I was at the Harvard Social Enterprise Conference this weekend and Premal Shah, President of Kiva was one of the key note speakers.
For those of you who don’t know, Kiva is a microfinancing site that allows individuals to make loans (as small as $25) to people in (mostly) developing countries. (A current controversy the company is facing is their decision to support American workers as well as those in the so-called Third World.)
To increase the fun factor on the site, Kiva came up with the idea of creating teams so that groups of people could donate money and track their giving against other groups. The two teams that lead the pack are the “Atheists, Agnostics, Skeptics, Freethinkers, Secular Humanists and the Non-Religious” and the “Kiva Christians.” However, aethists have given close to $1.7 million while the Christians are just under one million dollars.
I find this very interesting, though I’m not sure exactly what it means. It could be that atheists are more internet savvy than their Christian brethren. It could mean that Christians are giving to their churches rather than Kiva. We don’t know. However, it does beg the question: since atheists don’t give to a religious institution (which is a substantial part of the donated money in the United States) where do atheists tend to donate…besides Kiva, of course?
I noted a while back a key element of Dog: The Bounty Hunter is that the posse circles up to pray before they go out to round up the bad guy. This is particularly interesting because we rarely see this sort of “lived religion” on television. Perhaps on an odd episode of Friday Night Lights you’d see the football team say a prayer before a big game, but that’s the exception not the rule and that’s a scripted program not a reality series.
More recently, we are seeing prayer within the context of another reality series. That series is Ruby, a show in which a morbidly obese woman brings a team of experts together to help her overcome her issues with weight and food.
Ruby is from Savannah, Georgia. She is an obviously religious woman as we see her attend church and it is evident that she is a regular attendee. When Ruby goes through a particularly difficult time, she turns to her church to help her find the strength that she needs to recommit herself to her goal of getting in shape. As I’ve written about elsewhere here, Ruby is not alone in turning to faith for assistance in this area. Where Ruby is different, however, is that faith is not integral to the diet as it is to her life. It will be interesting to see how much faith is an element in the show when it starts its new season on February 14th.
In the meantime, I’m curious if others have notice this as a trend. Are people turning to God on other reality series?
Today Samuel Goldwyn is releasing To Save a Life, a Christian film about a teen coping with another teen’s suicide.
The filmmakers claim they produced the film because they realized that movies have the most influence on teens today. In addition, they are using new media to get teens to spread the word –dare we say evangelize?–about the film. To that end their website is very impressive. The number of tools they use is far to extensive to enumerate here so I suggest you check it out for yourself.
This campaign is a great example of the blending of sacred and secular; corporate and Christian. In fact, while we won’t know for a while whether it is successful, on its face it is simply a very good marketing teen-targeted campaign.
I find myself recently being bombarded with emails asking me to buy the latest book from Joel Osteen or the attend the latest weekend seminar from Saddleback. I can only assume that these institutions are feeling the effects of the recession just like everyone else.
What is particularly interesting, however, is the increase in marketing sophistication attached to these promotional missives. Most interesting is the promotion for Joel Osteen’s new book which you can see on his website. While one always has the option to purchase the book outright, consumers are also being offered the opportunity to purchase a limited edition of the book which is signed and number.
Since when have mass produced commodities been numbered like limited edition lithographs? Oh sure, we can get into a discussion about mass produced art, but we’re talking about books that are going to be produced in the millions. What’s the value here? Being the first to get a copy? Having it signed? Is there appreciative re-sale value?
In terms of the advertising itself, there’s the feel of a PBS pledge drive in the language. “Donate this amount you and you get the signed edition of the book and the DVD.” It leads the consumer to feel like s/he’s giving something away and not simply buying a book.
It’s smart marketing, for sure. Is it smart religion? Can we even call it religion? Well, that’s for another post.
Thought this piece from Rachel Maddow might be of interest. It is about how Conservatives are re-writing the Bible. We assume that’s because they are trying to improve the product for the target audience. Enoy!
