Mavis Moon

You're right, Allen, knowing what you're doing makes a big difference, and that takes training.

Staying focused is definitely a prerequisite, too, as you noted. Once when I was recruiting new people in a bulletin announcement I wrote that one of the necessary skills was to stay cool when things go wrong. No matter how hard we try, sometimes things do just go wrong (As Jon Acuff also wrote in his blog, "God hates microphones."), and staying calm is another necessary skill. 

Thanks for sharing your perspective, as someone who's on the other end of the mike.

Thanks, Jason. Great input, worth much more than just 2 cents! :)

When people say, as you did, that they've made connections and friendships through Twitter, I am curious as to exactly how that happens. I've used Twitter a bit but haven't made it a regular thing, at least not yet.

How exactly, on Twitter, do you connect with people you don't know and start getting to know them?

Jason, I'm going to look you up for sure. Thank you for the practical advice. Very helpful.

Wendy,

Thank you for your comment. YouVersion looks like a very rich tool. I plan to explore it more fully. And LifeChurch.tv, who offers YouVersion, is also an interesting site and concept. I'm going to check that out, too. At first glance I thought it was intriguiging that LifeChurch encourages attending church while at the same time making full use of social media.

Mavis

 We're encouraging small groups again (we have some functioning already). I'd love to hear more specifically what you would consider "easy" when you say to make it easy to join. 

What a great idea! We've been talking about ways to encourage our congregation members to tell their "God stories" and I think this could be a wonderful method.

I was struck by this years ago when a group I was in studied John Timmer's book *The Kingdom Equation: A Fresh Look at the Parables of Jesus.* He really explores the way that the meaning and impact of the parables are affected by the Eastern culture within which they were told.

We use Planning Center People. My idea was we would have just one place for all the names and so on since we also use some of the other Planning Center products and I wanted to change our offering tracking to their product for that. However, our deacons have not changed to it. They're comfortable in what we used before and even though I tried to train them and explain why we were doing it, I did not succeed. We also use Google drive, email, etc. so we still have several places to put contact info so my thoughts of reducing duplication have not been successful. :( However, I do think Planning Center could be a great centralized system. We do integrate it with MailChimp so that is useful.

I would definitely say use a database rather than an Excel spreadsheet. You're going to need database features that go way beyond a spreadsheet.

Our Facebook page is doing all right. We have a good number of fans. But, like others have said, we don't get a lot of back & forth conversation. I try to post something at least once a week.

http://www.facebook.com/sjcrc

Every time I make a suggestion, you've already done it! :-D

Good job.

There are several articles and discussions about social media on the network. If you click on the "Social Media" tab you'll see a list.