Several years ago, I was digging around for opportunities to be inspired by a topic and to share my writing with other like-minded bloggers when I stumbled on Blog Action Day (http://blogactionday.org). On October 15th of every year (since 2007) bloggers from around the world write about the same topic. Registered bloggers then have their contributions become a part of the massive collection of perspectives on a single issue.

It’s really pretty incredible… so many voices all singing the same song like a giant choir that’s determined to make sure the whole world feels the ripple.

I know that I felt it.

Blog Action Day 2008 was on the topic of poverty. Now that’s a topic that I knew that I wanted to write about!

After all, I’m a Christian, and Christians are supposed to care about poor people and stuff, right?

I’m pretty sure Jesus talked about that kind of stuff, and the more I dig into the Old Testament I see some references back there too. In fact, the Bible talks about poverty all over the place, so I figure I should probably be talking about it more.

I thought of that one verse at the beginning of a sermon where Jesus says, “Blessed are the poor…” Then I looked it up in Matthew 5:3. Oh snap, that’s referring to “the poor in spirit.”

Now I was on a mission. I stare at the screen of the computer that costs as much as some people make in an entire year and rub my eyes because I’m up way too late for me to be completely coherent at work the next day. But I had to get to the bottom of this issue.

Let’s see, there’s that story where Jesus tells about the poor widow and her two coins. (My handy dandy BibleGateway.com helped me find it in Mark 12 by searching for the word “widow”). But Jesus doesn’t say what we should do about poverty. He just talks about what the poor widow gave. Still, I’m on to something. God seems to look after those who have very little.

Hmm… what else? That’s right, Jesus told some rich guy to sell everything he had and give it to the poor, and then follow him (in Mark 10). I knew all about this one. Jesus is saying we shouldn’t be so connected to our self-made, earthly wealth. It’s the rich guy’s bad attitude more than hungry poor people. Right? Regardless, I think I’m getting on the right track. There’s definitely some stuff in the Bible about the poor, and it’s certainly clear that God cares about them, and not so much about the comforts we tend to cling to.

By this time, Blog Action Day was only a few days away. I wouldn’t have time to iron out an entire theology of poverty. That would have to wait. I had enough to know that poverty is important, so now I needed to figure out what Christians should be doing about it.

Except I didn’t know anyone personally who was doing anything about the problem.

I didn’t even know how widespread the problem is. So a little research was in order.

I did a little poking around, mostly by surfing the Internet on poorly designed webpages that seemed to have good information, but looked like they had been created by some kid in the 5th grade trying to earn extra credit. I’m floored by the numbers that I find. Did you know that half of the world’s population lives on less than $2.50 per day? UNICEF reports that 22,000 children die every day due to poverty. I was shocked by the news that one billion people entered the 21st century unable to read a book or sign their name.

But the problems don’t stop with poor people. The rest of us are getting richer and fatter every day. Yeah, I said fatter. I get angry when I learn that the poorest 20% of the world accounts for 1.5% of total consumption, while the richest 20% accounts for over 76% of total consumption. Then I look around and see obesity becoming a bigger problem every day in the United States, not to mention my own ever-increasing waistline.

Yeah… theological reasons aside, a little bit of Google activity looking for poverty statistics reveals the world’s self-made epidemic.

Now what to do with my new found rage? Who’s fighting poverty? And more importantly, who in the church (if anyone) is fighting poverty? If the church should be leading the charge since God cared so much about it, right?

Of course, I run into some crackpot solutions that’ll never fly. One guy says that all of the world’s wealthiest people should develop a moral conscience and give everything they have too the poor. (Hey, that sounds like what Jesus challenged someone to do, and we know how that turned out). People simply won’t give everything away to the poor, and people who blame the wealthy for the problem never seem to recognize their own wealth. The wealthy people who should be doing taking on the issue of poverty always seem to be just a little wealthier than they are.

But I found people who were doing some interesting work…

For more of this story, you can check out TheUnlikelyMissionary.com or purchase it at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and E-junkie.

Also, Blog Action Day this year is on Sunday, October 16th. It coincides with World Food Day, and therefore will focus on the topic of food. If you decide to participate, I’d love to see a link to your post and hear about your experience of writing on this topic. How can an event like this help you find passion and purpose for your faith?

1. Learn as much as you can about the most recent changes
2. Understand how they affect your organization and then
3. Adjust your Facebook strategy to make the most of them

The New Newsfeed

The changes individual users notice immediately are the changes to the newsfeed.

