Martin Hathaway

It has been a year since I decided to launch my church software start-up, Church is Social™. The twelve-months period to that had been spent working for one of the UK’s leading church management software companies. During that time I gained a lot of valuable experience and insight into the way the church software market operated.

Six months into my employment I found myself at a tipping point. I knew just enough about the product to understand the overall business strategy, but I was still fresh/naive/new enough to be able to spot the problems with that strategy. It was then that I first came upon an idea;

Church is social – let’s build on that!
– Church is Social™

Eery new business launches with a vision. It might be an idea of how to better solve an existing problem, or it might be that we should start doing things differently because of what they see happening in the future. Personally, I saw that no one was taking responsibility for helping churches to realise the huge potential that social technologies present.

Over the last year I have crafted a social web application tailored to the needs of churches and their members. Along the way I have had the opportunity to sit down and demonstrate exactly how powerful such a platform can be when it is applied to specific functions. More often than not, those church leaders have come away with a better understanding (or at least less fear) of social media and enterprise-grade collaborative tools.

For as long as I have been trying to sell my church community and communication web application, the single biggest obstacle that I have encountered is lack of awareness. This will not come as a huge surprise to anyone who has ever worked in, or for, a church. Churches are grand-masters of making do and getting by. And while they have their heads down, just focusing on muddling through, they have little reason to believe that there are better tools or methods available to them.

So, it has taken me a little over a year to arrive at a rather counter-intuitive conclusion. That is, that I should not be selling a product at all; instead I should be selling the problem.