I am a guest blogger over at the Church Marketing Sucks blog. They have asked me to write a short series to give a sneak peek on how my research on Internet Ministry is going. Check it out…
Best Practices in Internet Ministry Part I
Archive Page 2
18
Mar
08
Hey look, I suck!
13
Mar
08
Crowdsourcing
Computerworld recently ran a cover page story on how businesses are using crowdsourcing to more quickly develop products and get feedback from target groups. Crowdsourcing is a method of using the Internet to allow multitudes of people to quickly give input to your organization via Internet-based software tools. Crowdsourcing can be used to get input from your customers on products, to do brainstorming from a larger group of people, or to simply increase customer loyalty by giving them a place where they can feel a part of your company. In a separate article written a couple of months ago, it is put this way:
Also compelling is the increasingly popular notion among companies desperate to stay competitive that the best, most direct and possibly cheapest sources of innovation lie outside the corporate walls, among customers and other previously hidden sources of talent.
One example of crowdsourcing given is Dell’s Ideastorm, where people can suggest ideas and then promote or demote the ideas. Dell examines the most popular ideas and, in some cases, implements them!
So how can this be used in Internet ministry? Would your church or organization have enough guts to give people the ability to give you suggestions? Would you be willing to think “outside the box” sometimes? Is there anyone doing this?
The Church Marketing Sucks blog has just completed an online poll on the three categories of Internet ministry that I posted about a couple months back. Interesting post and results…I’m still trying to figure out what the 5% people are replacing.
Internet Evangelism Day is coming on April 27th. According to the IED website:
We wish to communicate the outreach potential of the Web to the worldwide church. The site has a twin-track purpose:
- to explain the strategies needed to use the web for evangelism, along with showcase examples, and demonstrate the many ways you could be involved. One surprising fact: you do not need to be technically gifted to do web evangelism!
- to enable you to communicate these truths to others, by providing free downloads: PowerPoint, video clips, drama scripts, handouts, etc. These enable churches and other groups to build a web evangelism focus program into a service or other activities.
One of the most interesting tools the site provides is a checklist for your church website. This checklist includes 55 items that you can use to “score” your church website and then, based upon your checklist entries can generate a report to help you understand what needs to be fixed on your site. For the most part, I like the checklist and feel it provides some really good ideas for what makes a good church site. I will be using it as a way to help evaluate the redesign of my own church’s website.
So I have been doing an intermittent series on using technology to improve your life. Here’s a case where relying on technology could seriously mess you up…
I received a free CD from TurboTax in the mail with their latest software. Pretty cool idea: it’s free until I decide to file. I used TT last year, so I figured that I would go ahead and use it as I wanted to get started on my taxes early to do some planning for our finances. So I start working through it and filled in my income, investments, etc. It then takes me to the “Federal Review” and tells me I owe a freaking large amount of money! I am trying to figure out what happened when I realize that I never entered in any of my deductions! We have several big deductions include mortgage interest and charitable giving, so I’m figuring I somehow missed it. After spending an hour or so looking for it I cannot find it! I finally gave up and sent an email to TurboTax support.
Today (a week later) I got the email shown below with the subject line shown at the top of this blog post. I don’t know how widespread this was, but this was a huge blunder by a very well-known company.
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Did anyone get caught by this and actually file? This could be a huge black eye for Intuit!
12
Feb
08
Lifecasting:
Lifecasting is the practice of making your whole life available via the Internet. This used to be done by attaching a camera to your PC and then uploading everything to the Internet as it happens. A somewhat newer trend is using a cellphone video camera. By having the camera on a mobile device, people can now truly take the camera everywhere and broadcast everything that happens. But are people really doing this? Yes: check out qik.com to see what people are showing.
Just as cellphone cameras have made the availability of pictures from any event available (no matter how obscure, unplanned, or accidental), now cellphone video cameras have done the same for video. David Brin wrote of the Transparent Society and I believe that his vision is coming to be. In his book, he envisioned that all parts of public life would be recorded and used to enhance public safety (as well as to allow us to do things like check on our children, preview traffic conditions, etc.). While he didn’t necessarily include the idea of mobile phones and the Internet as part of this, what is happening today is eerily close to what he foresaw. One of the overarching ideas in his book is that we are much better off in a world where the public has control over the cameras than where the government has control.
Let’s look at this from a ministry perspective now. How can lifecasting be used to promote Jesus? How can it be used to encourage people to come to our churches or participate in our organizations? I’m not sure. If we live streamed our services and events? If we hooked up our pastors 24/7 to a camera?! I’m not sure if I want to know what anyone is doing all the time; and I sure do not want everyone to know what I am doing all the time! What do you think?
