How can you increase your Ministries presence on Facebook?

One way that I plan on doing this is by doing events for the family based around the community of Facebook. The first event that we did was called “Facebook Family Fun Night”

What is Facebook Family Fun Night? Well the origin of my idea came from Kendra and her team at North Point Church. I love the practicality and ministry in the trenchness of Kendra’s blog and read every post she posts. She is also a great breakout speaker if you are going to Orange make sure you go to at least one of her breakouts you’ll thank me later. They did a competition based event, from what I could gather, that was more through their website. I thought for us that Facebook would be a great way to do something similar to what they did.

Here is the basic description of what we did: Facebook Family Fun Night was an interactive family night that parents from all of our campus’ can sign up to be a part of. The event took place at your home with families from our church the twist is they did a devotional and the supplemental actives with their own family but in a race with all the other families who had registered from all of our campus’. The way the progress will be logged is by each family taking pictures and uploading them to our kidmin fanpage.

A few questions as to why we did this?

1. Why Facebook? – Loads of our families are on Facebook and know how to work it so we didn’t have to communicate how to use the technology. Plus Facebook is free.

2. What was our goal?
Our goals were:

• Stir ideas for creatively teaching your kids the bible at home
• Help connect families to each other through a shared online experience
• Do a family event in the winter that wasn’t weather dependent.
• Build Uptown’s Facebook brand with our core audience
• Create a shared memory for our families.
• Create an opportunity for parents to lead their own kids to Christ.

3. Why make it a race? I like the race because you don’t get bogged down in any one thing if forces you to keep moving because everyone else is. One of the reasons family devotions are lame is because they get bogged down and don’t keep moving and kids lose focus. The race factor keeps the family focused. I like that.

I really liked this event. I don’t think virtual community will ever replace face to face community but I do believe it can enhance it. When we have done events in the past people who didn’t attend didn’t really feel like they missed out but based on the viral and social nature of this event if you missed it you know you missed it because of the chatter and pictures loaded. Love that. We work so hard and not making people feel left out ever that people rarely feel like they missed something great. I hope everyone who didn’t take part in this event feels like they missed out…because lets face it they did!

What I would change for next time:

1. Have a better way to judge who was the winner
2. Perhaps have different criteria for who the winner would be
3.  Maybe do part of it via ustream or the like.