The United Methodist Church has been running an advertising campaign recently called “Rethink Church.” (To view the commercial campaign, go to youtube)
The Web site for the campaign is not “Rethink Church” but rather 10thousanddoors.org. I find this particularly odd because it dilutes the branding of “Rethink Church,” a concept the UMC has been using for a while. Moreover if you type www.rethinkchurch.org, you will be re-routed to the UMC home page. (I thought, perhaps, they weren’t using this branding because someone was squatting on the “rethink church” name, but that’s not the case.)
The idea behind “Rethink Church” and “10 thousand doors” is to think of church beyond any preconceived notion and to imagine, instead, what it could be. The tagline on the 10,000 doors site, for example is “What if church wasn’t just a building, but thousands of doors?” On the site there are doors you can click on to talk to others, there’s a door called Go/Do which answers the question: What do you do once you know you want to do something? and another that says “Find” which directs visitors to ways they can help others. The church, therefore, is about the world and not about any given building.
While I think the marketing is a bit confusing, the message is dead on. Volunteerism is up (okay, some of that is because people are out of work, but still), MBAs are taking oaths to “do good” in their jobs and there’s a White House office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation. Whether this is the “Obama Effect” or declining economic circumstances, it’s hard to say. Either way, it appears the UMC has tapped into what has traditionally been a strength of religious institutions–the ability to foster service–something many churches moved away from as they increasingly embraced a personal relationship with Jesus.
Months ago, I blogged about the Trinity Church tweeting the Stations of the Cross. I thought it was the only interesting use of the technology other than for PR folks. Turns out it had some glitches. See, the issue with Twitter is that it’s interactive, and people started tweeting back (and not things like “Amen.”) The church took it in stride and were at least pleased these interactors were paying attention.
This article is the latest in an evidently growing number of articles about religious institutions and technology. (See post below on CyberSynagague.) The uptick has occurred because these institutions are now having to deal with Web 2.0. Do we use Facebook? We’ve signed up for Twitter, but now what? (Which is what everyone else is say too, no?)
The difference for religious institutions broadly is that much of the benefit they provide, particularly these days, is community and fellowship–something that is in direct contradiction to the isolation of digital technology. Individual faiths also have specific issues, such as Muslims’ concerns with being watched by antiterrorist investigators and Catholics’ concerns with message control.
What has happened, though, is what happened with marketing–one by one, each group finds some way to use the technology to further their needs.
The cover story for the summer issue of Reform Judaism is called CyberSanctuary. It is about how Internet technology is being used within congregations and within reform institutions, i.e., Union for Reform Judaism.
It was interesting that the magazine gave this topic the cover. I say this because much of what was discussed in the piece didn’t seem particularly new. Rabbis mentioned that they had been using podcasts for three years and blogging for two–that doesn’t constitute “new news.” Other uses of the Internet included posting monthly bulletins and using emails for death notices. Congregations are also providing their services online so that people who can’t make it to the synagogue can participate virtually–something Christians have obviously been doing for quite some time.
A couple of new ideas were mentioned: web sites that help track b’nai mitzvah students’ progress, video conferencing and social networking. This last was useful primarily for engaging younger congregants. One thing I thought was interesting is students practicing their Torah portion and uploading to a site so their tutor could review it before their next lesson. This is an effective use of the technology to further religious study and not one I had seen before.
The article is worth a look for a few pieces of interesting information like the last one mentioned above. In addition, it contains several links so you can see what various institutions are up to.
And a new tween mag Relate focuses on fashion, entertainment and faith. Below is the video that introduces the publication.
More interesting for our purposes is the video that appears under the tab for faith. While talking about girls and faith, notice the sponsor logos behind the speaker. Most interesting is Claire’s–a store that sells jewelry and makeup and all sorts of faddish things that get girls to focus on what they look like. This video is of an awards ceremony for girls who wrote essays about how they can be “true to themselves” in this day and age–particularly as it relates to purity. The best essays are rewarded with, you guessed it, gift cards. So much for separation of God and Mannon.
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