Free webinar: Six Online Trends Your Ministry Must Address Today
Want something for free? This Thursday, June 23rd, Drew Goodmanson (CEO of Monk Development) and I will be conducting a webinar entitled “Six Online Trends Your Ministry Must Address Today”. The webinar starts at 9:00 AM Pacific Time and ends an hour later. CLA, sponsor of the webinar, has graciously given me an access code that will allow my you, my blog readers, free access! Normally, you would have to be a member of CLA to access this webinar, but if you follow this link, you can register for free. As of last week, there were already almost 200 ministries signed up to participate – why don’t you join us? I hope to “see” you online this Thursday morning!
The outline of the webinar is as follows:
- Introduction
- Trend #1: The Web’s Exponential Growth Requires Organization Change
- Trend #2: We Now Live in a “Post-Website World.”
- Trend #3: The “App-ification” Revolution is Beginning
- Trend #4: Mobile is the Future. Mobile is Now.
- Trend #5: Focus on the Fringe That is Central to Your Success
- Trend #6: There is No Longer “One Right Way” to Be Online.
- Questions and Answers
CLA 2011: “Research Strategies for Online Ministry Success”
I am speaking later today at the Christian Leadership Alliance’s annual conference in Dallas. My presentation is entitled “Research Strategies for Online Ministry Success.” The focus of this presentation is on how the use of real research, not just “gut intuition”, is needed in order to develop a successful strategy for online ministry.
I will be using a Prezi presentation, which I have uploaded to prezi.com for those of you who want to take a look. The Prezi is embedded here.
I also created a jing video to demonstrate how to use Google forms to collect data:
Help us help you: excellence in online ministry
I told you earlier this week about the Ministry Internet & Technology Summit at CLA 2010. One of the themes of this summit is going to be “excellence in online ministry”. I am part of a research team that is putting this project together – and if you are part of an online ministry effort, I need your help!
The cornerstone of this research project is an online survey that will help us understand just what online ministries are doing, why they are doing it, and how effective they are. The results of this survey, combined with interviews and in-depth conversations, will provide our team with the resources needed to develop materials that can make your online ministry excellent.
So will you help us? The survey should take under 30 minutes. I know, this is still a lot of time, but we ask your patience in completing the entire survey to give us the full picture of your ministry. Those who complete the survey will receive a discount code good for $50 off of the conference registration.
Start the survey by clicking here.
If you would like more background on the conference or the team that is working on the project, see our website: State of Ministry Online. And if you are not part of an online ministry team, but you know someone who is, please forward them a link to this post or to the survey and ask them to help us out!
Twitter research
I’ve had a couple people ask me how my Twitter research project is going. I saw this picture (via Digg.com) today and I think that it sums up how I am feeling about Twitter so far…
Researcher at UC Irvine to study WoW
I wasn’t going to post again until after the new year, but saw an article in yesterday’s paper (yes, I still read the newspaper, get over it) that questioned the validity of NSF funding going towards researching online gaming. Below is a link to a story from a few months ago about the actual research project which sheds some light on what they are doing. While I don’t want to argue the merits of NSF funding going towards this, I do truly believe that we can learn a lot about Internet ministry by studying how people interact online through games such as World of Warcraft and the “not really a game” Second Life. See my write-ups here and here about this and read the news story below.
UCI tackles ‘World of Warcraft’ mystery
And Happy New Year!
Book: “Church Next”
Over the past several months, I have been reviewing books for my course on Internet ministry, trying to narrow down my choices and select books that will be most appropriate for the class. My goal for these books is that they would provide a range of views on Internet ministry, with an appropriate mix of theology, philosophy, strategy, and technology. I am NOT looking for books on how to create a web site or how to blog, etc., because these are secondary to first really understanding the concepts of online ministry. I also want books that are readable by the mix of students I will have and that will foster good discussions.
I have finally settled on three primary books for my course (though I still have a couple I am thinking about adding). Over the next few weeks, I will share my selections here on this blog. The first book I have selected is Dr. Aubrey Malphurs’ Church Next. Written with his son, Michael, I found this book to give a good overview of the current state of the Church and makes a great case for why the move to the Internet is the right one. For those who do not know who Aubrey Malphurs is, he is Senior Professor of Pastoral Ministries at Dallas Theological Seminary. He is also the head of the Malphurs Group.
