Not sure how we missed this (probably because it pre-dates us), but last year Microsoft blogger Robert Scoble visited Fellowship Church in Dallas and wrote the Ten Evangelism and IT Lessons from one of America’s Biggest Churches. It’s heavy on the techie side, but there’s plenty of interesting gems:
- Make it easy for everyone to learn about you—on their terms. Scoble notes that the only thing visible from the freeway is the church’s url.
- Make it easy to experience your product’s special attributes. Scoble was given a DVD with an overview of the church.
- To get word-of-mouth advertising you need to be remarkable. 50 manned computer registration stations, all-digtal sound system, plasma screens everywhere, etc.
- Use IT to efficiently get close to your customers and take care of their needs. A high-tech system to register kids quickly and easily.
- If you want to be better, make sure you’re better from the first minutes of someone’s experience. The church makes a sports fan feel at home.
- If you want to be seen as bleeding edge, invest to be bleeding edge and do so throughout your company. They are the first church to film all their services in HDTV.
- Extend the usefulness of your plant. They make WiFi available to their congregation during the week.
- Design your systems so they never go down and can expand for future growth. they’ve got redundancy all over the place.
- Don’t be religious about technology, choose what gets the job done best for the least amount of money and staff time. While they heavily rely on Microsoft’s technology, they also use Macs and Linux when those platforms work better.
- When you become successful, bottle up what got you there and sell it to others. They sell their own software: FellowshipOne.
Brian Bailey, Fellowship’s Internet Manager and the one who originally invited Scoble, blogs about the experience as well.
Eliot Landrum
May 13, 2005
All well and good for a techie….. but what about the content? One of Edward Tufte’s rules of design is that people should be impressed by the content NOT the manner in which the content is displayed. #3 especially is disconcerting: “To get word-of-mouth advertising you need to be remarkable.” Anyone can spend money for remarkable technology. Only a few invest in providing the church with authentic theology and something more than a pep-talk with fancy technology.
I certainly don’t want to bash Brian Bailey. He’s doing a fantastic job of using technology for his ministry. But I just want to put out a warning that we should not be impressed by the how, but by the what.
Stephen
May 15, 2005
I’m sure many agree with you Eliot, but this web site it not called ChurchContentSucks, it’s about marketing. We all could agree that the what is more important than the how… but this blog is all about making sure the how is top notch. My 2 cents.
Michael
May 17, 2005
In order to not suck, our marketing efforts must be a complete experience. A row of plasma TV’s with lights swirling around without excellent content falls flat, the best content printed out on 8.5×11 paper and taped to a wall can fall flat just as well.
We are called to excellence, and that’s where we are falling short. We have great content, the word of God, but the methods we are putting it in fall short. Excellence must be our goal for the entire experience.
Keep at it!
Allison Gower
July 27, 2005
I just launched a new service called qtags text-to-web. We’re offering to non-profits / churches are no-charge. Goal is to make it easy for people to remember & find content. For example, I read about an event in a bulletin or newsletter, but get busy making dinner or tending to child and forget…If, on the other hand, the newsletter had displayed a keyword, I could have texted it, and then had web-link placed in my inbox so I could refer to it later. We’re new. I’d love feedback and comments. Trying a consumer-centric approach. Public decides what they are interested in and controls interaction – the text is safe – no spam and not added to any mailing lists.
Jo DeSantis Winter
December 18, 2005
Because I am 80+ and for other good reasons I do NOT support just any church “organization” any more! I choose to give to pro life workers and those that visabl;y help the poor and I will no longer support a rich greedy “evangelical” on INSP one comes to mind a prosperity preacher Murdock..who would make an excellent used car salesman.