You go to church every Sunday for service.
You meet new people. Not only that, but you greet them, and now you made some acquittance.
But what if you want to formalise this so that everyone else could be a part of it and things are a bit more structured.
This is not in any way saying that you want to restrict people to join in. This is just to make things more organised.
So, what are the 3 things you need to consider before starting your Church home Group?
- Who is your target audience, in other words, who will become a part of your home group?
- What activities you will be conducting in your group to keep your members interested.
- How you will be managing your group in a streamlined fashion?
Let’s talk about it one by one.
Who will become a part of your home group?
The answer to this question is fairly simple.
You want people who are looking to get educated about Christianity and learn more from bible to be a part of this group.
Or am I totally wrong here?
Considering, I am not.
You need to first figure out if there is a scope for your group.
If yes then you need to find out who will become the first 5 members of your group.
These could be the people whom you have met in your church and found interested in joining hands.
What activities you will be conducting in your group to keep your members interested.
Now, when it comes to keeping members of your group interested. You need to make sure you are organising events which are relevant to all age groups in your small church group.
You have to make sure that when you plan any activity.
Its primary purpose is to create more engagement, and it does not hurt to make anyone feels offended.
Said that, you will need to come up with a schedule for different activities.
You could do something like:
How you will be managing your group in a streamlined fashion?
Managing groups is not an easy task.
And this is coming from someone who has looked after more than 200 groups on meetup, with 80k group members all together.
It takes a lot of effort and time management to look after your group and make sure each and every member of your group is satisfied.
How to start a group:
Now, as we had the initial flux coming in. We did set up our Group online with bylde.
Now you can always create your own website or use meetup. But setting up your own website will cost you around $1200, and then you will have to integrate all services like:
- Email Newsletter Capability
- Members management
- Event Management
- Attendance Management
- Member Permission Management
- Selling of tickets (if you have ticketed event)
- Subscription Management etc.
Again, if you choose to go with meetup then you will end up paying $198 for 6 months. You can read this article showing how much meetup cost with description (sites like meetup).
But we had no liberty to spend that much money. So we needed a solution which does not cost us our eyes, also we could solve most of our problems listed above.
So we decide Bylde. It solves all of our problems. It cost only £12 annually, i.e., £1 per month, and it has a lovely iOS and android app too.
How to Set up a group?
Just go to bylde.com and login with one of your social logins. Remember, Bylde does not allow registering with email address to reduce spam. It’s written on their website:
Currently, with this approach we have managed to reduce the spam by 68%.
So don’t feel intimidated by it as it’s for our own safety. You can log in with your Gmail, Facebook or LinkedIn accounts.
So after login, go to the groups tab and click on the + sign on top right. This will walk you though the step-by-step process of creating your group.
Things are pretty straight forward from this point.
You will be taken to the next screen where you have to select your city. You can easily type name of your city and then choose it according to your country and region.
Once you select your city, you can move to the next screen.
Then you will be presented with a Tags screen where you can select some relevant tags for your group. For me, it was easy, I just searched for church and found few tags related to it.
After that, I had to decide on what should I name our group.
Just to make it super simple and easy to remember, I named it after our church, which is South London Church. So basically I named it “South London Church Youth Club”.
After that, you will need to describe a bit about your group. Just for this demo, I put in a Youth club for South London church.
Once you finish with describing your group. You will be presented with guidelines screens. You can read it though and proceed by agreeing to it and clinking the next button.
After that, you will be presented with a terms and services screen.
Make sure you read it through and click the checkbox to agree and proceed.
Then you will see two pricing plans.
You can choose the one you prefer. For me, £12 annually was perfect. So I selected it.
Once selected, you will reach to the Summary page where you can see which plan you are about to purchase and how much it will cost you annually.
After reviewing everything, you can click on Pay button.
This will present you with a pop-up where you can put your credit or debit card number to get your new group setup.
That’s it! Your group is set up and live on bylde.
You can always update your group settings and image. But I leave that with you.
After all, you understand your group better than I do :)
