Social Networking

It has been several years since this group last discussed Facebook, so I pose this question:

Why does a church need a web site when they have a Facebook Page?

Nic

Just posted the same thing in my local area group(NC), but thought I'd ask here also. How many of you are on twitter. I imagine a good bit of you are. I know I am following some of you already, but this would be a good place to post your twitter and get some twommunity going. I'll go first:

@adamgregory

Let the following of tweets begin!

We're wanting to launch forums in our church site, to promote more community interaction, but some of our staff is concerned about bad language, improper postings, etc. I'm wondering how many churches are using forums, how successful they are and how you prevent malicious behaviour?

We're using D6 and I've installed the abuse module, which allows specific content types to be flagged. Is there any type of bad language filter that would prevent something bad from being posted in the first place?

Online groups are quickly becoming a staple of church sites. Some churches are using CMS, like drupal and the organic groups module, to build their groups while others use sites like Church Community Builder to manage their members and provide online groups.

Looking at how some of these groups are setup I notice a number of differences in information architecture. Some of the different IAs are fairly good and meet the needs to of the average user. Others suffer from missing features or are difficult for the average user to find what they are looking for.

Recently a LOT of our church members (adults and teens) have discovered facebook and there has been a growing community and interaction growing there (one of our pastors had a 40th anniversary party organized via facebook).

I have finally found some time to start mulling over what role our church website would have in relation to all of this activity on facebook.

Do you have any ideas or experience in using your church website to complement facebook (not replace it, no need to re-invent a perfectly well working wheel)?

I do a bit of church development and I know there are others in the same boat. I, also, see that this group has 61 subscribers. I have seen good church sites but the overwhelming majority of them out there are not good in functionality, security, look, or in meeting the need the church is trying to do. Drupal is a great tool that can help with 3 of these 4 things (exception is look). The 4th (meeting the need) is more than drupal but drupal provides many keys.

So, here we are. Drupalers who work with church websites. How can this group provide more added value to those of us in the group? And, how can the group reach others who need it?

Some thoughts are talking about what functionality would be good in a church website. This would be dependent on the size of the church, i think. Another is talking about what the need is and how to do that in drupal. The final though I had was about how to make a site look good and theme that in drupal.

Any thoughts from the gallery?

Okay, I just removed my previous post. I'm not sure what I was thinking, but I think everyone here can post full stories when they have something interesting. Bah. ;)

Anyway, I did want to make a post about the management aspect of running a church web site. This isn't particularly related to og or even Drupal, but I did want to make a few comments since I've been the volunteer webmaster of our church for three years.