Let me start by saying that I love my small group dearly and I in no way intend this post to be critical of my small group in any way whatsoever. So hopefully this post will not find me in trouble.
I want to share my experience in using a blog to help coordinate and organize activities and events for my small group. Our group was looking for a way to improve communication amongst our small group members. Emails and phone calls were being made, but some people were being missed. Some problems occurred when email addresses were not advertised when they changed. We had to carve time out of our every other week meeting to talk about what we were going to study or when and where we were meeting. My solution was to setup a blog in an attempt to take our community online where it would be accessible to everyone at any time of the day. I envisioned deeper discussions taking off from our regular meetings. I had hoped that it would become a place where we could share our lives with each other and gain more real time interaction with one another.
Unfortunately, the blog did not turn out to be the best solution for the group as a whole. It took off at first and helped us to share ideas on meeting days and times. There was a lot of discussion at first and it was a lot of fun for me. I was able to share prayer requests with them throughout the week and get feedback from everyone well before our actual meetings. It saved us time in our personal meetings because we did not discuss nearly as much in person when it came to group logistics. But after some time the interaction dwindled. I was updating the blog and receiving little or no response. It all came to a head recently and we sat down as a group to discuss it. I had already decided that it would be a good idea to find another option because the blog was not accomplishing anything except for a place for announcements. The rest of the group felt that it was hard to find time to participate in the online community and would rather stick with email and phone calls for communication purposes.
I am sad to see that this did not work as I had hoped. Ultimately, I want to grow deeper in my relationship with my small group and this was an opportunity to do that. Even if the technology works to build community, I still need the community to participate for it to work. And in the case of our small group, participation just was not going to happen as easily as it would for me. I hope that communication will improve without the blog. We have discussed some ideas of helping our group to grow closer, but I feel that it will be harder to organize such events that will work into everyone’s schedules.
I consider this attempt at using new technology for a small group a good learning experience for me. I am going to leave the blog up as is right now in case I come up with another idea to use it for group. I guess we will see what happens. For now it may become my test blog for themes and new plugins.
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