Recently, our church added a FREE job posting web service to our website that we call “Career Connections.” The purpose is to connect businesses with qualified job candidates within our church family. Employers may post job openings, search resumes, and view applicants. Job seekers may post resumes and search for job openings in the Houston area.
If your church has not done something like this, let me highly encourage it. We found a great partner in Tim Krauss at NeedsMet. NeedMet is a customized web application that connects employers and job seekers inside your church. It is a valuable tool to help church members find meaningful employment, connect church employers with job seekers, and help churches reduce unemployment.
They did a great job customizing our instance of their software to match our website (see before and after). They also back filled our account with job openings from Houston area companies…giving our church family immediate opportunities to pursue. I highly recommend them. Best of all, they are priced right for churches and deliver a great product in a short amount of time.
Recently, we have been discussing the role of blogs in our web strategy. We have several staff who already blog (view list). We encourage that, but we also wanted to begin incorporating blogs into our church’s web presence. These blogs are different from our staff’s personal blogs. They are more refined in scope and will add another layer of rich content for our church family that our website does not offer. In preparation for that roll-out, it was important for us to understand the differences in these mediums so we know best how to utilize them. I created a helpful chart to guide our staff.
As you can see, websites, blogs, and social media each have their respective functions. By confusing their place in social media, we endanger our relevance and effectiveness with our intended audience. As for our church (Second Baptist Church, Houston), blogs will be used for spiritual formation by providing ministry resources, Biblical perspectives, encouragement, leadership development and/or ministry best practices. Each blog will have a defined audience whether it is for SBC members and visitors, SBC leaders, or Christians and church leaders worldwide.
We also have used blogs for special events such as our annual Beach Retreat (read more). We limit event based blogs to mission trips, Beach Retreat, etc. where the event occurs out-of-town and over the span of several days.
On a technical note, we are using WordPress MU and hosting them internally on our servers. Thanks to Clifton Griffin, we also integrated the WordPress MU login with Active Directory to give our staff a single sign-on experience.
On February 13, the Houston chapter of the American Advertising Federation awarded Origin Design a Gold Medal Addy Award in Interactive Media for their design of Second.org. We are very excited about this recognition of our website.
As a gold medal winner, our website will now be submitted for a district award and hopefully then a national award. The Addy awards are a very prestigious honor in the advertising industry.
So join me in recognizing our in-house project team who worked tirelessly with me on our website. They share in the the reward of this great honor:
Chris Castle, Senior Applications Developer
Barbara Durand, Director of Marketing & Communications
Heather Halaska, Art Director
Brian Milinski, Volunteer Ministry Coordinator
Cindy Raymond, Communications Account Manager
Dave Riggle, Associate Pastor and Executive Sponsor
Cliff Young, Pastor and Director of Creative Media and SecondFilms
Great job gang! To see a list of all winners, go here.
More About Second.org:
- Video Overview
- Key Features: Online Prayer Room; Class/Group Websites; Streaming Media; Events Calendar; ShareThis; mySBC Life; e-Newsletters; Event and Media RSS Feeds, Completely integrated with Church Membership System
- Features of Group Websites: Events, Evites, File Sharing, Photo Albums, Class Roster, Small Groups, Email Personalization, Leadership Positions, Data Exports.
- Average Monthly Website Traffic/Usage:
- 60,349 Average Visits per Month
- 2,021,790 Average Page Views per Month
- Over 50% of our website’s traffic is attributed to use of group websites
- Average Monthly Emails Sent via Group Websites: 65,955
- 144 of 162 (90%) of Adult Bible Study Classes are using group websites
- Monthly Average Media Consumption:
- 19,684 Videos (Watched Online)
- 12,699 MP3 Down loads
- 4,164 MP4 Video Downloads
- 3,039 Photos Viewed
- 34,138 Podcasts Views
- 4,076 Registered Users
Project Partners: Origin Design (Design, CSS/HTML); RoundedCube (Sitecore CMS Implementation; Google Mini and Social Media Integrations)
Twitter is the fastest growing social network on the web today.
Comparatively speaking, the total number of users on Twitter is slightly less than the population of New York City. So, I certainly wouldn’t consider it mainstream, but its growth rate is impressive.
What is even more interesting is who is using twitter. Nielsen’s study corrects some common misconceptions. Twitterers (a.k.a. Tweeters) are not primarily teens or college students as you might expect. In fact, in 2009 the largest age group on Twitter was 35-49 (42 percent of the site’s audience). Majority of people (62%) visit Twitter.com while at work, while 35 percent accessed it from home only. 
The assumption that social media is a youth movement is not true. Facebook stats prove this true as well.
The big question is, “Is there a strategic opportunity to use Twitter in my ministry?” In the end, each of us have to answer that question ourselves, but here are some rough ideas of where Twitter could be used within the church:
- Greeting & Parking Ministry: Each of the parking and greeting volunteers could use twitter to facilitate quick communications regarding real-time updates on parking lot capacities, special needs of visitors, security concerns, and advanced notices to check-in volunteers.
- Marketing & Brand Monitoring: Twitter is one of the most viral social networks, allowing individuals to ‘pass the word’ with a single click of a button. Using this as a medium to participate in social conversations and to listen to what people are saying about our church can help the church identify its strengths and weaknesses.
- Spiritual Formation: Develop a curriculum comprised of daily 140 character statements, thoughts, and action items. The progression of tweets would lead individuals through a specific doctrine or life application.
- Mission Trips, Retreats, Camps: Twitter is often called micro-blogging. Twitter is a great tool to send updates, pictures and short commentaries on what is happening at church events that are occurring out of town.
- Singles Events: Recruit 2-3 volunteers to tweet updates during your ministry event. Not only does this get the word out, but it also creates a ‘buzz’ about your ministry, especially with Twitter’s new Local Trends feature. See a map of local trends to learn more about the power of this feature.
See Atkinson’s ebook called Twitter for Churches for a more thorough look at Twitter’s use in the church.