Pew Internet Project: a great resource
As I am working on planning my course in Internet ministry, I am spending quite a bit of time reviewing possible books and other supporting materials. One invaluable resource that I use quite a bit for my own research that I will be using extensively in the course is the work of the Pew Internet and American Life project. As I stated in my last post, it is extremely important for us to understand the users of our Internet ministry resources. If you are interested in understanding how the Internet is being used by Americans (sorry, this resource is US-specific), then you will find the reports issued by this organization extremely useful. Below is a link to their home page, along with links to a few of the most recent reports that relate to Internet ministry. If you find these interesting, I highly recommend subscribing to their RSS feed so you will know when new reports are released. Unfortunately, the last report they did on the use of the Internet for faith-related purposes is now getting quite old (2004) – I hope they will be releasing an update soon!
- Pew Internet and American Life Project home page
- Report on use of podcasting (2008)
- Report on use of video sites (2008)
- Report on “networked families” (2008)
- Report on “faith online” (2004)
The Internet ministry elite?
When I was at the Internet Ministry Conference having wonderful discussions with the Internet Ministry “elite”, I found myself wondering several times if we were beginning to slowly isolate ourselves from the reality of the lives of those to whom we were trying to minister. It seemed that all of our excitement around technologies such as the iPhone, Twitter, or even podcasts, put us out of touch with the mainstream of most churches. Sure, if your church consists of mostly twenty-somethings working hi-tech jobs, then these things work. But what about the small, rural churches? What about the churches serving older congregations? I think we can get way too caught up with what works for us and is, frankly, just way cool, and forget about the fact that many, if not most, Christ-followers in America (or around the world) just don’t have the money or the time to figure out how to use these new technologies.
I believe that the key to this is understanding the people you are trying to reach, your “target user” if you will. If you are trying to decide if you should begin using a new technology at your church (or even add a new feature to your web site), you should first determine if it will even be used. For example: if you are trying to determine if your pastor should start writing a blog, first do some research to see if those in your congregation read blogs in the first place. Don’t simply ask “would you read the pastor’s blog?”, but instead ask “do you read any blogs?”.
At my church, we did this sort of research before we updated our web site, and the results were quite interesting. Perhaps the most interesting of the results were that web site viewing and email were used quite regularly by all congregation members across the board, regardless of age. This encouraged us to go ahead and spend some time and money on the web site redesign, as well as to increase the use of email as a communications vehicle. See my previous blog entry on this for more details on the survey (and a copy of the survey).
How about you? How do you make decisions about the use of technology in your church or ministry?
Full research write-up posted
For those of you who have been asking me for documentation related to my presentation at the Internet Ministry Conference, I have now posted a six-page report on my web site that details my findings. In conjunction with this, I also wrote a short summary of these findings for the Church Marketing Sucks blog.
Link to Church Marketing Sucks blog entry
Link to research page on genesys11
My next project
After I was done speaking at the Internet Ministry Conference last week, several people came up to me and asked “what is your next research project?” Several people suggested different areas of research, including a couple who offered up their own ministries as research subjects.
So, what is next? Well, there are two answers to that. First, my next big project is planning and teaching my course in Internet Ministry here at Biola. This course is being advertised for students at the seminary (Talbot), the School of Intercultural Studies, and here in the School of Business. Here is the course description:
The Internet is the greatest communication technology ever developed by man. It is imperative that the Church learns how to use it to its fullest potential. This course will study the use of the Internet as a tool for ministry using a combination of lectures, case studies, and hands-on laboratory work. Special attention will be paid to the effectiveness and limits of using the Internet as a ministry tool.
The course could take many directions and my hope is that several more research ideas will come from the course. Additionally, I may develop a textbook for these kinds of courses as there does not seem to be any yet. As I develop and teach the course I plan on blogging about it – so stay tuned.
The second answer to “what is your next project?” is that I will probably continue to dissect the data from my Internet ministry survey and continue to break down the results. These will also be posted to my blog. If you have any ideas on what sorts of data analysis you would like to see, please let me know by commenting on this post or sending me an email!
Search
Welcome to the Lessons From Babel blog
This blog is where I share the latest thoughts on the world of technology and faith. Feel free to join the conversation by leaving a comment. To find out more about me, my company, and this web site, or to see what resources are available on this site, click on the images right below this.
- Dave Bourgeois
