{"id":514,"date":"2013-11-21T15:49:07","date_gmt":"2013-11-21T15:49:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/beta.dminlgp.com\/?p=514"},"modified":"2014-08-13T21:06:01","modified_gmt":"2014-08-13T21:06:01","slug":"open-leadership-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/open-leadership-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Open Leadership"},"content":{"rendered":"

Open Leadership <\/em>by Charlene Li is about how organizations can harness the power of \u2018Giving up Control\u2019 and using social networks to further their mission. Her book is chalked full of stories about how organizations have successfully moved forward with social media. While she does occasionally reference churches, she doesn\u2019t center on them.<\/p>\n

About 5 years go my church, Second Baptist, made a push to engage the community via social networks. I\u2019ll outline the process, benefits and challenges we have faced and are facing.<\/p>\n

The Process:<\/strong><\/p>\n

–\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Trust those that know. When the church decided to engage social media we brought in people who knew both the power and the danger. These leaders happened to be members of the church and were excited to use their professional skills for the church. Over a series of meetings, we laid out our goals and how we would achieve them. Ultimately, we decided that Facebook was our best entry point, though we secured a twitter account in case we wanted to use that in the future.<\/p>\n

–\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 We put our Facebook link on all our church media (e-mail, website, etc.). We encouraged church members to \u2018like\u2019 our page and then to share our link on their own Facebook pages. As of right know there are 148 church members who like our page.<\/p>\n

–\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Then, we used Facebook\u2019s in-house advertising mechanism using our \u2018Different Kind of Baptist Church\u201d theme.\u00a0 Our hope was to draw new folks to our FB page who would see posts that center on issues like justice, women leading the church, ways to engage, surveys etc. and that they would like our page. Even though we had a good plan, we were surprised when the plan actually worked. As of right not we have 385 people who like our page and aren\u2019t members of our church. This has given us the opportunity to communicate with people that we otherwise wouldn\u2019t be able to, for extremely cheap.<\/p>\n

The Challenges<\/strong><\/p>\n

–\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 We\u2019ve underestimated the challenge of moving folks from liking our page to engaging us as a church. We hoped by giving people opportunities to serve that that we could connect in-person (via a service project or something).\u00a0 That hasn\u2019t proved true. Unfortunately, we have all these FB friends, and we can\u2019t engage them in a real and meaningful way.<\/p>\n

–\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 At first, posting was easy but as the years have dragged on, posting good content consistently has been a challenge.\u00a0 Part of that is because we don\u2019t have one person dedicated to posting. We have a rotation where several persons are responsible for posting once a day.<\/p>\n

The Benefits<\/strong><\/p>\n

–\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 We\u2019ve been able to communicate needs to our church members quickly and easily. For example, the city was opening an emergency homeless shelter during a particularly cold night, and they were requesting soups. I posted on the church FB page and got more soups than we needed!<\/p>\n

–\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 When we\u2019ve been on mission trips (South Africa, disaster responses, etc.) we\u2019ve been able to appropriately keep our church updated with pictures and information about what\u2019s going on.<\/p>\n

There are other benefits and challenges that have resulted from us engaging social media, but these stick out to me the most. What suggestions do you have on how we might help people move from being Facebook friends to actually engaging with our church?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Open Leadership by Charlene Li is about how organizations can harness the power of \u2018Giving up Control\u2019 and using social networks to further their mission. Her book is chalked full of stories about how organizations have successfully moved forward with social media. While she does occasionally reference churches, she doesn\u2019t center on them. About 5 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2,220],"class_list":["post-514","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-dminlgp","tag-li","cohort-lgp3"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/514","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=514"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/514\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1848,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/514\/revisions\/1848"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=514"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=514"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=514"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}