When I was young, I used to collect and trade baseball cards with the other kids in the neighborhood. The cards we collected were not really worth much money, so whenever I tried to trade for a card, I was always pursuing one of two objectives: collecting cards from my favorite player or team, or completing a series.
As an adult, I still find myself collecting things, although I have moved on from baseball cards. Now I collect technology, and if I had to guess, you probably do too.
If you’ve purchased anything in the last twenty or so years, you’ve almost certainly experienced it: that moment when you get to the register to purchase an inconsequential item, perhaps with exact change at the ready, and your dreams of a quick in-and-out transaction are dashed on the rocks of a series of questions:
“Can I get your phone number please? Hmm . . . you’re not in our system. Let me add you. What’s your name? Address? Email address? Phone number? Mother’s cousin’s oldest stepchild’s phone number?”
In my last blog post, I walked through how to decide what to post on your church’s Facebook page. This time, we’re going to dig deeper and talk about when an event or crisis is going on nationwide or in your community. The question always comes up: to share or not to share?
In February 2016, my wife and I welcomed our first child into the world. Two weeks later, we were sent into a panic. My wife had recently started a job with a local hospital on an as-needed status. She had basically gone through training and then been put on maternity leave. Two weeks after the birth of our son, she was asked to come back full time at the end of her leave. This meant we needed to suddenly find day care for our child. To complicate matters, the day care associated with our church had eight children already on its waiting list.
As many churches continue to see the value in social media for reaching out to their communities, it’s important that we use best practices for helping our content reach more people. As many studies show, when it comes to Facebook, videos tend to be the best content to get more engagement. Because of that, it’s a good idea to produce high-quality video content to share on our social media platforms.
For many church workers, this can seem daunting. You might be thinking, “I didn’t go to film school. How am I supposed to create this kind of content?” It doesn’t have to be as hard as many people make it sound. There are some easy steps you can take to regularly make short, high-quality videos to share on social media.
Whether you love it or hate it, social media is here to stay. Facebook started back in 2003 as more of a college/dating-type site and has turned into something much bigger that influences everyday life around the world.
With the rapid-fire pace of web applications today, it seems there’s a new must-have product about every other week. Generally, these come and go and aren’t actually all that new or innovative, so I hope I might be forgiven for largely ignoring Slack when it first launched. It was, after all, little more than a glorified chat tool, and not something our team at CTSFW really needed.
At this point, though, I think I’m willing to concede that I might have been mistaken in my first look at Slack. Over the last few years it’s actually become an indispensable part of our team’s toolkit, finding a niche alongside apps like Wunderlist, Google Docs, and Gmail in the selection of apps that do one thing, do it really well, and don’t try to do anything else.
Have you ever worked on a project for a church committee where you’ve spent weeks meeting, planning, studying, and preparing to make a decision, then a few more weeks double-checking some things, and then a handful more weeks waiting for the right people to come back from vacation, and finally after months of delays, preparation, and hard work, discovered that the opportunity had passed or the problem had solved itself?
Nobody likes to waste their time, and sometimes churches move at the speed of committees. (Which is, incidentally, only slightly slower than frozen molasses on a January morning in northern Canada . . . during an ice age.) Speed is not the only virtue, of course, and we want to make wise decisions with limited resources. But in many cases, it would be very helpful if churches were a little more agile.
In the past, the front door of your church was probably, well, the front door. These days, however, the first exposure visitors get to your church is probably via your church website. Our church websites give visitors a small taste of what our churches are up to and what they can expect when they actually set foot in the building. They also can allow visitors to find the information they’re seeking without having to call the church secretary.
It’s important that we have the right information in the right location on our websites so visitors can find that information without having to dig. There are no hard-and-fast rules that demand every church website look the same, but there are some considerations you may want to keep in mind to help your website best serve visitors.
What happens after someone visits your congregation?
At my church, the visitors sign a guest book and a day or two later, they receive a letter in the mail from the pastor—which is an excellent practice. It’s personal, especially in this detached, electronic world. In fact, it has repeatedly led to visitors wanting to meet with him and eventually join the congregation. Several people have mentioned how important that letter has been. People like to be acknowledged and the personal touch makes a huge difference.
But more can be done to help someone get to know the congregation.
