Launch of a new service?
I just did a soft-launch of fbcbelton.me yesterday. Yes, I admit that I completely ripped of Jason’s team who is getting ready to launch northwoods.me. Both Jason and I are using AccessACS, a Web product from ACS Technologies. We have actually been using Access for a while, since February, but we made a major shift in our practice that necessitated a name change and re-launching.
Previously, we were only uploading members of the church and their families. This was both a privacy issue and a cost issue. It’s too expensive to upload everyone as the price structure is based on the number of records. The problem was that Sunday School teachers were never happy with their rosters because they did not show the regular families who hadn’t joined yet.
So, we made a shift from calling our service FBC Member Connect to calling it fbcbelton.me, and we’re now uploading everyone who has attended or given in the last 4-6 months. We’re also rolling out serving functions to allow people to volunteer for opportunities within the church.
To my friends at ACS, I beg of you, give me some RSS feeds. Let me include links back to Access, formatted in the way that I want them formatted on my main site. For instance, give me an RSS feed of all of the serving opportunities. Give me an RSS feed of all events available for registration broken down by the campus and department chosen. So, a separate RSS feed for youth at the central campus, adults at the downtown campus, etc. In doing this, you will enable churches to better connect their people.
How about your church, how are you enabling self-service information for your members and regular attenders?
Hey, i am thrilled that someone thought our crazy branding cool enough to copy it…
I concure with Matthew… ACS needs to give us better ways to ‘consume’ the volunteering information to re-use that data in ways that fit into the look and feel of other vehicles (public sites, kiosks etc). I mentioned RSS as a solution to the dev team 6 months ago, but haven’t seen any progress on that yet…
Sometimes an RSS feed would be sooo much better than messing with the generated links.