Gone is the “Top News” with the option to switch to “Most Recent.” Now there are Top Stories and Recent Stories. The Top Stories are things Facebook thinks you might be interested in based on your interaction in the past. The Recent Stories are in chronological order, but they don’t include everything from all your friends. Facebook filters Recent Stories and only gives you what it thinks you’ll want to see.

Introducing the Ticker

For those who want to see all their “friends’” status updates, Facebook has introduced the Ticker, which is a real-time list of everything your friends are doing. It includes everything in Recent Stories plus notices of when your friends add friends, like pages, comment on stories, play Farmville, and more.

In other words, the Ticker is what old Facebook used to be.

It also looks suspiciously like Twitter.

New Lists = Google+ Circles

The other big change individual users will notice is that Facebook has improved their lists functionality. It functions a lot like circles in Google+. Once a user creates a list, they can not only click to view just the updates from the people on that list, but they can now also publish content that only people on that list can see.

So, you can now create a “family” list and share pictures so only people on that list can see them. Or you can create a “work” list and post links to industry-related news that only your co-workers would be interested instead of bothering everyone with it. You can share content with multiple lists, make it public, or even hide from specific individuals.

Other Changes

There are a bunch of other new things that are available now like watching TV & movies with your friends, listening to music and seeing what your friends are listening too, and others big changes that are coming soon like the Timeline and Facebook Gestures. But those won’t have much have much impact on churches and non-profits now, and that’s where I want to go next.

Likes Less Important, Engagement Critical

With the changes to individual users newsfeeds, Facebook takes another step towards playing god in what content Facebook users see.

All content is not created equal. No longer can you expect everyone who “likes” your organization’s Facebook page to see everything you post to Facebook. Status updates, photos, videos and links that get “likes” and “comments” have become even more prominent and thus more likely to be seen, while those that do not have become even less prominent and less likely to be seen.

This presents both a challenge and an opportunity for churches, non-profits and businesses. It’s more important than ever that organizations engage people with their content. Those that do will find their content being seen by more people.

Furthermore, every time someone likes or comments on your content, that action shows up in all their friends Tickers. So, engaging content gets double prominence.

If you manage your organization’s Facebook page, every time you post to Facebook you have to ask yourself more than, “What do I want people to know?” You have to ask yourself, “What do I want people to do?” And “How can post this in a way that will invoke a response?”

Relationship Building More Important

If you use Facebook personally, you understand that you engage more with the people you have the best relationships with – your immediate family and close friends. The same is true with organizations. The better your organization builds relationships with its “fans” the more they will “like” and comment on your content. That means doing things like

• listening and responding to wall posts and comments
• posting polls and asking for feedback
• featuring members or customers
• posting photos and video of your “fans” interacting with your organization offline

Discussion

1. Which recent changes to Facebook do you think will have the biggest impact on churches and non-profits? Why?
2. Do you think engagement and relationships on Facebook are more important than ever now?
3. What are you doing to strengthen relationships and engage more in Facebook?

Well, that is just the tip of the iceberg.

Your employees are probably just a small percentage of the people who know and love what your organization is doing.

• Churches – every member and regular attender should be spreading the word about your church.
• Schools – every parent and student could be talking about your school.
• Non-profits – every volunteer and donor could be sharing the great things your org is doing with their friends.
• Businesses – every customer or client has a story to tell about you.

Creating a “We” Culture

Just like with employees, if you want your members, parents, students, volunteers, and customers to become a part of your marketing team, you must create a culture where they are motivated to do that. In fact, the culture is even more critical here, because while employees may be motivated to some extent by self-interest (to keep their job or make a good impression on supervisors), your customers, members and volunteers must be inspired by something beyond self interest.

Here are 5 key elements to creating that culture:

1) Expand the “we.” If your primary goal is the success or growth of your organization, you are doomed. That mindset views customers, volunteers, and members as a means to an end. If you want them to talk about you, you need to start by envisioning them as joining with you in a movement that is bigger than your organization. Why does your org exist? To save souls? To end poverty? To cure cancer? To prepare students for adult live? To be a partner with like-minded organizations in providing?

To make this a part of your culture, it has to start at the top and permeate the way your organization thinks about everything. There can no longer be an “us” and a “them.” Whenever you talk, think and dream, it must be about “we,” and “we” must include your customers, volunteers, parents, and members.

2) Communicate the “we.” We live in a society dominated transactional relationships. Our default thought process is “You give me this and in return I’ll give you that.” If you want to change the culture, you have to constantly tell your customers why you’re doing what you’re doing. You’ve got to talk to your volunteers with words like “we” and “us.” You’ve got to remind parents, “We’re all in this together.”

