Today is the final day to take the State of the Church Online | Member Community and Social Networks survey. We’ve had a tremendous response to the survey with a definite surge of respondents taking it over the last week. Currently we’re hovering just under 300 respondents and I personally hope to we break 300 before the day is over.

With this milestone we’ll move into the next stage of this research where we’ll be reaching out to church leaders to conduct interviews. We hope through the interviews to better understand how these types of solutions have created an impact in churches and communities of all shapes and sizes. If you are a church leader who’s community has been significantly impacted by your member community or social network and you would like to share your experiences to help others who are considering investing in a tool, please contact us at research@unconventionalmethod.com.

Over the coming weeks we will be analyzing the data from the survey and beginning to produce the multiple deliverables for this project. So be sure the check back in soon for an update and information about how you can access the findings from this research.

We screw up.

It’s true. I don’t think most companies would confess something like that. And somewhere back in B-school I’m sure they taught us to avoid admitting such things. Oh well.

Fortunately the times we mess up are usually the result of the chaos and challenges of running a small business. And they aren’t catastrophic or indicative of any major flaws. I’m talking about things like letting an email go unanswered or neglecting to add a project partner to a web page. Thus far these situations have been remedied rather easily.

During the remedy phase of a recent error (a neglected email), I realized that it is quite natural to want to include some form of an excuse when seeking forgiveness for our mistake. Simple things like, “Hey, sorry I didn’t get back to you, I’ve been in crisis mode for two weeks.” Or, “Sorry it’s taken me this long to respond, I was trapped under something heavy.” We do it as a way of providing contextual information that somehow enlightens the other person as to why the error occurred. More after the jump… » Read the rest of this entry «

We received this email the other day:

I started the survey on “The State of the Church” and got about halfway through.  I got interrupted and had to leave it.  When I tried to resume, I got an error message telling me that the session timed out.

Is there any way that I can resume it, or do I have to start over?

Users taking the State of the Church Online | Member Community and Social Networks survey have noted that if they get distracted from taking the survey, their session times out and they can not resume where they left off. That’s no good! Wnat to read what we did about it? More after the jump… » Read the rest of this entry «