Can ChMS Leverage the Social Graph?

Imagine a scenario where:
1) Your entire church is on a social network like Facebook
2) The Facebook API is two-way, such that any app can push or pull data

Let me try to explain #2 with examples. 

Say the Facebook event application lets your Facebook church members RSVP to a marriage seminar at your church.  And that RSVP data can get pulled into your own database.  Or say there's a Facebook app that lets your church members input private data about themselves that only the pastors could see (ex. mailing address, family information, baptismal records).  Or even better, the pastor can launch a demographic survey for his congregation through the social network.

What about an app that lets church members sign up for volunteer and serving opportunities - again with a data exchange to your database.  Or how about online tithing through a social network app - integrated with the donation management system that the church runs.

As I educate myself on what Church Management Software is, I'm thinking that self-service tools on social networks might contain useful data and application for the church administration.  Of course, a lot is left to be proven.  But the potential and promise is there for social network applications to integrate with ChMS. 

I think the key is convenience and member participation/engagement.  Church members won't log into a church management database.  They may not even log into their own church website.  But they will log into Facebook and Myspace - at least the younger ones.

Thoughts? (Church IT gurus will have to grant me some grace on my lack of deep understanding of CMS)

- Joe Suh from MyChurch.org

Comments

[Cynthia]

Joe - I think you're onto something here.

I posted on Tuggle recently and realized how little the large majority of us (even with your background and my background) are able to grasp all the ramifications, application potentials, etc. of the convergence of online technologies for ministry support. I'm not trying to plug the post - but I do recommend readers check out the comment section.

Tuggle is being used for ministry connections by over 1000 students in the Denton, Texas area. When you and I speak at the Dynamic Church Conference in Dallas in May, I'm hoping to find out more about it.

From what I understand it is social networking, but with significant database capabilities - thus integration in a hybrid way. Like a bridge between social media & ChMS.

I hope IT gurus are even more patient with me than you.

[Cynthia]

I don't know why I can't insert links in comments anymore. Maybe the TypePad interface got updated. Anyway, here's the link:
http://thedigitalsanctuary.org/tuggle-social-networking-for-ministry-leaders/

[Kevin]

In thinking from the perspecitve of those who lead Great Commission churches, social networking should increase community among members and increase opportunities to be salt & light in the world. Note the ChMS does neither of these.

I'm happy to know my people are using social networking tools. I'm looking for ways to leverage those tools to promote our message and further our mission. I'm not sure yet what would motivate my church to adopt and promote one social networking tool over another. It is quite possible that ChMS integration would be a factor in that decision.

My ChMS supports the basic processes that make our church work from week to week. However, much of that information is only indirectly available to the church body.

I think ultimately the ChMS will be something people access routinely (say weekly) for onling giving, tithe statements, scheduling, and engaging ministry opportunities. That access may be in the form of public side tools and links in emails even if the user doesn't directly go to a site and login. They will function more like online banking or school management systems then like social networking tools where interaction is daily for many.

The idea that my ChMS may generate content that your Social networking tool can consume and vice versa is a powerful idea and a good place to start. I'm thinking of RSS feeds and the like. The idea that transactions generated by one system might be passed to the other is also important, but I wonder if anyone will go to the trouble of creating that integration. I think of my ability to reference external financial accounts from my bank's website. Perhaps I can reference the items at my church that matter to me into my social networking profile. More likely a ChMS could tap into some of the profile information about a person stored in the Social Networking system. In particular, the Social Networking tool could make my ChMS aware of connections between people that it did not previously know. This could enhance member care at critical moments.

As a church leader, if I decide to promote one social networking tool over another it may be in part to increase our ability to deliver information to our body, but it should not come at the cost of the two most important things that Social Networking can do for our church that I mentioned in my first paragraph. We'd be more apt to lock-in if the social networking tool is going to be a primary source of communication to the body as well as within teams and groups. For that to happen we want to avoid managing teams in groups in multiple places.

So, in short the partnership between Social Networking tool and ChMS needs to enhance community and extend the mission without causing an **unreasonable** cost to those tasked with managing the institution that brings people together and mobilizes them for shared ministry.

[Gus Svendsen]

[Comments should not be longer than the original post, but you bring up a significant discussion.]

I like to think of the social network as the GUI for the church attendees (and ideally greater community) and the ChMS as the GUI for the church staff. Right now, the two are disconnected. What I learned about ChMS is that one of the purposes for keeping a ChMS is to track data, which usually manifests in the form of a report. In other words, tracking data is primarily beneficial when you can see the data from a summary or aggregate level. I also have learned that inputting data is a pain.

Social networks facilitate interactions which lead to and capture more data points on individuals. What churches really need is a way to mine or view this activity so they can identify relationships between people, giving, serving, and spiritual growth indicators.

Look at the new "People You Might Know" feature from Facebook. It's powerful. How incredible would something like that be for the church? Now, take that idea beyond people-to-people relationships. For example, if someone has given to Africa missions, is involved in the church sports league, and the person has expressed interest in mission work, the platform may suggest an upcoming sports mission opportunity to Uganda.

But for this to be really successful, I truly believe church walls need to fall. For example, given the above scenario but restricted to my church only, I may never be approached by the platform to do missions in Africa if my home church never has a team that goes. However, if my giving, interest, and involvement at my home church could extend to the activities of other local churches, I would have a higher likelihood of finding a serving opportunity that truly matches my interests, passions, and gifting than if my opportunities were only presented by one organization.

Unfortunately, not many churches would be willing to let "their" "members" venture outside "their" walls to meet God on a life-changing level without "their" direct involvement.

(Didn't mean to make this an indictment of the church. I have tried to go down this road a bit in the past, and this is experience speaking.)

Rock on Joe!