3) Empower the “we.” As you help members, parents, students, customers and volunteers view themselves as part of a bigger movement, you’ve got to create the tools that will empower them to be a part of the “we.”

• Blog and use social media in ways that make it easy to share what you’re doing with others online.
• Create Facebook Events that make it easy to invite friends.
• Facilitate dialog, feedback, and suggestions so everyone can speak into what your organization is doing.
• Make your paid staff available.
• Facilitate meet-ups and relationships among customers, members, parents, and volunteers. A lot of this can be done online through social networks.

4) Encourage the “we.” Call people to action – specific action. “Bring a friend.” “Share this video.” “Rate this service.” “Like us on Facebook”

5) Celebrate the “we.” Find examples of members, parents, customers, or volunteers who are spreading the world. Tell their stories. Show specifically how their actions helped further the movement. Recognize those who are making a difference, and it will inspire everyone in the tribe to make a difference.

How does your organization think about its customers, members, parents, students and volunteers? Are they a part of “them” or a part of “we?” What do you think is necessary to create a “we” culture?

10) How to triple your marketing team overnight for $0 <– Leadership in Communications

1) Written Blogging: is the first form of blogging. People write articles to share information with others. There are many different types of written blogs:

• Personal
• Collaborative
• Corporate
• Topical
• How-to

Most missionaries use personal blogs to tell their story. Blogger is a very popular website for most bloggers. One example of missionaries using Blogger is Dave and Jana Jenkins, a couple writing about their work in Rwanda. Here is another website dedicated to missionary blogs.

2) Photo Blogging (Photoblogs): A personal journal of photos that are available for others to see. One social media site for photoblogging is fotothing. On this site, one user has photos of his/her missionary team. One photo features the team members praying for the kids of the bakerton location. This is a great way to share all the snap shots your team takes while out in the field.

3) Video Blogging (Videocasts): Similar to photo blogging, except instead of photos, members post videos. One example of a missionary that used YouTube to record videos of his experiences is Justin Ashurst. Another great site for video sharing is Vimeo.

4) Audio Blogging (Podcasts): An array of audio files produced by the blogger available for download. Many churches are currently doing podcasts of their Sunday services. The City Church is a great example of integrating their podcasts by using iTunes.

This website goes over the blogging basics and has some great vocabulary!

When a young woman searches for ”unplanned pregnancy” in the search engines, do you want your Christian pregnancy center to show up at the top of the search results of planned parenthood? …

People’s eternal salvation may depend on SEO. It’s a big claim, but take a look at the screenshot to the right. Those are the search results for “church near Colorado City, AZ”. Three out of the top four results (including the top two results) are Mormon or Jehovah’s Witnesses churches.

A lot of people have the misperception that search marketing is all about organizations acting in their own self interest. It’s businesses trying to improve their rankings so they can get more customers than their competitors. It’s First Baptist Church trying to get ahead of First Presbyterian Church so they can get more members.

We need to have a bigger, kingdom view of SEO

• What difference would it make in your community if the top 10 churches listed in Google were Christian vs cults?
• What difference would it make in your community if the top 10 counseling centers, pregnancy centers, food banks, life coaches, and more were Christian vs not Christian?

Now multiply that time millions of communities around the globe.

• What difference would it make if the top 10 search listings for “Who is Jesus?” were Christian vs not Christian?

Now multiply that times thousands of related phrases and hundreds of languages.

4 Action Steps To Advance the Kingdom View of SEO

We have a real opportunity to spread the gospel and advance the kingdom of God through search engines. To do that, though, we need to take action and seize this opportunity. Here are 4 things each one of us can do

1) Raise awareness. We need to help more and more Christians understand the critical importance of search engines. Talk about it regularly with your church leaders. Blog about it, tweet about it, Facebook about it. Share articles showing how Christian organizations are changing lives after people find them in search engines.

2) Optimize your own sites. Do your part to make sure your Christian church, school, ministry, or business is as prominent as possible in search engines. That’s probably not going to be easy. You’re probably going to have to learn a whole lot about SEO or get someone to help you with it.

3) Connect with others … who recognize the importance of SEO on blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and Linked in. Help others by sharing their content, commenting on their posts, guest blogging and publishing guest blog posts on your blog.

4) Share your insight. Search marketing is constantly changing. Search engines are changing their algorithms, developers are creating new SEO tools, SEOs are experimenting with new techniques. Instead of hoarding knowledge, let’s help one another optimize better.

