New Feature Request: Simultaneous Post to Facebook Group
While I prefer the FaithLife experience for faith-based social media, the bulk of my Sunday school class still uses Facebook exclusively for their online presence. As a consequence, I have created groups in both places for our class. It is getting to be tedious to have to post the same announcements to both places each time. If it were possible to "link" a FaithLife group with a Facebook group, in the same way that I can link my Twitter feed posts with my Facebook so they show up both places each time I "tweet," that would be terrific.
Comments
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Geoff, thank you for your feature request. We've discussed this idea a number of times, but have decided to focus our limited resources on making Faithlife better so more people come to the platform. We'll let you know if we decide to do this in the future.
Quick question, how do you use social media for Sunday school class? Are you setting up events, posting assignments, having dialog? In what ways do Facebook and Faithlife improve your Sunday school teaching?
Thank you for your feedback!
Jim
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There are several ways I would like to use social media that currently is not happening. Right now the only two ways that I am actively using it is to generate newsletters using the FaithLife tool (which is really more about using e-mail than social media to be honest) and also to post reminders to the calendar. But here is the list of things I would hope to use it for:
- Facilitate on-going discussions of in-class study topics.
- Post a reading schedule so that class members can have a reference for what passage we will look at in upcoming weeks.
- Provide the prayer list so that members can post prayer requests AND updates with answered prayer or new information.
- Provide the snack sign-up list so that people can indicate their volunteering to brings snacks to class and then have a reminder.
- Facilitate planning of outside-of-class social events, including RSVP, venue info, childcare requirements, potluck signups, etc.
- Communicate class-related data such as the class funds inflows and outflows, updates on our sponsored child in Haiti, etc.
We have an extremely small group in our class, and few people who are there week after week due to obligations in other ministries of the church, children's needs, and such. So as the only person really committed to being in class every week, I currently have to manage all class communications and activities, and having a robust online tool to do that with would really be helpful. FaithLife, for all its promise, is really more "potentially" helpful than helpful in actual fact. The tool itself has some rough edges that make it not-quite-ready for primetime. Combined with the lack of interest on the part of the members of the class to sign up for yet another social media site, these factors really impair the practical use of the platform for this purpose.
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Hey Geoff. I know what you are saying. What I've decided to do is gently 'force' our people to go to Faithlife exclusively if they want to know what is going on. We only have 22 in our group as of today, but it is beginning to work. I think that you almost have to go with one avenue of communication and keep encouraging (I didn't really mean force), they to load the app. I keep telling our people "The good thing about Faithlife is that there are 'no haters' on it!" It's positive and encouraging. Yet, on the other hand, I know it's impossible to move people off Facebook.
With that said I'm hopeful the developers will continue to work on ways to speed up the app and fix a lot of the bugs. I keep looking for updates, but they are few and far between. I'm sure they have a small team working on this, so I'm patient
Elder/Pastor, Hope Now Bible Church, Fresno CA
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In the last couple of weeks several more class members have joined at FaithLife, so I am more encouraged now at it being a viable collaboration tool for the class members. And I also just discovered how to make a custom reading plan so I can post the scriptures we will be discussing each Sunday using that tool. So things are moving in the right direction. I realize FaithLife doesn't have the resources of Facebook for their development staff, so things will take more time to reach the final spit-and-polish shine. It is just frustrating to have it be oh-so-close to what is really wanted but just not quite there.
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I would tend to think that if you create a way of cross-posting to FB you would actually achieve your goal getting people to come to the platform! throw my vote for cross-posting in the ring!
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