What if this works?
During our annual conference I was heavily exposed for the first time to the new Rethink Church campaign coming from United Methodist Communications (UMCOM). Being on the conference staff I have heard rumblings about this initiative, but this was the first time I a full presentation. The communications folks started talking about this months ago when they came back from their big annual meeting. I watched the presentation on the floor of conference, watched the DVD movie that was passed out and read the fliers. I met with the UMCOM representatives and discussed the project. I even discussed it with our own Communications Director. I realized after doing all of this research that this project may be leaving our people in the local churches wondering what the heck this is all about. Here’s a summary of the different resources I used to research this big project called Rethink Church.
The new campaign doesn’t seem to be just one website. It appears to be three different websites and directions. UMCOM has done significant work on some of their older and more established websites as well as launching completely new ones. Let’s discuss each one in turn.
Rethink Church
I first started at the Rethink Church website. The website address redirects to the umcom.org web template. This site contains the majority of resources for the Rethink Church project. It fully explains what the advertising campaign is and how it is carried out. I found the Rethink Church 101 page to be particularly helpful. The What If video is worth viewing. How can we propagate it via the social networks without the ability to embed it?
Find-A-Church
My search then brings me to the Find A Church website which had been completely revamped. This domain name also redirects to the umcom.org web template. It looked almost nothing like the older site that I was sending people to. This appears to be a major thrust of the new campaign. The site has been updated with a new Google Maps widget and links to the appropriate Conference/District websites. As before the information is as up to date and helpful as the individual church enters into the system. As long as they enter the information the site is very helpful. If they don’t participate (or maintain updated data) then the site isn’t very useful. That’s not a knock on the UMCOM effort however. The old adage about garbage in/garbage out definitely applies.
Ten Thousand Doors
The last piece of this new campaign is found at the Ten Thousand Doors website. This site seeks to match up interests with United Methodist churches in the visitors immediate area. You can pick from a list of multiple attributes such as Advocacy, Hobbies, Family Life and Volunteering. You then enter your zip code and a mileage radius for the search criteria. I’m not sure how these attributes are assigned but they are certainly interested. If I had to guess I would say it was when the church updates their Find A Church information. This site also integrates with Google Friend Connect and the major social networks. You can also read news updates from various sources. Some of them are pulled from United Methodist sources. I’m not sure where the other news sources are chosen. They don’t seem to have a whole lot of relevance to UMCOM or Methodism specifically. The most interesting parts of this website are the comment forums and the ability to find volunteer service opportunities via Google Maps. These are possibly the two most useful features of the entire campaign. These sections allow people to communicate with each other as well as easily match up their skills with nearby service opportunities.
Social Networks
You can follow along with the major social networks as well. These areas are fairly self explanatory for seasoned social network veterans. I recommend them all.
I wish all of the different domain names were built into the Rethink Church website. It’s a shame that they redirect away and lose some of the branding. That may be a technical issue with the back end system but it’s still a shame. Overall I like the new tools available on the Rethink Church website as well as the revamped Find-A-Church site. These changes are encouraging. They seem to be designed for people who are not already exposed to the United Methodist Church. We’ll see how it goes long term. I hope the outcome is positive.
Posted by Rethink Church « DouglasWard.net | Google Friend Connect Blog on July 7, 2009 at 11:59 pm
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Posted by gavin richardson on July 8, 2009 at 9:27 pm
good analysis, my slant comes more of the action associate with web presence. it is less the norm than people believe that significant action comes from web elements (a case in point, look at giving to all the ’causes’ on facebook.. pretty poor imho). i do think it helps with knowledge, so people have more an opportunity to act, or be the church, time will tell if it actually works.
Posted by Bayard Saunders on July 9, 2009 at 8:38 am
Close, and nice reverse-engineering speculation, but the real story is slightly different.
The Find-a-Church function already existed and was accessible via a number of the UMCOM and other web pages. The database was simply updated to include categories of local church activities and interest (to help seekers identify a potentially good match church for them), and the graphic presentation was improved (glad you noticed).
The Rethink Church page(s) were simply added to the UMCOM existing site, and are intended as internal communication to churches and their congregations to try and explain the campaign’s elements from a 30,000-foot view.
The 10ThousandDoors.org website is the only completely new piece. For additional information, please see the article at http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/united_methodist_church_listens_responds_to_social.php#more
United Methodist Church Listens, Responds to Social Media
Written by Jolie O’Dell / May 7, 2009 1:12 PM / 6 Comments
Churches aren’t the first organizations that come to mind when you think about intelligent adoption and incorporation of social media. Nevertheless, many feel that if there was ever an organization in need of modern relevance, the Christian church in America is it.
One denomination, the United Methodist Church, has opted for a boldly redesigned web presence to ask users, “What if church wasn’t just a building, but thousands of doors? Each of them opening up to a different concept or experience of church – and a journey that could change our world. Would you come?”
10ThousandDoors.org goes far beyond a Facebook page or Twitter account. It pulls in information scraped from the web to track trending topics, then curates collections of articles on those subjects. It allows users to login using Google Friend Connect. The site gathers social video content about “people making a positive difference in our world,” and its GO/DO page uses a Google Earth plugin to get users to make connections between the online and the offline.
Apart from being remarkably aesthetically pleasing and entirely modern, the site also blows the lid off of traditional expectations of static church websites. Even non-Methodists or non-Christians would get a kick out of the rich interactivity: The TALK page that allows users to respond to simple questions, the FIND page that directs users to the closest churches with programs most relevant to users’ interests, the LISTEN page with audio news features and an iLike music player.
We caught up with one of the minds behind the site, Miiacom’s Bayard Saunders, in Nashville, Tennessee. “The big idea,” he said, “was to serve the content of the home page like a giant tag cloud based on feeds from news sources, blogs (including Twitter), keyword searches, site paths and referring pages. So by design, the site is constantly refreshed and always highlighting the most relevant content based on the most current topics relevant to seekers.”
Saunders also revealed that an ad buy-fueled partnership with Google has allowed for additional relevant innovations, including a Methodist layer on Google Earth, Google Maps, Google Friend Connect, and content fed by individual UMC churches from Google Apps.
“It is ground-breaking, certainly for an official religious denomination’s website,” he said. “And it’s been quite an interesting experience, designing a web presence for ‘the God account.’”
Posted by Douglas on July 9, 2009 at 9:50 am
The 30,000 foot view comment is critical and I think it is often lost in internal discussions. Much of the feedback I have received, as the Conference IT Director, from established church folks reflects that the ad campaign doesn’t do enough for them. Once you think of it as a general overview for an entirely different target audience it makes much more sense (and negates a lot of the internal criticism). I still think the sites should keep their domain names instead of switching to umcom.org. Is there any way to do that or do the separate systems prevent it?