Crowdsourcing Ministry: How to Get By With a Little Help From Your Friends

On Sunday, June 22, Tony Morgan, the Chief Strategic Officer at NewSpring Church in Anderson, South Carolina, tweeted, “35% of our weekend attendance is on Sunday evenings. Anyone doing better with non-Sunday-morning times? I'm looking for ways to grow that %.”

Morgan tells me that one of the replies he received was from Ron Sylvia, pastor of Church @ the Springs in Ocala, Florida, who wrote: “40-45% of our weekend attendance is on Saturday night. We have been as high as 49% when we drive it hard.” Now Morgan knows who he can go back to for more advice and information.

It’s this kind of instant feedback that more and more pastors and church practitioners are finding useful about social media tools—they can effectively be used for crowdsourcing ministry.

Granted it helps that Morgan has over 1,000 “followers” on Twitter. And that’s one potential limitation—you have to be worth “following” in order to gather a large pool of people on which to draw for input/information. The good news is that if you have enough friends IRL following you, they will usually care enough to respond when you have a question. (That’s what I’ve found, anyway.) Using Twitter this way is like sending out a mass text/instant message. You may only get one or two responses, but they are usually thoughtful and helpful.

Message Boards and Groups
A more traditional venue for crowdsourcing ministry is online message boards and groups. With over 1,500 members, Greg Atkinson’s Church 2.0 group on Facebook is a hopping place for innovative church practitioners.

Another exciting and growing online community is the Center for Church Communication’s “Church Marketing Lab” on Flickr, which now has over 2,000 members, more than 5,300 pieces of uploaded media/artwork, and nearly 2,000 message board posts. The message board, which you can subscribe to via RSS, is often the site of ministry crowdsourcing, as church professionals share their questions (and sometimes complaints) and get valuable input/feedback from others.

Isn't Crowdsourcing Just Plagiarism?
One negative of crowdsourcing is the potential for shifting from inspiration to duplication or, in other words, plagiarism.

Maybe you’re wondering, “Isn’t all of this ‘crowdsourcing’ stuff just that—plagiarism?” Or perhaps you’re an Executive Pastor who’s wondering, “Don’t I hire the best people so they can come up with ‘original’ ideas? Why would I want them ‘crowdsourcing’ what we do as a church?” Please consider (and take to heart) the admonition of media guru Jeff Jarvis who recently shared this crowdsourcing story: “Joanna Geary, a young journalist trying for a job at the Birmingham Post, told her readers about the task she had to perform for the interview ... [and] she decided to ask for her readers’ help. I said in the comments that that act alone should get her hired. It shows she thinks in the new way: open, networked, relying on and trusting the gift economy and respecting her readers and what they know.” (emphasis added)

Jarvis concludes, “Your friends are, indeed, your greatest asset and when you can tap them for help you exploit their value to you. The internet now enables you to do that anytime with anyone. If you don’t have friends, you can’t do that. Newspapers, magazines, companies of all sorts need to realize that is why they need friends.”

So don’t be afraid of crowdsourcing ministry. While there's always the danger of slipping into duplication and plagiarism, crowdsourcing (in most cases) is simply the new way of operating in, what Jarvis calls, our current "relationship-based economy."

Learn what are the best avenues for you and your church staff/team for connecting with ministry friends and partners who can help answer your questions. Try Twitter or online groups and message boards. For face-to-face connections, check out CFCC’s “Local Labs”, now operating in 28 locales around the country, and Greg Atkinson’s “Church 2.0” local forums coming up in Santa Cruz, California, and Taylors, South Carolina.

Do you have other suggestions for online groups/message boards/tools for crowdsourcing ministry? Please share them in the comments!

—Steve Knight, Kingdom Journalist and International Communication Coordinator for SIM (Serving In Mission)

Comments

[Cynthia]

Steve - this is one of my favorite all time posts at Digital. Excellent research. Well done. We want more from you. And thanks for promoting Church 2.0!

[Steve K.]

Awesome, thanks, Cynthia. You're no slouch yourself! ;-)

And thanks to Tony Morgan for letting me use him as my sermon illustration.

[Steve K.]

Anyone looking to outsource a design project might want to check out this new service:
http://www.crowdspring.com/

I haven't tried it, but it looks like a genius crowdsourcing system, where you put up a project with an offer to pay a set amount, and designers create multiple designs for you to choose from.

I found it through ... Twitter ;-)

[Andrea Useem]

What about crowd-sourcing as a means of church-planting?