SoChurch: Church Communication Simplified
Have you ever felt overwhelmed by the sheer number of social networking tools available to your church? I mean, how can you prepare a Sunday morning message, update your Facebook status, write a thought-provoking blog, check all of your emails, and Tweet about the wreck you almost had because you were Tweeting and driving?
Meet Ben Forsberg and the SoChurch team. SoChurch is creating products to simplify church communication. After surveying hundreds of church leaders, Forsberg and his team identified what practices contribute to ineffective church communication. Here’s a quick rundown:
- most churches communicate in one-way broadcasts- receivers do not have an opportunity to respond.
- there is a lack of integration between social networking tools.
- many leaders don’t know how to leverage social media and don’t have time to manage all the different channels.
- church leaders rarely use research-based practices or feedback mechanisms to evaluate their communication.
- community-style church websites become another place for members to check and administrators to manage, rather than communicating via the tools their members already use.
To address these problems, SoChurch is developing a kind of “master dashboard,” where administrators can easily control the integration of multiple communication tools and change privacy settings. It looks like this:
Be sure to check SoChurch’s website for new products, and join in the conversation about what other technology you would like to see SoChurch integrate. Or, participate in their survey for church leaders.
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By the way, that’s me on the SoChurch advisory board. I hope to share more about what’s happening at SoChurch in the coming months. In the mean time, feel free to play around with their new intermediary site.
:) Super pumped to have you on board.
Enjoying watching it all develop but lately getting more concerns. (that may be a strong word seeing that if it “fails” it does not effect my life) but none-the-less.
I am not sure about the whole lets be secret campaign. I have read and re-read what sochurch is and what it is going to do and it is rather unclear. For going after communications it would seem the communication is vague at best.
A second thought is on over promising under delivering. It would seem the bar is raised to be as if this will solve everything under the sun related to church communications…I might under sell over deliver instead.
Not that you needed my two cents…
Any light you could shed on this? I can’t seem to get it at the site or on the facebook. (I say the facebook cause I am old).
I also go to the walmarts and use the twitter…
Brice,
Thanks for your concern about SoChurch. We understand our messages are limited at this point and that is due to a variety of reasons. However, limited communication is not necessarily poor communication. As we are developing our product we release specific information at appropriate times. But we do have a goal in mind and it is a Product that will meet many communications needs within the Church, but we have no delusion that it will “…solve everything under the sun related to church communications…”. We are working hard to make sure that we deliver a great product that meets the expectations that we are setting. As such, we will be increasing the product information and descriptions on our Intermediary Site. Please be patient with us as we continue to provide more information as it becomes available for us to share. And make sure to check back often at SoChurch.com to stay up to date with the conversation (which is helping shape the development process) and the product.
Thanks for the followup…