Three Questions to Ask about Your Church’s Social Media Use

There’s a great deal of information available to churches and businesses about how to “inventory” and assess your social media program. Many of these inventories are quite good; done properly, they’re also time-consuming and best done with the assistance of someone who specializes in this world.

Should you go to that extent? Take the time to fully account for all your social media projects, assess their effectiveness, and analyze how you manage your channels?

Before undertaking a full inventory, SLC recommends you answer three simple questions.

Question 1: Looking at your existing social media channels, are you following everyone (or as many as you are able) of your congregation? 

Why It Matters: Social media is just that–social. If you are not following your parishoners, you are using social media channels as a one-way street. You can send out information that you find important, but you aren’t seeing information about your community that your members find important.

Question 2: Thinking about your online habits, are your church’s social media channels integrated into your work (i.e., they stay on and you check them at the same rate you check e-mail)?

Why It Matters: Social media works best when you respond. Just like e-mail. If you aren’t monitoring and responding to the social media pages of those in your community, you are missing a critical opportunity to discover what people are saying about your community and learning what those in your community are learning and sharing with others.

Question 3: Do you regularly review and make adjustments in your social media habits based on your parishoners’ responses and posts?

Why It Matters: Think about real-time, face-to-face conversations. When you start talking with someone, you use your aural and visual senses to decide how the conversation will develop. If the person you’re speaking with is using sober tones and looking down, you aren’t likely to start talking about how wonderful everything is in your life. Instead, you listen and sympathize more. If someone is excited, you don’t burden them with a heavy question. The same is true of social media. Sending out material that no one responds to and never changing suggests to those who follow you that you’re tone deaf. Staying on top of people’s reaction is critical to your success.

So how’d you do?

If you answer positively to all three questions, you’re set for a full-blown social media inventory. Forge ahead!

Less than that, there are some more fundamental steps you need to take before investing in an inventory. Start with the questions you can’t answer affirmatively, try doing them for a couple months, and then re-evaluate your readiness for an inventory.

Happy Socializing!

Martin Davis is founder of Sacred Language Communications and specializes in helping congregations and faith-based organizations leverage social media to strengthen their communities through improved mutual understanding and discussion. Contact him at mdavis@sacredlanguagecommunications, or call him at 540-498-5994.

Unleashing Staff Creativity with Data

As leaders of congregations, it’s important to remember that as you come to see the significance of what understanding data derived from electronic communications can mean for you and your staff, your staff may not feel the same.

Data, properly used, can have a liberating effective on staff creativity and energy. But very often, at the outset, your staff may well feel threatened by the emphasis on numbers.

It’s not hard to understand. Unless you’re the top person in the organization, any attempt to introduce data—which is objective and, to many, feels cold—can seem like a threat: to their ability, to their self-esteem, or to their job.

Removing the sense of threat, and bringing about the creativity, can take some time.

Change Comes Slowly

Anything new and different takes some getting used to. Though I have experienced this in my own professional life (as we all have), and have helped employees overcome their apprehension about analytical data, even I need reminders of how hard it can be.

Data, properly used, can have a liberating effective on staff creativity and energy.

I was reminded again on Monday night, July 15, as I watched Yoenis Cespedes of the Oakland A’s put on a clinic in the All-Star Homerun Derby—crushing shot after shot deep into the New York night.

Afterwards, as he was presented awards—always in English—the non-English speaker’s fear was palpable. And when an ESPN analyst asked him a probing interview question, I began to feel for the young man. It could have been a disaster. Instead, it became a shining moment. After asking the question in English, the analyst, on national television, asked the same question in Spanish. Cespedes answered in Spanish, and the analyst translated for the public.

What an extraordinary change from our not-too-distant past. As a child, I recall watching Roberto Clemente, and listening to announcers consistently call him Bobby, refusing to use his real name. A subtle, and at the time, pervasive racism fueled by fear of a culture few European Americans understood.

When Home Run Derby winner Yoenis Cespedes was interviewed in English and Spanish on national television, no one blinked …

… but just 43 years ago, announcers wouldn’t even use Roberto Clemente’s real name on the air, calling him “Bobby” instead.

Change has indeed come—but it has taken a lot of work on both sides. And the same will be true in your congregation as you begin using analytics.

Pick at Yourself

The most important thing to remember is to be quick to pick at yourself.

