Releasing an Army of Volunteers
Have you seen those BestBuy commerials? The one where a guy/girl is standing in the middle of a stadium, asks a question, and thousands of BestBuy employees are there, ready to help with answers?
All I could say is wow.
The concept of what they’re doing is really simple. They’re releasing many of their employees to be available on twitter to answer questions that you might have.
Why is this important?
Firstly, what a great way to leverage technology. This is way better than just going to one store and asking an employee for his opinion. In theory, you could have quite a few eyeballs on your question and quite a few responses.
Secondly, this must create an incredible sense of momentum and warm-fuzzy-vibes (couldn’t think of a more technical term) for the employees. They’re being released to help people. They’re making a contribution. And nobody is paying them extra for it. What a beautiful recipe for making a difference.
Not only that, but a company that is willing to make their people “available” like that to help is going to engender a greater amount of trust, loyalty, and good will from the customer.
This is the same exact principle that we try to do as churches. Releasing every single person to be missionaries and to minister. This is easier said than done, though.
I wonder how we could release our people in a similar way to serve and minister, all while leverage a similar use of technology?
[image by ShockandAwe]
In case you haven’t seen the commercial, here it is below.
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"I wonder how we could release our people in a similar way to serve and minister, all while leverage a similar use of technology?" I think we need to step back a bit further than that. We need to teach the church members what avenues there are out there and train them on how to use these technologies properly and effectively. That is much easier to do in a "younger" church as more members already are computer saavy and have the know-how for most of these avenues. The "older" churches tend to lack that type of knowledge and are more deeply rooted in tradition and aren't as open to trying new ways of reaching the lost. As you said in earlier blogs and posts on Facebook, we, as a church need to catch up with the rest of the world in terms of technology. Instead of relying on the same old way of "fishing for men," we need to meet people where they are…on the internet. Jesus talked to people in a way they could understand, and we need to do the same thing today. Using sites like Facebook and Twitter are just the tip of the iceberg on ways to reach out to the entire world. If we, as a church in general, can effectively use these sites and others like them to reach the lost, the growth we would see would be absolutely phenomenal.
We gotta brainstorm more on this, Scott. You're the tech guy. Let's do something!