media salt

As I’ve been trying to learn PHP over the past few weeks, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about new projects and some changes I would like to make in Long Hollow’s online efforts. I get to spend a good amount of time with just about every one of our age-level ministries, which means I sit in a unique position to step back and evaluate what online tools would be useful to these ministries as a whole. Here are a few of the projects I’m looking at tackling sometime over the next year. If you know of a good solution for any of these, please pass it on in the comments below.

Unified Comments

This is more of a wish than anything, and one that I’ve mentioned several times on Media Salt before. I’m playing around with a revised version of longhollow.com where all news, events and online messages have comments enabled and users can gather around these pieces of information and talk about it. This sort of functionality is already very successful on our Facebook Fan Page, and I want to carry that over to the main site.

The only issue is that I want users to see and contribute to the same stream of comments, no matter what site they’re on when they view them. It’s annoying to me to have two separate conversations going on about the same thing. For a while I thought Google’s Wave might be the answer to this, but I’m not sure if it’s intended for this sort of functionality.  Maybe through Facebook Connect somehow?

A Real Small Groups Tool

Whew, this is a big one. We use Fellowship One’s “Web Link” tools to allow many of our Small Group Leaders to update their own rolls and send email blasts to their groups. That’s about it. We have very little control over the look and feel of this experience, and there’s really no incentive for Small Group members to gather there when they’re online.

What I would like to see is a specific tool built around these groups where users could talk, share photos, plan events, share prayer requests, etc. Ideally, users would be able to login through Facebook Connect and receive information from their groups however they like (RSS, email updates, etc). I realize as I’m typing this that this all sounds pretty similar to Monk Development’s Cobblestone Communities (although I’m not sure if that’s exactly what I’m looking for).

What I’m weary of doing is creating yet another login and closed off site that users would have to go out of their way to access every day. Whatever solution we land on, it’s needs to easily fit with users as part of their daily online lives.

A Better Way to Handle Contacts

Here’s another piece of functionality that’s built into Fellowship One, but doesn’t work well for our team in every day church life. We’re looking for a better way for us to manage the various contacts we receive during weekly ministry activities. Ideally, a contact item could be entered into the system, assigned to a specific individual as a middleman, who could then intelligently assign the contact to a lay person or deacon who could do the legwork and make the personal touch. In our experience, Fellowship One’s solution (along with others) falls short when you want to assign contacts and follow-ups to somebody outside the staff. Maybe we’re just doing it wrong, but I’m convinced someone could come up with a better solution.

Does your expertise speak into any of these issues? What projects are you hoping to tackle over the next year or so?