Wednesday, May 18, 2005

IT Tour of Fellowship Church

Scobleizer writes in his blog about visiting Fellowship Church in Dallas and discusses how they've used IT and technology to make people feel more welcome and at home at church.
He has some good points for churches and companies wanting to use technology to tell their story.
Make it easy for everyone to learn about you—on their terms. Scoble notes that the only thing visible from the freeway is the church's url.
Make it easy to experience your product's special attributes. Scoble was given a DVD with an overview of the church.
To get word-of-mouth advertising you need to be remarkable. 50 manned computer registration stations, all-digtal sound system, plasma screens everywhere, etc.
Use IT to efficiently get close to your customers and take care of their needs. A high-tech system to register kids quickly and easily.
If you want to be better, make sure you're better from the first minutes of someone's experience. The church makes a sports fan feel at home.
If you want to be seen as bleeding edge, invest to be bleeding edge and do so throughout your company. They are the first church to film all their services in HDTV.
Extend the usefulness of your plant. They make WiFi available to their congregation during the week.
Design your systems so they never go down and can expand for future growth. they've got redundancy all over the place.
Don't be religious about technology, choose what gets the job done best for the least amount of money and staff time. While they heavily rely on Microsoft's technology, they also use Macs and Linux when those platforms work better.
When you become successful, bottle up what got you there and sell it to others. They sell their own software: FellowshipOne.

There's bits and pieces there that each of us can use daily wherever we are.

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