Church Strategy v2
I've been thinking about a different strategy than the one I originally proposed. This one is a bit more interactive for the members and leaders of the church.
#1) Facebook - everyone is on Facebook and a "fan" of the pastor and church. They're part of the church group and RSVP for all events via Facebook. All social interactions and most updates go through FB.
#2) Tumblr - create a Tumblr for everything you need. For video and audio, have a church Tumblr that posts it all. Every leader in the church has their own Tumblr where they can post pictures/thoughts/music and more so they can keep all their members up to date on what's going on. All members have a Tumblr and follow each leader and group within the church that they want. Leaders can have their own blogs but they make sure to import them into their Tumblr. Give all leaders iPhones so they can snap pictures and send them to Tumblrs instantaneously.
Beyond those two things, you can do other cool stuff. They include:
* Stream video via qik or Justin.tv.
* Send quick updates to members using Twitter (this gets aggregated into Tumblr though)
* Aggregate EVERYTHING into FriendFeed just for fun.
* Upload all photos to Flickr and create sets.
But the two core things to use are Facebook and Tumblr I think. Everything else is just gravy...
Ok now I need to get a church to test out this strategy to see if it could work. Any takers?
Church Website and Internet Strategy on a Budget
Churches have horrible internet strategies across America. The only church that I know of that has really gotten it right in my opinion is Mars Hill Church, but they've got the resources. Here's a cheap way to do things right on the internet if you're a church on a budget.
Social interactions: Facebook
Put your church group and ministries all on Facebook. Make a Facebook group and have all the members of the church join it, then run events and updates through that. Utilize the discussion board to hear feedback from people that go to the church. Make sure the officers are up to date, so this can completely replace the About page and all that garbage that go on most crappy church websites.
Events: Facebook
'nuff said
Website: Tumblr
Nobody's built anything worthy of mention here. I would actually say to use Tumblr, and just make it really lightweight. Post basic information on the page, and let people subscribe to the RSS feed to get updates about things that are going on (link to events on Facebook and stuff). Let the pastors post updates and write about the upcoming week etc. Also post videos on this (on Vimeo). Tumblr would be cool because you can 1) put it on your domain and 2) customize it like crazy.
Video: Vimeo
Upload all the videos that are made for the church (announcements, sermons, etc) to Vimeo and if you have the resources, use Vimeo HD to have all of your videos stream in HD quality (it's beautiful).
Photos: Flickr
Post all photos to Flickr after an event/conference and put them into a set. Would be really cool.
Podcasting: ???
I don't know anything about podcasting because I think it blows.
That's the advice I'd give, just pounded this out really quickly so comment if you have ideas.
What Facebook could do for The Father’s House
The Father's House is a church in my city (Vacaville, CA) that I have been going to for a little over three years now. It is one of the best churches I have ever been to – every week they have a great band, a good message from the sermon, and they have grown like crazy these last few years because of it. As of now, I believe there are around 1800-2000 people that attend The Father's House (TFH henceforth) every weekend. That's a substantial amount of people, it makes TFH the biggest church in Vacaville, and it is has only been around for 10 years. But with a large amount of growth, there comes problems and changes that need to be made from the top down to sustain the growth, and this is where I think Facebook could step in and solve one of the biggest problems that TFH faces today.
In the Internet business, when a web application begins to see growth, there are a lot of changes that have to be made to the infrastructure of the company (i.e. the servers) to sustain this growth. There is nothing worse than growing like crazy and then not being able to provide your users with the value that they need to stay with your service. The same is true with a church: to keep their members they have to provide enough value so that each person compelled enough to come back next week.
The number one thing that will bring people back to your church every week is the people they know and are connected to. Sorry to break it to you, but no matter how great a worship team is or how inspirational and loud a preacher is, in the long run people aren't going to stick around if they feel alone in a large community. It would be like going to work every day and not knowing anyone that you work with – it would be impossible to stick with the company for more than a few months. Humans tend to find other humans that have the same interests as they do, and they stick with these groups (or cliques, whatever you want to call them). It is a lot more obvious in Junior High and High School, where you can walk into a lunchroom and find cliques of every kind; the punks, the skaters, the jocks, the geeks, etc. People in large communities like The Father's House have a very hard time finding these like-minded people; they exist, but there is a problem with a serious lack of information available to these people who are looking to get connected.
This lack-of-information problem is killing The Father's House right now. People are leaving left and right because they don't feel connected to anyone in the church. I could go into numerous stories of people that have been in the church for 2-3 years, and have literally never had a single person come up and introduce themselves. I'll admit that I really haven't reached out to anyone in the last 2 years; I made my connections the first year I was there, and it helped that I worked in the church office. Since then I haven't really had much of an inclination to reach out to new people. I think a lot of people feel the same as me, they've been in the church for a few years and are very comfortable with the people they know so they don't have an incentive to go meet new people. I feel like the leaders do an even worse job at reaching out by staying in the front after the services and talking to the same people every weekend – it's almost predictable who they're going to be talking to after, and I think a new person trying to get connected and know people have a lot of trouble getting to know the leadership. I have nothing against the leaders, they're awesome people -- but come on, no one's perfect.
