CircleBuilder : just the facts mam.
Recently I came across a new and wonderful resource for churches called CircleBuilder . Keen to explore what this means for churches and for you the BrownBlog reader, I caught up with the President of CircleBuilder, Brent Cohen:
BrownBlog: How would you describe CircleBuilder?
Brent: CircleBuilder’s secure and family-friendly service immediately improves any church or ministry’s capacity to internally organize, manage, promote, and recruit. Working behind the scenes under the church’s own established brand, CircleBuilder’s turnkey solution is applicable to all congregations regardless of their size or budget.
CircleBuilder offers a web-based networking, management and outreach service that enables churches and ministries to open new and dynamic channels of communications with their congregants. We enable these organizations to increase their membership, organize events, improve fundraising and efficiently serve the community.
Our FREE online service offers an effective and hosted solution allowing churches and ministries to better connect their members, grow their faith and build a stronger community. CircleBuilder delivers the best features of today’s social networking sites in a private, rules-based networking and outreach management solution. Church staff, members and ministries can now directly interact and communicate with a set of high-tech “touch points” - personalized emails, shared calendars, blogs, photos and audio/videocasting. CircleBuilder’s self-build platform operates as a stand-alone website or can integrate into an existing website.
Publicly launched in September of this year, CircleBuilder is already being used by nearly 400 faith-based organizations around the world. They have found CircleBuilder to be the perfect solution to help their churches and ministries create a private, branded, connected community and an easy way to help their members grow in their faith. Learn more about CircleBuilder on GodTube by clicking here. or take the virtual tour by clicking here .
What is your vision for CircleBuilder?
Brent: We believe that churches require innovative online solutions to support and expand their community. Declining church affiliation and participation should worry religious leaders. Barna Research found “a 92% increase in the number of un-churched Americans” between 1991 and 2004 with nearly one-third “unchurched.” Gallup has reported declining U.S. church attendance for the past four decades. In 2006, Outreach magazine wrote that less than 20% regularly attend church. CircleBuilder empowers the Christian community and their church network by employing CircleBuilder’s innovative and unique web-based platform to help reverse these declining trends.
Getting the wholesome messaging and the Gospel out is increasingly a challenge. Life today is fast moving and church brand, messaging and communication can get lost in the sea of broadcast, print and Internet advertising. Additionally, unsavory messaging runs rampant in our culture. Church-branded and sponsored group-to-group and member-to-member collaboration allows messaging to be “pushed and pulled” in modern formats (text, blogs, photo sharing and audio-video podcasting).
Additionally, churches and ministries need to give people the right “quantity and quality” of information in order to grow and prosper. Churches need to use their brand to create a cycle of transformations toward a Christ-centered life.
1.) Awareness and visibility lead to…
2.) Interest and education lead to…
3.) Involvement and attendance lead to…
4.) Invite others and volunteer service lead to…
5.) Tithing and giving
How did it come about?
Brent: Howard Brown, CEO of CircleBuilder, started a non-profit organization called PlanitJewish.com in 2000. Now in use in over a dozen major metropolitan areas across North America, PlanitJewish.com is the online home to thousands of Jewish organizations and their community events. I joined PlanitJewish as its Chief Operating Officer in 2005. We quickly expand our model to include individual day schools, synagogues and other Jewish organizations.
Nearly two years ago, I met Pastor Rick Warren (Saddleback Ministries) at a conference and told him about our experience with PlanitJewish. I explained that a very important part of church is the “mingle” - time before and after a worship service where congregants greet each other in the church foyer, fellowship hall and parking lot. Pastor Rick amplified on this by noting that the experience of thousands of people coming together at his church was “worship” but what really made a difference in people’s lives is the “fellowship” that’s found when people sit down together to pray, discuss and work in small gro
ups.
I explained to him that it was our vision to extend this experience of “mingle” and “fellowship” online to enhance the value of belonging to a church community. By recreating the mingle online a congregation gets to channel the power of member-to-member creativity and communications. For example, during worship services it might be mentioned that “Judy White” is ill and we might want to include her in our prayers. Now, I might now know who Judy White is but by securely logging into the church’s own website I could look at Judy White’s profile and send her an online prayer, a poem, flowers or even offer to carpool her children.
He told us that the Christian world did not have anything like PlanitJewish.com and asked us how quickly we could build “PlanitChristian”. I told him we were working on it!
Over the course of the next few months we expanded on the idea that people need to think and participate in church between Sundays. We felt that we could do this by creating the “right touch points” for each member and family. We do this with a “dating algorithm for each church” that allows the congregant to fill out a dynamic profile that lets the church know about their interest. In so doing, the church is better able to serve and meet specific member needs. We believe this creates a tighter bond that can be established creating more relevance for the church, its community and its message online and offline.
