Private Church Social Networks

I see a few organizations offering a gated social network for churches (ex. OneBody, MyFlock, Ning), and I also see a couple churches building their own gated social network (ex. Mars Hill and Seacoast Church).  By gated, I mean it's private to the church itself and not open to people outside the church community.

(If there are other vendors providing private-labeled social network solutions for churches, please comment and I will update the post.  And if there are other megachurches that are building their own private network, I'd like to mention them as well)

Does a private social network for a church make sense?  We know that forums and message boards don't work well for churches.  But maybe social networks will?  I tend to think so.

Social networks need network effects and critical mass to thrive - if your friends aren't on it, then you won't stick around.  An intimate community like a church is conducive to network effects - most of your church friends will be in your private social network.  But your non-church friends hang out at Facebook and Myspace.  So network effects are actually pretty limited for gated communities if most of your friends don't go to your church.

It'll be interesting to see how this plays out.  I can imagine most large churches having a gated social network of their own in a few years.  Something for their members to log into - linked from or integrated into the church's main website.  Especially when they outgrow a Facebook fan page or a Myspace group, and want something more custom to their communication needs. 

What do you think?

As a disclosure, MyChurch.org provides white-labeled private social networking for churches.  (ex Seed Church and the River Church).  We let the members of these churches individually opt-in to join the larger MyChurch community, and we also integrate parts of their network into their church application on Facebook.  (2 approaches we take to expand network effects outside of a single church)

-- Joe Suh

Comments

[Shawn Wood]

Joe,

We (Seacoast) are building a a double-edged social network currently. One component will be a social network for each small group...the other will be a social network that is private label but not "gated". There will be some components that will be "gated" to give our attenders a place to connect, but it will also have a piece that is an evangelism tool.

We are working with AspireOne on the small groups piece and tying that in with ACS (our database) and a volunteer within our church is helping with the code for the social network piece...he owns a company that does social networking for .edu's

Pretty exciting stuff and we have no idea what the impact or value is but we just see this as the next step in using the web as a tool to "help people become fully-devoted to Christ".

Shawn Wood
Experiences Pastor
Seacoast Church

[Tim Morgan]

Just to clarify, OneBody is an open-source project and is solely improved and maintained by volunteers. I built OneBody for my own church, and make no money from its use.

Also, here are some thoughts and realizations that came from our experience at Cedar Ridge (http://cedarridgecc.com):

1. Young people are on Facebook and MySpace already. They're used to having different communities for different segments of culture, i.e. MySpace for the highschoolers, Facebook for college people, and now OneBody for their church friends. They don't seem to mind logging into different apps for different things.

2. Older people are probably never going to get on a traditional social network. OneBody gives them an opportunity to play around with social networking without the hassle of dealing with all the trash. They only see people they know (or could possibly know) and don't have to mess with "friends" if they don't want to. OneBody is super easy to navigate for non-techy people.

3. Our biggest and most used feature of OneBody (at our church) is the Groups. In less than a minute, a Sunday School class or small group can create an online place to share prayer requests and other notes. They can send email to their group with one address (because OneBody also acts as a mailing list server). These are people who would never go on a Facebook or MySpace or other social network and create a group, for several reasons, not least of which is the fact that each of their group participants would also need to go on and go through the account creation process.

4. And that leads me to the last thought... Account creation is uber simple with OneBody: each churchgoer already has an account with some basic information made visible. This is where OneBody also doubles as an online directory. Since each person already has an account tied to their email address, they simple go on and verify they own the address, set a password, and they're done. They don't have to spend precious time filling out their name, address, phone, etc. if they don't want to. They can then choose to show more of their info or hide it. Privacy is up to them, but we choose some sensible defaults.

OneBody has been a fun experiment for our church, and it's been a hit. We have lots of ideas to expand it and improve it.

I understand the argument of being a walled garden, and we should be a light to the world, etc. But you have to realize this is just yet one more place for people to go online. And the fact is, we are actually getting some of our congregation to go online and use the Internet that wouldn't have touched it without this compelling reason to do so.

[Kevin McCord]

Church social networking sites may need to evolve so that they leverage information from other social networking sites/services and serve up that information alongside information about the individual's involvement in ministry. In that sense they may collect information published by the church management system, created by the individual and shared back to the church management system, and delivered via RSS and though API's from more established social networking systems.

Frankly, I hope they go in that direction since it will mean our folks are out there in other online communities being salt and light.

[Darryl Darwent]

How well will this work for churches that are less than 200 members? Is it viable to have this private social network and still maintain a Facebook page?

[Joe Suh]

Pastor Shawn - cool! I updated the post to mention Seacoast. Let me know when you have a link up so we can all check it out.

Tim - all good points. We should trade notes sometime. OneBody sounds awesome.

Kevin - definitely agreed. But who will lead the effort to combine ChMS and social networking? Do you think the ChMS companies will eventually offer their own social networking solutions?

Darryl - that's what I want to know as well :) I'll be watching how Seed Church (100) and The River Church (500+) use the private networks we provided them with.