Businesses Can Test New Services and Promote Brand Awareness By Empowering Faith Based Organizations

As businesses face tough economic times and tighter budgets there is still the push to be competitive. Now is the time to do more with less.

And since technology is so intertwined in our lives, faith based organization need to stay up to date with the trends of society as a whole and find ways to leverage those trends to reach people who are not in the church.

Both entities (businesses and Christian churches/organizations) whether they realize it or not, directly and indirectly need each other. Businesses constantly need to test out ideas and initiatives and provide case studies of their successes. One way businesses can do this is to donate their services to Christian churches. These churches who lag behind in leveraging technology to run more efficiently, to provide greater transparency, and availability could use the services of businesses.

And businesses need to establish and maintain brand awareness as well. Aren’t some of the same consumers of their services in churches? Has any business out there done any type of business intelligence to find correlations of church membership and consumers of their products or services?

And as businesses donate or provide their offerings to churches and faith based organizations, they are in fact empowering the church to reach the masses. The same masses that are or could become consumers of a business’s products.

For example, if a business provides to a church the tools, training, support representatives for a church to have the appropriate infrastructure to setup the appropriate servers, networks, databases, applications, web servers, etc…. then that business can use that church as a case study, or a testimonial or other forms of advertising. There may be tax deductions/writeoffs that the business can apply. And also it shows the business’s commitment to the community. This also helps brand awareness.

Another benefit to businesses that donate their services and time to Christian churches is that the business will gain a platform of users that can help them test out new services or upgrades to existing services. The church could be used as an external testing or focus group. This can help a business iron out problems or issues that they didn’t see or catch in doing internal testing. It may help a business better understand the workflow or real world business use of the product or service. The benefits to a business are many.

The church benefits in that it receives the very necessary tools to efficiently run a church like a business which will ultimately help the church establish and maintain integrity. The church will be empowered to do more with less. The church will be able to use modern technology to reach the masses (most of which can not imagine life without computers, cell phones, and other hand held devices).

For example, it would be great for a church to launch an email campaign and have the right tools to track the efficacy of that campaign. It would be great for a church to have the servers, databases, and applications in place to really capture trends in services they offer. Do the churches backup their file servers, databases, or even the content of their website? Do the churches have several applications scattered in their network or do the larger churches have enterprise solutions and the right infrastructure in place for their enterprise? What about licensing issues? What software do the churches have in their environment? Are they in compliance to any licensing policies?

Businesses, the churches can use your products and your services. And businesses you can use the churches’ services, personnel for testing your products and services, feedback on your product offering, and membership to promote brand awareness.

It’s time for businesses to partner with Christian churches and organizations and embrace the partnership not as charity but as truly a vehicle to benefit the business from brand awareness to product testing and case study analysis.