What are some of the stories/feedback you are hearing about it from users?
Brent: One of our users is Derry Gibson, Senior Pastor at Central Christian Church in Colorado Springs, CO. He tells us that
CircleBuilder makes it so much easier for our church and our ministries to directly communicate. All small groups and ministries as well as the church have their own page to send messages, set up events, post pictures and blog on the latest meeting or topic. CircleBuilder eliminates many of my administrative hassles and frees up my time to focus on growing the church and ministering to my congregation. We love the fact this is our own private site. It integrates well with our public website and allows us to have proper control over membership, events and content.
What are you plans for the future?
Brent: We will be launching a subscription service early in 2009 that will build upon the services already offered on our FREE website. Nearly a dozen churches and ministries worldwide are now testing this subscription service.
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To check out CircleBuilder CLICK HERE.
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9 Responses to “CircleBuilder : just the facts mam.”
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Circle Builder is similar to CCB - www.churchcommunitybuilder.com which we are currently using. While CCB is seeking to do the whole networking thing as well, it is also a fully functional church management system (ChMS) which Circle Builder doesn’t seem to be. Its worth checking out.
Thanks for the tip Mark. How have you found CCB?
Mark, I’m puzzled, the guy says his tool helps churches (among other things) to “promote, and recruit” yet unlike the existing popular social networking tools like Facebook it does this in a closed environment. How does that work? We “talk” to each other behind closed doors, and somehow the world says: “Golly what attractive doors! Please let me in to see what’s inside…”
Why not use either a blog or Facebook and let people see “inside” - or are we so ashamed of church we’d prefer to hide it away?
Great point Tim. I will invite Brent to respond.
One immediate thought of how they could ‘open up’ is the just released Facebook Connect which enables websites to leverage facebook. Facebook state:
” * Seamlessly “connect” their Facebook account and information with your site
* Connect and find their friends who also use your site
* Share information and actions on your site with their friends on Facebook
For more on this see: http://developers.facebook.com/connect.php
CCB is also a closed environment and I think that this is one of the reasons why I haven’t even bothered trying to implement the social networking side of it. Those that might have used such a thing in the past are engaged with Facebook and its connections out into the ether-verse.
What CCB does provide is an online Church Management System which 6 months ago at least there was veritable few. It provides the ability for group leaders to record membership, attendance etc It provides secure child checkin facilities, financial management stuff etc and all of this from a secure website so no one computer or person in the church has “the data”.
People need to “share their stories of glory as well as woe” as many pastors have has told us. Some of the stories are about the glory of God and those associated events , blogs, video’s can be made public.
Private stories / conversations about addiction, gambling, counseling, abuse need to be kept confidential and private both online and offline.
We working on a social media sharing widget to share with rules, filters and moderation any CircleBuilder content (events, blogs, devotionals, prayers, sermons, classes audio, video). Conversely, we will be able to bring in external content from Facebook and other websites but it will be reviewed, potentially amended or edited for appropriateness, then sent on for further approval or published to live pages. Unsavory content will be deleted with or with out return comments.
Closed networks vs wide open social netoworks like FaceBook and others. The verdict is still out on the staying power of FaceBook. MySpace has lost its luster for many already. The dormancy rate on many social network sites is not widely reported but I have a Friendster, Myspace, Bebo and other accounts I do not bother with checking are a left collecting dust.
FaceBook may grow or disappear over time. Eventually flash crowds disappear over time or find the “next-new” thing but the Church has survived for 1000’s of years and will continue. Some churches are in a state of fantastic growth and other need to adopt more modern day “touch points” to be able to serve their members in a more concierge type way.
Church management systems like Church Community Builder and others. Recently we have seen progress for integrated church member management with a web / social media front end. I applaud the improvements and we are trackiing the adoption. CircleBuild can be for many a mini-membership system for a church without walls or a church plant. We do have data integration plans to take the CircleBuilder data and port it to any church member managment system in coming releases of our softeware.
Right now we do this via a .csv export
Lastly, most church member management systems are expensive. CircleBuilder has both a free and coming in Q-1 of 2009 a paid tiered subsciption service from $125 - 1,000 a month.
There is another solution that has the same functionality as CircleBuilder.com and lots more. That product is called ChurchPortalz. Their website is www.churchportalz.com.
Their platform is built on SharePoint and has all the functionality, including features such as discussion forums (up to each individual church whether to “turn on”), wikis, blogs, profiles, surveys, project management, task management, content management, document management, etc…
SharePoint is a technology that is taking the business world by storm by enabling information workers to collaborate more effectively, even if they are on opposite sides of the world.
ChurchPortalz is built on the SharePoint platform.