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WEC for church planting and robust two-way communication


Author Message
Written on: 08/14/2008
David Wehrle
Topic creator
registered since: 01/31/2006
Posts: 4
Hi! Can you help by providing an opinion and comment?

I am thinking about all the networking and communicating that I am doing for the church plant I am leading. I use WEC and other tools. I have pretty much determined my priorities for the when, what and how of our communications. Now, I need to think about the how more... I need to determine how best to leverage WEC to get it done. What do you think?

Here’s what I am going to produce:

A weekly short piece of writing with photo or other media
A weekly short video piece
A daily text of 146 characters or less
More frequent text messages for emergent prayer/announcements

Here are the “channels” I want to push this stuff along and make available to “subscribers:”

One organized web repository of everything that is easily navigated and includes room for growth and for additional stuff – static and otherwise
Weekly e-mail – this would presumably include the longer written piece and links
Monthly snail mail – ditto
Daily SMS
RSS of as much of it as I can manage

I want to get on people’s phones, in their email, on their web browsers, in their rss readers, and in their mailbox (this last one only when I need to).

I’m curious about popular social networking tools as well. What do you think about: twitter, myspace, facebook, youtube, others? Do I need those? Can they serve as connectors somehow? I think both twitter and facebook will take rss feeds and publish them.

Finally, I want to empower the community I am building to interact publicly with one another by replying along the same channel that I pushed out to them. I want them to be able to respond with SMS, e-mail, on the web, and via mail.

If you have a moment, would you consider my situation and tell me how you would use WEC to do this as simply as possible? I’m going to push this out to the community as well. I really want to use WEC. I like a lot of the additional functionality and will probably use it as well – the devotional journal extension, for example, and the google map thing.

Thanks!
Dave
Written on: 06/12/2010
Mark Stephenson
registered since: 11/01/2004
Posts: 401
David,

Well I think you are really on the right track. I suggest a Facebook and a Twitter component to this plan. They should both point back to your main website for any significant content but they are both excellent connection points. Twitter is a great way to get text messages out to phones at no cost and there are automated ways to post to twitter. Facebook is great for its friends network. Facebook can be a wrong direction for some people (due to some ads and some Frinds' Facebook pages), so I have a slight bit of concern there, but the social connection is powerful and as long as main content resides on the church website, you are not pushing people to Facebook.

In Christ,
Mark