In the last three months I have watched about 5 online church services, got glimpses of 3 live church leadership/communication conferences. One was all prerecorded by various leaders around the globe that had nine minutes to share what was on their hearts. It was powerful to see the variety of church leaders and the impact they are making in their respective communities.

I have appreciated the church leaders who have stepped outside their tech comfort zones to communicate in new ways. In addition to these conferences I would follow comments posted about the conference on Twitter. Even though I was unable to be present and missed some of the speakers, I was able to gather various quotes that stuck out to people as they tweeted during the conference. Gone is the day where you only have the option to be present o learn. You can learn and discern through comments and blogs by others. I am not saying that it is not worth while to attend conferences as that is the only way to truely connect with fellow believers, church communication or church leadership folks.

It is my hope and desire that church’s continue to make steps to reach out to people by utilizing technology.

Most people would agree that web sites can be a powerful tool to connect and convey important information. I have heard these phrase way too much. “We need to put something on our website ‘to get it out there’ or ‘so people can see our info’.” This bugs me so much, because it a blurb is posted somewhere on the web (including my small little blog) doesn’t mean that it is going to be seen by the world and everyone in the targeted audience of the web site.

There needs to be multiple levels of getting info out. Just posting it once on a website gets the job done. The content also needs to be useful for people. By living in this world we are surrounded by stimuli and tons of it. When we seek out information, it needs to be functional and useful. Visitors to the site need to be stimulated in thought or actions. Thought provoking content encourages the visitor to engage and either express opinions in favor or against. Open the dialog. Action content provides opportunities to get involved, contact info, the opportunity to make a decision right then and there.

Isn’t Easter an important enough of a day to celebrate and put some planning and forethought into? Especially with mail blast capabilities (like MailChimp) messages can be scheduled in advance for a timed release. That way no one has to be bothered with sending a last minute e-mail to the church’s e-mail system 12 hours before the sunrise service even begins because there is concern that people have forgotten when it is. Better yet, send multiple campiagns marketing the upcoming Easter Sunrise Gathering at 6AM including important information like directions, who to contact before the event with questions, a little blurb about what someone can expect the experience to be like.

May next year be planned a little more in advance to give people to invite friends, neighbors to these amazing Easter Sunrise services to experience Christ rising from the dead in a new way.

One huge marketing and tool found on the web now is video. For the average non-profit or small business, it would be wise to partner with branded video players like, Vimeo than to spend time and resources on developing or purchasing a video player to play video content. A major reason to partner with them is because they have already worked out many of the plug and play bugs and functions. Even with purchased video media players the setup of, storage of, and rendering of the movie files would have to be managed and that often gets missed. Even when it comes to my anablepomedia flash site. Looking back on the amount of time that went into creating a flash video player, it took a lot of time. Personally I plowed through trying to learn how to create custom video players through flash so that I could evaluate it and for a school project.

A major buzzword of the web is social networks! There are companies that provide a closed “social network” to ensure privacy and create a “close network”. Why go through the trouble of creating a individual social network when there are tools like facebook that already have a large network of people. The great thing about facebook is that you can promote networking of people inside & outside of your own organization/company. You can create a group (private or public) to represent your organization and network within that group. Events for that group can be created, the group page can be used as bulletin board postings, etc…

Just about every organization large or small has a calendar. There are many services that provide online calendars for a monthly or yearly fee. Google has a calendar that is free and can be applied to many various web applications. It also allows multiple users to administrate the calendar’s events. Calendar’s can be public to everyone or be private for a select group/organization.

The key with any white-label technology is to find out what it offer’s, any limitation’s, etc… As with anything there are pluses and minuses. Then it’s a matter of creating and utilizing the tools for the best interests and marketability of your organization/company. For the majority of non-profits and small businesses to create their own brand of video players or social networks will not result in the best bang for the buck. There are however circumstances when it would be best to branch from facebook into a low cost alternative social networking like Ning. One must consider the trade off of losing the existing community found through YouTube, Vimeo, facebook to creating one’s own brand.