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Posted by Justin Long ⋅ September 24, 2008 ⋅

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So you’ve figured the importance of not being distracted and you can articulate your purpose. But you’re wondering about this whole blogging thing, and you think that maybe that’s a bit too much for you and where you’re at. Or maybe you want it to be a little quieter—not so public. The other option that might be useful to you is an e-group.

The benefit of a blog is that you can publish things quite publicly, and people can easily link to you. However, one downside—particularly in missions—is the publicity. An e-group can be less public, and slightly more controlled. The downside is that it’s not as easy to find an e-group via a Google search, and the control can be an illusion.

An e-group is simply a collection of e-mails in a list management system. This system usually lets you send one email to one address (e.g. notify-momentum@strategicnetwork.org) and it will be sent out to all of the e-mail addresses on the list. Further, it usually automates the process of subscribing and unsubscribing so that people can manually add or remove themselves from the list with minimal interaction from you. And, it also typically controls who can post to the list.

There are a number of email list management systems out there. I’ll mention two: one that I manage and the other I don’t. The first is www.strategicnetwork.org, which offers free e-group services to missions-related people (that’s the one I mange). The other is Google Groups, which does roughly the same thing. We launched strategicnetwork.org… back when Yahoo Groups regularly sent adult-themed advertising to e-groups, including Christian ones. Nowadays that’s less of a problem, but we still have 160,000+ subscribers to our e-groups. Google, as you might imagine, has quite a bit more. They’re both free, or you can check around for one that you like more.

Most e-groups come in at least three flavors: Open, Moderated or Closed. An Open list means anyone can subscribe to it; a moderated list means you can apply to join but a moderator has to approve you; a closed list typically isn’t published anywhere and you can’t join unless the moderator sends you an invitation. E-groups also have at least three flavors of posting: open, moderated and closed. As you might imagine, Open means anyone can post (good for discussion lists); moderated means all messages must be approved by a moderator before they are sent out to the list, but anyone can post (good for a high-quality, thoughtful discussion or a sensitive list); closed means only the moderator can post (a newsletter style list).

E-groups are great as “push” systems – they push e-mails out, and you don’t have to worry about people coming to the website to check in. But, the control can be an illusion in this respect: the emails can be forwarded, and you’d never know it. So if you’re on a sensitive list you either have to use code words or trust your members.

Really, you want the emails to be forwarded, because that’s the ideal form of word of mouth. And this is one place where e-groups really shine over blogs: if you have a small passionate core of people around a specific purpose, an e-group can be a very useful mechanism for sharing the group’s vision and getting the word out to others. Send a key story via e-mail to the list, and let them forward it on. What you want to do is turn participants into evangelists for your purpose.

Whether you use blogs, microblogs, e-groups, or whatever, you need to work on this singular goal: now that you know your purpose, you need to share it in a compelling way so that it attracts other people. You need to find “kindred spirits,” if you’re going to build some kind of network or swarm. So start getting your Message out today!