I think I've outlined the problem enough, it's time for the solution. In fact, it is a very simple solution; it's one word and two syllables: Facebook (you guessed it). To those of you stuck back in the stone ages of computing, with your AOL dial up, Facebook is a social utility that connects people with friends and others who work, study and live around them. Anyone can join and it is completely free of any fees, and even more importantly, isn't owned by the megalomaniac Rupert Murdoch. I am going to explain the different scenarios where Facebook could step in and become the social directory for The Father's House.
1) Current members
Current members would join Facebook under their respective networks (San Francisco, Sacramento, Napa, their college alumni, their current college, etc.). As soon as they register, they search for “The Father's House” group on Facebook and join it. Inside the TFH group, there are several useful features that the new user can utilize. There is a directory of all the other members on Facebook that are part of The Father's House group. The user could go through the directory and search for friends, or could simply look for profile pictures of people they recognize and “friend” them. There is a list of upcoming events that the user can RSVP to right away (more on that later). There is a “wall” that the user can post things on, and a discussion board that allows them to start new topics that other members can reply to. There is also a list of links in the description of TFH that link to other groups of ministries that exist within the church – currently there is a group called 1221 for all the members of 1221 to join. The same actions of The Father's House group are available to all the members of the 1221 group. There is also another feature that allows members to post pictures to the group. For example, if a user took a few pictures from the Small Group Rally weekend, they could post these pictures to the group and all the members of the group would be able to check them out and enjoy them.
2) Visitors
Retaining your new members is almost as important as retaining old ones – you never know who could be joining. It could be the “next Billy Graham”, or more importantly, the “next Bill Gates”, etc. The fact is, retaining these visitors is very hard in a large church. During the “welcome visitors” session of the service, the person could talk about how involved all the members were on Facebook, and how easy it would be for someone to get connected on Facebook. The visitor would go home, join Facebook, and join The Father's House group. From there they could go find people with similar interests to them, and start talking to them via Facebook. At the next church service, these people would have a reason to come back – they would know somebody with similar interests that they could meet. From there, there are a million positive scenarios that could occur. This new friend could introduce them to a group of people that share the same interests, invite them to a small group that they are in (more on that in a bit), go out to lunch and find out that they need a job, are looking for a roommate, etc. The possibilities are endless, but would have never been enabled without meeting via Facebook.
3) Small groups
There are different types of privacy settings that users can set when they create a group. Small group leaders could create a Facebook group for their small group, and they could let it be a private, invitation only group. This would mean that only the members of the group are allowed to see what is going on – the events, the discussion board, the wall, and the other members. It is like a real life small group – only the members that are within it are the ones that are in the loop, anyone looking from the outside doesn't get to see what is going on. Small group leaders could also allow their groups to be seen by the public, so other people looking to join a group could check the group out and its members before talking to the leader about seeing if they could join.
4) Events
Entire events can be managed through Facebook. Events can be a part of a group, so small group leaders could create as many as they like. Events could also be created for the entire church (such as Frequency Conference), and attendees can see the other people that are going to be there. They can also invite their friends to to the event, and it is very easy to access all the information about the event. There is a discussion board for people that are attending who have questions, and a wall for others who are excited to be coming to write their thoughts. Need volunteers? Send out a message to all the people that have RSVP'ed as “attending”. There is a rich set of privacy settings for each event – private, invitation only, etc.
5) Rich social connections
Thanks to Facebook, I have been able to connect with old friends and instantly deepen my relationships with new friends and people I have met through friends. Facebook is a new medium by which people communicate, and it is a much more efficient means of communication. In the past, people would have to talk to 150 people to tell them what they are doing for the weekend. Now they can write the information in a note, or put it in their profile, and all 150 of their friends in real life will be able to access that information without having to pick up the phone or see the person face to face. The best thing about Facebook is that their goal is to mirror social reality, all the interactions that happen on Facebook are similar to what would happen in real life, only in a much more efficient way. This means that people at The Father's House will be able to connect with other people much faster and more efficiently than any other solution that exists today.
A few numbers from some of the most important companies in the world on Facebook: Google has 13,748 employees, 5,418 of which are on Facebook – 39%. Microsoft has 76,000 employees, and there are currently 17,647 of them on Facebook – 23%, with more joining everyday. Note that this was less than a year ago that they opened these work networks, so all these people have joined in the last 12 months.
There is a social revolution going on right now, and it is up to the people and leaders of TFH to embrace it or leave it behind – and watch another church come from out of nowhere to crush all the competition because of the vast amount of social connections each member will have because they embraced this revolution.
And if you don't believe me, go join, create a profile, and start adding your friends. There is a reason Facebook is worth the rumored $10 billion, as Peter Thiel says, “only the members can truly understand the value in this thing.”
UPDATE: For people that go to The Father's House reading this, why not join The Father's House group on Facebook now instead of 6 months from now when "everyone else is doing it".