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The Future of Facebook, Congregations, and Meaningful Community

 

Does your congregation use Facebook?  If so, you’ll want to watch this Facebook Live discussion on the Future of Facebook, congregations, and meaningful community below.

  Make sure to subscribe to email updates so you can join the live conversation! Not on Facebook or just want recordings?  Subscribe to my Youtube Channel.

What did Zuck say to promp this conversation?   At the F8 conference, Mark Zuckerberg shared a vision for the future of Facebook including an intensified focus privacy, encryption, ephemeral content, and connecting people with “meaningful community” via Facebook groups. The group focus is already rolling out. You’ve seen the changes if you updated your app.

As Facebook works to drive people into groups, we need to make sure your congregation has a Facebook strategy that takes advantage of this group focus and helps people successfully connect with your congregation offline, face-to-face.

Tracking these changes and discussing related strategies is something I’ll continue to discuss via social media and in my Leading Congregations Monthly trainings.  If you’re interested in this topic, make sure you subscribe to my email newsletter so you get notifcations for live chats, video releases (like the one above), and training topics.

This session was recorded May 10, 2019 in my Facebook group for Unitarian Universalist Leaders.

Here’s Zuckerberg’s full F8 talk:

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Social Media for Spiritual Practice with the Rev. Naomi King

Friends, on Friday, March 1st at 1:00pm EST I’m going live with the Rev. Naomi King to discuss using social media for spiritual practice, setting intentions for how we digital tools, and more!  If you are interested in the intersection of social media and spirituality, I think you’ll love this conversation. Join us!  Use the attached Youtube player to watch, chat, and share your questions.

The Rev. Naomi King is a Unitarian Universalist minister who teaches spiritual practices in person and online. Connect with her and her teaching via the following links.

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Engaging people in congregational life using social media – climate justice example

How can you use social media to engage people in congregational life?  It isn’t by bombarding them with boring cut and pasted invitations to attend!

In this excerpt from my weekly live Q&A / office hours in our UU PLANET Community group, I share an example of using social media to engage people with a specific worship service and upcoming area of focus for the congregation. Because it is dangerously HOT, HOT, HOT in Boston I use a climate justice focused service and launch of a new climate justice ministry as an example.

Organizations I used in this example:

Note that YES, we do need to work on addressing the root causes of climate change, but I think a special focus for our congregations should be helping to re-connect humanity,  cultivating and articulating a vision for how we do “climate disruption” together, and working to address associated injustices.

 

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Facebook Changes: What Your Congregation Needs to Know

Facebook’s recently announced changes are going to have a huge impact on congregational pages. Here’s a briefing on the changes and why you may want to consider incorporating a congregation-wide Facebook group into your strategy. This is food for thought.
 
You should talk how to respond with your ministry communications team. Don’t have a team working on integrating ministry and media? Oh, we should talk… Let me know you need support. That’s what I do.
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We need to “Reclaim Conversation”

Professor Sherry Turkle is the founder (2001) and current director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self.  She studies human connection is being impacted by technology and our online lives.  Through her work and most recent book “Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age” she challenges us to look closely at our new forms of connections, the impact technology is having on our lives, and offers conversation as the rememdy.  In this video she shares her work at Google’s office in Cambridge, MA.

While Turkle offers conversation as a remedy, we still need the HOW TO. How do you work coversation into our human institutions? How do you create spaces and structures to prioritize the conversations we need to have?  The “how to” is the purpose of the Small Group Lab. To receive resources as we release them, please sign up for Small Group Lab updates.

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