About a year ago, Facebook updated their Groups platform substantially, allowing a more exclusive, internal broadcasting platform for Facebook users.
The new Groups tool has allowed many organizations, interest groups, and other niche segments to create an environment where messages are kept only to the members themselves, despite the fact that the Group resides on, and is fully powered by, Facebook.
I wanted to share with you one way I’ve been using Facebook Groups very effectively for managing and communicating with a group of volunteers at our church.
One of things I do at our church is assist our Media Pastor with the volunteers that make our media team. This is a team of approximately 30 volunteers that are rotated each week, all with different schedules, and who are assigned to cover different areas such cameras, production, and video / media during each Sunday service.
So I decided one day to build a Facebook Group for this media team and I’ve been pleasantly surprised with the efficiency of communication it has delivered. We currently have about 95% of the team as members in this group.
So today, instead of trying to call each person, mail letters, email, etc… we now simply turn to our Facebook Group.
The huge advantage of the Facebook Group is that whenever any one of the volunteers post something, all of the members get it as a message in the Facebook inbox. This makes it very difficult for anyone to miss a message, since everyone is always logged in to Facebook anyway.
And as the leader of the team, I’m able to post upcoming schedules quickly and get near instant feedback from the members of the group regarding any changes in their schedules.
Of course, a Facebook Group can be utilized in many different ways, but I wanted to quickly share how it helping me manage, coordinate, and communicate with our team of media volunteers at our church.