Can you even imagine seeing those words? They send shivers down my spine. danah boyd over at her blog tells the story of a friend of hers who had this happen: mail, calendar, documents, social network (Orkut)… All because the person accidentally gave out some information to someone they shouldn’t have and had their account hijacked.
A couple of lessons to learn. First, if you (personally) use an online email/calendar/document management tool (such as Google), are you prepared if, for some reason, they block access to your account? Second, if you as a ministry use a vendor-supplied web site or an ISP, are you prepared if, for some reason, they block access to your account?
This gives a whole new meaning to backing up your data! I, myself, have always thought that I was rather smart for using an online email system such as gmail (and on online calendar and document tool) because then I can get to my stuff from wherever I want, as long as I can get a net connection. After all, Google is never going to die, right? But I never thought about the idea of Google canceling my account for a reason outside of my control.
Of course, there are several solutions to this problem: you can set up a mail client to keep a copy of all your mail and sync your calendar with a client package. Or you can even have one mail account forward all messages to another. But it is much more difficult to synchronize all of the customizations you have made (labels, categories, saved searches, etc.). Several interesting solutions to this have been suggested over at Lifehacker, so if you are interested, check them out.
04
Feb
08
Strategy and the Internet
When I teach my course in E-Business Strategy here at Biola, one of the first readings we do is Michael Porter’s Strategy and the Internet. Michael Porter is a professor at Harvard Business School who has developed a reputation as the guru of “competitive advantage”. This classic of business strategy, published in the Harvard Business Review in March, 2001, is a bit dated but still a great starting point for understanding how businesses should plan their Internet strategy.
This article makes several key points regarding the use of the Internet for strategy, and several are useful for us as we look to develop a strategy for Internet ministry. The first of these points that I want to consider is the idea of having a strategy for Internet use at all. As Porter points out in this paper:
Even well-established, well-run companies have been thrown off track by the Internet. Forgetting what they stand for or what makes them unique, they have rushed to implement hot Internet applications and copy the offerings of dot-coms…And many established companies, reacting to misguided investor enthusiasm, have hastily cobbled together Internet units in a mostly futile effort to boost their value in the stock market.
Porter is very critical of firms who do not consider their overall organizational strategy before determining how to use the Internet. Instead, he says, companies need to understand who they are and then use the powerful tools provided by the Internet to enhance that strategy. He gives six principles of strategy (taken from one of his previous papers), several of which are applicable for ministries, which I summarize here:
- Know the goals for your organization. This is the starting point. For businesses, the goal is sustained profitability. For your ministry, what is the goal?
- Understand that there will be trade-offs, you cannot do everything. What are you good at? What shouldn’t you be doing? What makes your ministry distinctive?
- The activities of your organization should be mutually reinforcing. Does everything “fit”?
- Have a continuity of direction. Do not continually reinvent yourself or you will only confuse those to whom you minister.
Does your ministry have a strategy for their use of the Internet? Are you using the Internet to enhance what your organization does, or was it quickly put up as a way to just “get on the net”? This is the starting point for effective Internet ministry. I will continue to examine Porter’s paper and how it applies to Internet ministry in future posts.
In my previous post, I summarized a discussion I had with several pastors in an all day session on Internet ministry. One of the points made by these pastors was that true ministry required physical presence: “the class agreed that effective Internet ministry should always encourage face-to-face fellowship and should never replace the physical gathering.” As a ministry develops an Internet presence, this philosophical point must be agreed upon beforehand. If you feel that your Internet ministry is a supplement to face-to-face ministry, then you will likely choose a different feature set for your web site than if you saw the Internet as the primary place for ministry.
I received this email from Brian Atkinson, Manager of Alliance Development for Gospel Communications Network, regarding his thoughts on the place of the Internet in ministry:
Hi David,
I read through your blog post, and I have some comments.
Our internet ministry is built on the notion that the internet can indeed be used for ministry. We value the face-to-face time and have an annual conference to facilitate the community better. But for us, the physical connection supplements the internet ministry and not the other-way around.
Time and time again, we’ve seen people touched – virtually – but nonetheless spiritually by internet ministry. We have a nearly 13 year track record of ministries with no physical component to their ministry make an enormous impact for Christ online; bringing people into relationship with Jesus and helping to develop that relationship. I’ve personally been involved in ministry over the internet for nearly 10 years. I’ve never met anyone I’ve counseled face-to-face and I don’t intend to. I believe that ministry can happen anywhere – even in cyberspace.
I hope that helps,
-brian
Where do you stand on this issue? Did your organization develop a philosophy on this before (or during) the development of your web presence?
