Did you catch that? Facebook noticed that engagement is going down and so it’s looking for ways to decrease the lurking and increase the connection factor. Birthday greetings are a low-friction way for people to engage with the social network. It’s not (just) about the person receiving the birthday greetings, it’s about getting people to engage by sending the birthday greetings. What if we leveraged birthdays as an engagement point for our churches?
4 Ways to Leverage Birthdays as an Engagement Tool for Your Church
- Generate a monthly report from your database for your small group leaders and give them birthday cards to sign and mail to their people.
- Ensure that your team leaders know whose birthdays are coming up and have them text their people to wish them a happy birthday.
- Send a reminder email to team members that a fellow team member’s birthday is coming up and give them ideas on how to celebrate it simply.
- Take time in your staff meetings to sign cards for core volunteers and leaders and mail them out monthly.
3) Connect photos with contact data.
What is Facebook at its core? It’s a collection of images of people’s faces connected with contact information. It is a “book of faces.” This is a powerful tool to help you get to know people in your social network.
Once your church gets beyond a few hundred people, it’s impossible to know everyone. Stop trying. Unless you have cultivated a superhuman ability to remember faces and names, it’s not worth it. In fact, the military did a fascinating study finding that only 2 percent of the population have a “super-recognizing” ability. This reality pushes back against the notion that knowing people’s names and faces is the starting point of pastoral care. It’s hard to demonstrate care to people if you don’t know them to start with!
An underused feature of most church databases is the ability to associate photos with people’s profiles. Your team could benefit from this powerful feature. Church Community Builder (unSeminary’s preferred Church Management System) makes it particularly easy to update people’s photos. Regardless of which system you use, you need to encourage the updating of this vital information. It will help you recognize more people.
4 Times When Having People’s Photos in Your Church Database Is Helpful
- Phone Calls // When you phone people from the church, it’s a best practice to have a photo in front of you to associate their face with the voice you are hearing. This will help you to make the connection in the future.
- Pre-Weekend Planning // As you are getting ready for the weekend, take a look through your volunteer “roster” and see the people who are serving.
- Small Group Launches // When forming groups at your church, introduce the members by sharing their photos.
- Team Prayer Experiences // As your staff team gathers to pray for people from church, pull up the photos of the people you’re praying for.
What Facebook Gets Right – And what are you noticing?
What Facebook gets right is that it is all about getting people connected and engaged. They’ve figured out how to digitize relationships with hundreds of millions of people. What are you noticing about Facebook that we could possibly learn from in local church leadership? I’d love to hear from you!
This article on what Facebook gets right originally appeared here, and is used by permission.
