Internet Presence Management

Posted by D. Goodmanson on Jul 7, 2009 in Church Technology, Church Websites, Ekklesia | 2 comments

Monk Development has begun our shift from a Content Management provider to an Internet Presence Management company. What is the difference? Most Content Management Systems (CMS) focus on managing the content to publish to a client’s website. “If no one visits your award-winning new website does it really exist?” may be the existential question of the Internet age. Too often organizations spend all their time and budget on a website rather than establishing their presence across the web. We believe the CMS market needs to go beyond a website and that organizations need to ensure they are managing their presence across the web. What is your organization’s presence online?

Let me give you an example of how this would work. On Ekklesia 360 when a church publishes a sermon a number of things happen.

1. The Sermon is published to their website.
2. The church sermons are syndicated and churches can build custom syndication lists by sermon types and categories.
3. The church can connect their Facebook & Twitter accounts so that an editable status update announces the sermon. We even use bit.ly to shorten the url for you. Videos can be distributed to YouTube & Vimeo.
4. During setup we connect the churches podcast feed into iTunes.
5. Churches will have their sermon pushed to The Cloud Network where we route tens-of-thousands of online visitors a month to our church clients.

At the end of the day we want your sermons, articles and events to have as broad and far as reach as possible and to reach people where they already are. And this requires that we help you connect with people far beyond your website.

Cobblestone Community Network Goes Live

Posted by D. Goodmanson on Jul 7, 2009 in Church Technology, Church Websites, Monk Dev | 1 comment

Cobblestone was created to help your community be the church. Cobblestone is designed to encourage behaviors that are important for the body of the local church. Learn how Cobblestone can assist you with objectives such as:

• Helping People find opportunities to Serve
• Connecting People into Community
• Creating effective and powerful Communication channels
• Managing Events
• Discipleship and Accountability Groups
• and many more features.

Cobblestone is designed to move people deeper into real relationships. Cobblestone automates much of the administration, for example it can automatically connect people into home groups based on your criteria, so you can spend your time in relationship not administrating. This powerful web application automates many of the processes to allow your people to focus on the relationships not the administration. For example, our Group Permissions Agent can connect new members to the small group nearest them (or other criteria your church sets.) Use Cobblestone to manage Events on both your public website and within your community site. Push missional events into third-party Social Media sites such as Facebook. Learn more about these and many other ways Cobblestone can help facilitate the mission of your church.