I may be late to the party on reading Barna Groups latest findings on 16-29 year olds (could someone please tell Barna to write better <title> tags -- every page is titled the same).
As a member of gen-x (one of the most maligned generations in the history of the North American church), I chuckled to read that 16-29 years olds are even more pessimistic about Christianity and specifically Evangelicals,
Currently, however, just 16% of non-Christians in their late teens and twenties said they have a "good impression" of Christianity. [...] The new study shows that only 3% of 16-to 29-year-old non-Christians express favorable views of evangelicals. This means that today’s young non-Christians are eight times less likely to experience positive associations toward evangelicals than were non-Christians of the Boomer generation (25%).
I just had an interesting call from someone who was just starting to work on another Christian social network. Often I hear how these apps will help "save a generation". I can see how this is an appealing mission...However, building a social network is really hard and that also applies to building ANY community online:
- social network
- email newsletter
- blog or RSS feed
- podcast (video or audio)
- church intranet (hooking into back-office features of church management software)
So if you are considering embarking on a project where you intend to build community, here are a few lessons I've learned...
I'm tired of setting up and maintaining profiles
Brad Fitzpatrick (who is rumored to be working on the mysterious Google social network set to launch November 5, 2007) said this about what he calls the social graph,
People are getting sick of registering and re-declaring their friends on every site., but also: Developing "Social Applications" is too much work.'
I'm sick of this. I'm an early adopter. But how many profiles do we think people are going to maintain. So if you are building community and it depends on people providing lots of profile information -- you better be able to answer the question "Why should I spend an hour doing this, when I already did this on Facebook?"
Okay, that is my one lesson learned. If you are building community online (either as a social network, church intranet (lots of churches want to integrate there back-office software with their web site), email newsletter or even a blog. How do you answer that question? Or why should users help your site succeed (for social or economic reasons)?
Price of crowd sourcing
All social networks or online communities ask a lot of users; we ask them to spend their time with our applications. Even if our application is free, it costs me time (some call it digital sharecropping). If you don't you will fail. I know I failed.
For example, I spent 9 years on e-Church (view the Internet archive from 1998 to 2006) developing it as a "spiritual blogging platform". I had thousands of people register; about one third logged on; and less than 1% ever posted a blog; and even fewer actually used the application regularly.
It failed. But at its best, we got 1,500 visitors a day and generated about $150/mo in Google Adsense revenue.
I was never able to give a good answer as to why someone would use e-Church rather than WordPress, Blogger, TypePad or LiveJournal. Adding features like verse of the day or other "spiritual" features did not provide enough value compared with the value of my users time.
How to build community
So I do not sound all pessimistic, here is my best advice on building online communities:
- Exploit a niche "market". Make it people you really, really understand and who are like you. Do not save a generation. Save
- Spend time every day interacting with your community. If you don't use it everyday, why should anyone else. It also keeps it under control and away from trolls and spam.
- Find something that ONLY YOU can provide and that people need (not just want). You must have an exclusive service or product and people that NEED it. If people can go anywhere at get something similar, you lose. If people just want it, you lose.
So dream on, but ANSWER the question.
by Tim Bednar, founder of Plaid: ministry communication and tracking software
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