When in staff meetings, be the first to point to something you did for the website or the newsletter and point out that it didn’t do very well numbers-wise. Then listen to your staff. Do they say things like “I’m sure it wasn’t your fault,” or, “it was a really great piece, don’t feel bad.” If they do, chances are good they are projecting their own fears of offering pieces that don’t do well—and they are watching to see how you handle it.

By being quick to point out your own failures, and then ask the probing questions why (Did I word it well? Was this the best time to run it? Do people really want this material? Was it placed poorly on the page?) staff members will begin to see that data is not a tool for judging them, but a way of learning more about their own work and thinking about ways that they can do things better.

So long as you treat your staff members the way you treat yourself when their article numbers are down, you should begin to notice something powerful: the staff taking ownership of the work, and being willing to risk more and more to produce quality material.

By using data to reflect, and not punish, you give people room to expressive their creativity and learn for themselves.

It’s a great gift for you; most important, however, it’s a greater gift to your church.

Hospitality and Cold, Hard Data

Placing technology and faith at odds with one another has become something of a cottage industry in the world of faith. It’s not that we’re uncomfortable with technology; very few of us don’t interact with the internet, e-mail, or social media daily, if only at a cursory level.

But many faith communities remain suspicious, fearing that electronic communications can quickly de-humanize the faith experience. This is unfortunate, as in the congregational setting the information that electronic communications provide, courtesy of Google Analytics and the data that other communication tools provide, can be a real source of strength for building hospitality.

Before looking at how the data generated by technology can build hospitality, let’s look a bit closer at the tension between technology and faith.

Why Are Faith and Technology at Odds?

Many are unaware that electronic communications can teach as well as push information into the ether. On one level this is simply because understanding the information that electronic communications provide takes training and a certain amount of experience.

On a deeper level, many are still burdened by the faux tension that exists between technology and faith. The number of essays and articles that describe this abound, and examples are not hard to find.

Consider this very good commentary published in Religion News Service on July 8 by Tom Ehrich in which he argues that religion has succumbed to simple thinking. A big part of the reason?

We should be teaching the arts of subtlety — learned through literature, history, ethics and philosophy. Instead we teach how to make things work profitably through engineering and technology. Those are useful skills, but they shouldn’t be allowed to override a grasp of nuance and complexity.

Or this one that ran July 3 in Patheos by Paul Jesep.

[Technology] can empower, but also dehumanize and emotionally disconnect people renewing the purpose and relevance of spirituality often enhanced through religion. This is why religion is so important today.

There are many reasons for the faith/technology juxtaposition. The tension between science and faith runs deep in Western history (if you don’t know Wellhausen, you should—he is among the early flashpoints in this debate). Recent works by the likes of Richard Dawkins have understandably put people of faith on edge.

Add to this the the heeby-jeebies that so many of us have about math to begin with, and it’s easy to understand why we want to put the hard numbers behind electronic media (Google Analytics) at odds with the very human expression of faith and grace.

Can Data Be Hospitable?

The perceptions are unfortunate, as behind the cold, hard numbers generated by Analytics and other programs that track our every move on the web are real people.

Carefully read and interpreted, these numbers can provide insights into those who take the time to read the materials that we make available. To be fair, let’s admit up front that a cold side to this does exist. Anyone who has visited a website (say you click on page about Maine) then flipped to his or her Facebook page only to discover an ad screaming “Vacation in Maine” knows that the ad isn’t accidental.

In fact, so much of marketing today is about mining data and using that to “know” the people on the other side of the screen.

But there is a warmer, more hospitable way to approach this data. Especially in the confines of congregations. Unlike major corporations that can’t possibly know the real people behind the data, congregational leaders can, and do. Even within relatively large communities of faith.

That knowledge alone changes the dynamic. In congregations, analytics are not just numbers, they represent the people you minister to. And information gleaned through social networking channels and e-newsletters allows you to see exactly who is reading and reacting to your work and information. By clicking, liking, and following they are revealing a great deal about themselves to you and your ministry team. Information that can sensitize and strengthen your interactions with your members.

Data, in short, opens the door to hospitality—an ancient ideal in Christianity as well as many other world religious traditions—by allowing you to put yourself in the shoes of those you serve.

Individuals consistently clicking information about health care issues or mental health issues may well be signaling a great deal about their own situation that they may well have been hesitant to voice. Being aware of this can only improve your empathy, and your ability to create a hospitable environment for that individual.

Technology and hospitality are not disconnected—they are two sides of the human coin.