[kevin]

Gus,

You are right, the walls have to fall.

I'm already working to create a thought process among our church leadership that distinguishes between ministry we oversee, ministry we endorse/partner, and ministry we celebrate.

International Parachurch ministries of the last decades were just the practice round. Networks of Christians are going to challenge the institutional church to re-think how it equips and mobilizes people for ministry. I'm excited and eager.

Social networking tools and the communities they support should/will cause tension in the institution church because they are by their very nature beyond the control of the institution. I think churches that fear this and hide from it will diminish. Social networking tools that are developed by churches or controlled by churches will fail. That's not to say the two can't co-exist and collaborate. It just isn't in the nature of the institution to give up control or of the social network to accept institutional boundaries.

If your institutional church is slow to adapt, don't sweat it. Just keep networking. If they are sincerly living into the Great Commission they'll eventually catch on.

[Jeff Wilson]

Joe,

I really believe this is where we should be moving, integrating social networking with ChMS. I don't know of any ChMS that is doing it yet. There was some discussion of this at the MinistryTECH conference this week. But, no one knew of anyone doing it.

Keep me posted on what you discover. If you need input or dialogue, please contact me.

[Antoine of MMM]

A way to look at how a social graph can work within the ChMS paradigm is that of the organization's social graph, not the individual user's graph. While it is great to see and even leverage connections on a personal level, content management systems in this context would be better to grab a hold of what is happening on an organizational level, and then allow personal connections to be threaded in the mist of this.

Thank of Tuggle if you will. Church A has Tuggle, FB, MS, Jaiku sites. Church B says "hey, we are in their area of ministry, where else are they connected?" They see these connections and as a church subscribes to them. Then, as individuals log into their respective portal screens, they get something like what LinkedIn offers, a sitewide update, that is "This is whom your church is connected with" kind of message. Then the onus is on people to connect now knowing that these relationships are here.

Something like what I suggest would also keep ministries talking to one another for just simple support reasons.

[Joe Suh]

Wow, great comments all around.

Kevin - I think with an API, XML data exchanges can be done pretty smoothly. Full integration would be a lot more complicated as you pointed out. I agree that most data flow would be the ChMS grabbing data from the social network, and not the other way around.

Gus - as usual, you're thinking a step ahead of me! I was only thinking about the church as an autonomous silo that could trade data between its database and soc network. We should probably figure out how to do that first ;) From your experience at ACS, do you see a lot of data (which you deemed painful to input) that could potentially be leveraged from a self-service model via social networking profiles and activities?

Kevin - would love to hear your thoughts on the same question that I asked Gus :) How much potential overlap is there - is there a real pain point to be solved?

Jeff - After I posted, Clif Guy told me there was some chatter about this same idea @ MinistryTech. If this does happen, do you think this is going to come from a ChMS company creating social networking apps? Or a social networking or web company creating a ChMS application?

[James Higginbotham]

Rather than requiring dedicated data entry positions to fill up ChMS systems with data that drive reports for a few in the church, I prefer to see applications drive the data entry.

Whether they are social networking tools, or volunteer scheduling tools like Church Director (http://www.churchdirector.com), the data lives at the edge of the church - with the volunteers. They are the ones that know if an email or physical address has changed, not the data entry positions. While some data entry and oversight needs to occur, it shouldn't be the primary source.

[Gus Svendsen]

Joe, to answer your question, Absolutely YES! I actually think most data should be the responsibility of the individual and not the organization.

Access ACS is the only product I know that is even remotely headed this way. [As you know, I left ACS Technologies to return to the Silicon Valley last September, so I gain nothing by mentioning them here.] And to clarify "pain," I think manual entry is painful. There are things that make manual entry easier, but church staffs are still the bottleneck to many different points of data collection such as processing contributions, marking attendance, documenting people's spiritual gifts, updating contact information, etc.

A simple example of painful data entry is New Member Classes. These classes are typically used to assess where a person is at spiritually, educate them about the church, and (in best cases) find ways of getting the person plugged into the church. The manual process for gathering and inputting this information is a pain, and even if the information is gathered, it's difficult for the church to access this data in context.

Truth is, there's little information I would give to a church that I would not also feel comfortable putting into a social network profile. Personally, I would prefer to keep it all online. People move and rarely attend the same church indefinitely. My information needs to be portable, so I can plug it into any church that I choose. And if I have a serving resume, I would like to take that with me so the next church knows how I have been utilized in the past.

[Clif Guy]

Joe,

Sorry I'm so late to the discussion. After MinistryTECH I came home to a big backlog of work and major deadlines looming. You've drawn a lot of interesting comments to your brief but thought-provoking post.

There is a difficult hurdle in the way of your idea: the ChMS market is fragmented as is the social networking market, though not as badly. To solve this, we need one of two things: either both markets must consolidate, or we need some broadly adopted APIs that allow us to more-or-less seamlessly connect any given ChMS to any number of popular social networking sites.

My starting place has been identity. I posted back in September regarding Dave Winer's suggestion that Twitter is a de facto identity standard and I also have played a bit with OpenID. Like you and many others, I watched with interest the announcement about OpenSocial, and then with even more interest the announcement about the Google Social Graph API. Matt Bradshaw of my staff created a little application to call the Social Graph API. The results were intriguing.

While the applications you're describing are quite interesting, I'm afraid they won't be feasible in the short term due to the fragmentation roadblock. Consequently, my own focus at the moment is more in the area of social media and how a portal could be built combining church-generated and congregant-generated content. When it comes to content, the fragmentation problem is easily overcome using syndication and aggregation.

The work I've seen so far in commercial ChMS products has been around adopting some of the social networking ideas and implementing them within the ChMS, which is a far cry from the vision you're describing.

Hope this helps.