That’s what we’re trying to accomplish. That’s the motivation behind Christian SEO Guys.

What do you think of this bigger, kingdom worldview of SEO?

Which of the 4 steps above do you feel motivated to act on?

With online payment processors like PayPal, anyone with a credit card anywhere in the world is a potential contributor.  With social media tools like Facebook and Twitter, it’s possible for a charity to gain tens of thousands of online followers.  And those tens of thousands of followers have the capacity to spread the word about a campaign to millions of their followers.

I’ve written about several of the success stories:

• Big Love Little Hearts raised $25k with Foursquare, Twitter, Facebook
• Donald Miller raised $300k to save the Blue Like Jazz movie
• Pastor Shaun King, Eva Longoria raised $500k for Haiti through TwitChange

If you lead a charitable organization, it seems foolish not to be using PayPal, Facebook, and Twitter to maintain relationships with donors and connect with new donors.

Donor Fatigue

The success of online fundraising, the low barrier to entry (any charity can set up PayPal, Facebook, and Twitter accounts for free in a minutes), and the growing number of people using social media, has led to an explosion in online giving campaigns and donation requests.

Hardly a day goes by when I don’t see at least one donation request on Facebook or Twitter.

If you genuinely care about people,  reading the donation requests, considering them, making a decision as to whether to give or not, and then accepting that decision can be stressful and lead to “donor fatigue.”

At some point, you begin coping with donor fatigue by closing your heart to the requests.  You read them, but don’t seriously consider them.  Or maybe you stop reading them.  Or maybe you stop following certain people/organizations who ask too often.

Tomorrow, I’m going to write about strategies for coping with donation requests, but today I want to focus on what this means for church, ministry and charity leaders.

If you understand donation request fatigue as an individual, don’t perpetuate it as church, ministry, or non-profit.  This is another situation where…

Less is more!

Limit and be strategic about when and how often you ask for donations.

Have you personally experienced “donation request fatigue?”  Church and charity leaders, how often do you ask for donations via Facebook, Twitter, & your blog?  Do you consciously limit the asks?

http://webinars.globalmediaoutreach.com

The webinar is just short of an hour, but it thought it was worth the time.

If you don’t have a full hour, you might check out this ChristianPost.com article about the webinar.  Gordon Marcy also blogged about Eight takeaways from the webinar.

This post is part 17 in the series 20 Ways to Share Your Faith Online leading up to and following Internet Evangelism Day on April 25. We encourage you to tweet, share, blog & discuss these ideas in your church & circle of influence.

“These days, knocking on someone’s door to share the gospel is almost…unchristian,” my friend confided as we were finishing our dinner last night and talking about evangelism. “People don’t want an intrusion,” he said. Now, you should know that this man has led many, many people to Jesus by knocking on doors and sharing his faith.

“Imagine this,” I replied. “What if, instead of going to them, 6,000 people knocked on your front door every day asking you to tell them about Jesus? Wouldn’t that be great?”

I am an Online Missionary with GlobalMediaOutreach.com. Every day, someone knocks on my door and asks to know more about Jesus. In less than a year I have helped 226 people develop a relationship with Jesus Christ through email as an Online Missionary. I’m sure that some people go through their entire life without sharing Christ with 200 people.

On Internet Evangelism Day, April 25, more than 6,500 people emailed a GMO Online Missionary and asked to know more about Jesus. Follow up and discipleship is happening right now as GMO’s Online Missionaries engage these people who are coming to Christ from around the world. In Acts 8 we read about Philip being prompted to get up and go to minister to the Ethiopian eunuch who was seeking Christ and open to the gospel. In the same way, the Holy Spirit is connecting people seeking to know Jesus with the Online Missionaries ready to share the gospel.

If you would like to share Jesus with more people every day, I encourage you to visit www.globalmediaoutreach.com/volunteer.html Sign up to become an Online Missionary and begin to open the door for some of the many thousands who are knocking on your door every day.

Nick Runyon is a Jesus lover, family man, wanna’ be blogger, and Director of Outreach for GlobalMediaOutreach.com.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past 20 years or so, you know that most Churches, even most evangelical Churches, are not growing. Those that are growing usually do so through “transfer growth”, those who move to a new community or want a new Church experience rather than “organic growth”, i.e. adding new members by winning the Lost to Christ. Evangelicals need to reexamine the process of attracting new growth and more clearly distinguish between those “outside the Church” a reference to believer transfers and those “outside of Christ” or “organic growth”.

