Ning is a site that allows you to create your own social network website (like a mini-facebook) for free, which might have interesting application for churches.

Ning the company recently raised $60m usd (!) so they’re going to be around for a while, in internet terms at least. Currently there have been 200,000 networks created on the site.

There are quite a number of features that churches might find useful too, especially with all the photos, audio and video being produced these days, so check it out.

Yeah, this is absolutely the way things are going. Are you aware of any churches that have done this yet, Luke? Ideally it would integrate with something like OpenID…

There are quite a few churches listed (here’s one random example), but some are member only, so it’s difficult to gauge exactly what people are doing with it, but it could make an excellent ‘members’ site to complement a simpler, more outward facing site. Or it could be both, really. But yeah I agree it’s the way things are going. The Ning blog has more examples too (scroll down).

It’s obviously a lot easier to manage and organise events and gatherings electronically than trying to herd cats on a Sunday after church, and if you could get new people signed up and allocated to a (virtual) group on their first visit to a church, I think the chances of keeping them as a member and getting them more involved would rise dramatically, as would participation from ordinary members.

One thing I’ve found with a church web-site is that you don’t have the numbers of people (obviously depending on the size of your church) to make it particularly “social”.  That may also have to do with the content on our site that hasn’t been deliberately engaging, or focussed on the web audience.

I wrote recently, Social network aware church web-sites, that we should make sure our church web-sites are social network aware.  That is, make the content on your site shareable amongst the online social networks your members are using (at our church it seems to be Facebook).  Why create a new network tool when your members are already networking on places like Facebook?  And the other benefit is that your members can share content from your church with their non-church friends.

Having said that, Ning looks interesting, it is another thing for people to sign up for.  But, as Luke says, it does have a lot of features that might enable a church to setup a site without the in-house skills.

That is, make the content on your site shareable amongst the online social networks your members are using (at our church it seems to be Facebook).  Why create a new network tool when your members are already networking on places like Facebook?

This is a great point

Simon Job - 04 May 2008 05:20 PM

One thing I’ve found with a church web-site is that you don’t have the numbers of people (obviously depending on the size of your church) to make it particularly “social”. 

And I’m not sure that you ever will, unless your church grows to the size of Sydney Diocese. The SA forums have less than 50 regular contributors out of a large pool of potential people involved.

Let’s say your church is 10% of the size of the diocese (!), and so proportionately, your SA forum equivalent gets 10% of (less than) 50 regular contributors.

That means even your very large church of several thousand will have about 5 regular contributors to the forum. Let’s add a few because it’s ‘your’ church, and the website gets a regular flogging from the leaders, say you scare up 10 more enthusiastic participants. You still end up with less than 15 regulars, which really isn’t all that social.

I suppose it might just work if you encouraged all the ministry staff to be making weekly contributions. But you’d want a really compelling reason to make that part of their job description, and I’m not sure what that would be.

I suppose it might also work in a retirement village or somewhere with a lot of shut-ins, like a hospital.

Someone suggested OpenID for integration between a Ning site and another site I manage. Ended up being marked “not a good idea” as it’s kind of flawed in it’s security model. I think that if it we’re doing something associated with people where trust is important then OpenID won’t cut the mustard. Good summary here

Gordon Cheng - 04 May 2008 10:44 PM

And I’m not sure that you ever will, unless your church grows to the size of Sydney Diocese. The SA forums have less than 50 regular contributors out of a large pool of potential people involved.

But we’re talking about social networking, not public forums, so your argument is kind of silly. Especially from someone with *checks* 549 facebook friends as of writing. A more sensible comparison would be to facebook adoption rates, which are really quite high it seems.

There’s an argument to be made that you should keep it all on facebook, which is fair enough, and it’s also true that if you set up a site people wont just magically join and start participating, but there are large enough numbers of people now familiar with social networking that I think it would be possible to get a critical mass involved with single church sites. You would need to heavily promote it and encourage buy-in and use from leaders and so on, but the potential is there, and the success of facebook and myspace et al certainly demonstrates the possibilities.

Or you could just run it all on Twitter ;)

Luke Stevens - 07 May 2008 12:33 AM

You would need to heavily promote it and encourage buy-in and use from leaders and so on

I think that’s the bigger point here, whether you build your own Ning, use Facebook, or just a forum or blog on your web-site, without something useful and engaging happening on the site it will be useless.

I look at the staff at our church who are on Facebook, they’ve got lots of friends (or are they contacts?) like ministers do, but they’re not doing anything particularly interesting, just playing games (X has won a battle in Fleet Command!).

I still don’t think that many ministry leaders get the potential usefulness of blogs (let alone Facebook or Twitter)—see The Sola Panel.

At the same time, it’s up to people like us to help them “get it”.  I’m thinking of buying ministers I know The Blogging Church.

I can’t imagine a mini social network site for a church being very productive or useful...unless you somehow made it necessary by integrating it into your church structure, I think it could work for an educational institution, where you can force people to use it, but that’s about it.

You’d have to keep it all on Myspace or Facebook because I don’t think anyone is a fan of having more then one profile on the internet. Further unless your church consists entirely of hip happening teenagers I couldn’t see more then half of your church actually having a profile, or feeling any desire to have one.

As for Church websites particularly Sydney Anglican ones, I would point the finger and say that sydneyanglicans.net has very much killed them, and as long as sydneyanglicans.net exists they will probably stay pretty dead because almost anything that you’d put on a church website is covered in a bigger and better way on sydneyanglicans.net, which isn’t a bad thing, I think its a good thing its just an observation.
I think the best that a church website (particularly a Sydney Anglican one) can hope for is to have an amusing and interesting blog…