a web address in your advertising, you can provide access to volumes of information for far less than it would cost to include that information in the advertising.
And for your own members, the beauty of the Web is that you can keep the information there up to date and disseminate it automatically without churning the presses or running up the postage bill. As a rough estimate, if you can avoid sending out 300 copies of your newsletter over the course of a year, you have saved in postage alone the cost of the website for that year.
With the right tools (and the right tools are readily available, and not necessarily expensive), creating your own webpages is about as easy as creating a Microsoft Word document. True, some of the glitz you see on the Web these days requires some wizardry. But effectiveness depends on content, not glitz. You don't need to know any fancy programming languages or fancy keywords to write a simple but content-rich webpage that looks good and is effective. And we believe it's worth the effort.
The other point we want to make is that there is lots of help available. There are good books and good online resources. More importantly, there are people who can help you along. There are computer-literate people in your congregation, and people they know that will help. And one of our goals at the Twin Cities Unitarian Universalist Communication Committee (TCUUCC) is to help UU congregations begin to use the Web to improve electronic communication. We can provide technical services to help you start writing and publishing your pages.
This paper should be accessible to people who own and use a computer. There may be some spots where your eyes glaze over, but bear with us: the time will come when those spots have precisely the answer you need. So skip them for now, get together a group a friends interested in making your page a reality, share your talents, and start writing!