Was it really Christ’s vision to grow His Body on Earth by “shuffling Christians around” or to reach those who do not yet know Him? The question is therefore, how can we help the Lost in our Communities AND around the world to come to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ and use online technology as part of the solution?

At The aXiom Network, we believe the Church is overlooking the most obvious tool available. Our observations suggest less than 5% of Churches, even “evangelical, Bible preaching, Gospel believing, Great Commission fulfilling” Churches include the Gospel on their websites.

And, frankly, we don’t quite understand why. When asked why they don’t include the Gospel on their website the pastor’s typical answer is, “we’ve never thought of the internet as an effective tool for attracting the lost” or “the only way we can know of someone’s new faith directly is if they walk in our Church doors”.

The question for today and the future will be:

“Is your Church website a resource for the Holy Spirit to use to fulfill The Great Commission? Could He lead a lost soul to your site knowing they’ll come face to face with their need for the Savior and His promises of Eternal Life?”

If not this, how?  If not now, when? If not you, who?

Despite our optimism about a marriage of the Gospel, the local Church and the Web we have no illusions that the lost throngs will queue up to the heavenly throne someday because a Church or 100,000 Churches (our goal)  had the Gospel on their website. However, we do believe there will be some, perhaps many who will. And, they will be eternally grateful to the Church that made it possible for them to be there.

I’ll be discussing these ideas in much more detail in the near future as a call to encourage local Churches to add the Gospel to their Websites.

Rev. Don Walley, Director
The aXiom Network
www.theaxiomnetwork.com

The following is a guest blog article by Wendy Spoon, web administrator for First Grace Church in Glenpool, OK.

Slovakia. Just the name both thrilled and frightened me. My husband and I were going on our first Missions trip together. I was excited for the opportunity, but at the same time intimidated. I mean, I’m just the Pastor’s wife. I don’t teach and I don’t preach. I sometimes sing and I do book-keeping. I maintain the church website and had been looking into social networking. But what was my purpose in Slovakia? And what could I do, if anything, that would impact the ministry taking place there.

May 5, 2009 arrived quickly.  Our time in Slovakia was busy. Every morning, afternoon, and evening we were ministering to cell groups, individuals, leadership groups, etc. My husband and another minister who traveled with us handled these meetings. I still had no idea what I could offer…

In between all of these meetings, I got on the computer. There were always people around when I had time to update our blog, and Facebook, and they began to get curious about what I was doing. I explained to them, that even though we were away from our home church, that we were able to keep them updated about what we were doing in Slovakia. This opened the door to my being able to share what was truly on my heart with the church in Slovakia.

I shared with them video of a song my daughter wrote that I have embeded into our website through YouTube and Tangle.  They were very excited to learn that I had takes these videos with an inexpensive point and shoot camera and that the use of Tangle and YouTube are free.  Most of their worship songs are original works because of the lack of materials in the Slovak language.  This allows them to post videos of their songs without violating any copyright laws.

But this is what I was most excited about.  You see, in Slovakia, there is not a church on every corner. There are many places of worship, but very few Christian churches. We ministered out of Prielom (Breakthrough) Christian Center in Bratislava, Slovakia. What we came to learn is that many members live in towns as far as 2 hours away from the church with Prielom being nearest Christian church to them. What I found interesting is that everyone of the members had a computer with internet access, even in the farm town of Trebula, where there are only 2 homes in the entire town. So, they have a need for reaching their members through the internet.  I was able to share with them ways to share their services through audio or video via the internet.  They already have the technology to make great MP3 audio of their service, but they weren’t aware of simple, low-cost ways to share the audio through the internet.

During my time there, I was able to share with the church leadership, the impact that social networking had made for our church. I began to recall the information that I gained through the series of articles from Ourchurch.com on Social Networking to share with them. Because of my recent Adventures in Social Networking at our own church, I was able to share with them simple ways to connect with their membership, no matter the distance between them. And because of those same tools, I am now able to keep in touch with Prielom and be a help to them as they begin their own adventure.

Something that I did not know until we returned home is how our blog impacted our church.  They were able to keep up with what we were doing in “real time”  and pray for us accordingly.  They were also accessing our blog on our multi-media computer at church and sharing the blogs on the projection screen during worship services.  This was also very instrumental in helping our over 60 crowd to understand the need for a website and for the church to have a presence on the internet.

We may not always know why God is sending us, or what our purpose is when we get there, but He does. He had given me a desire to begin an adventure of social networking for our church in Glenpool, Oklahoma, so that I had the opportunity to help the church in Bratislava, Slovakia to begin their own adventure.

[image by peterfenda]