Facebook announced the other day a move that I found very praise-worthy: A completely free mobile-version of their service.
It’s only available though on select carriers that have agreed to not charge for the service so it’s very much a strategic partnership play. Unfortunately it’s not available on any US carriers.
Doh.
But it got me thinking about how businesses that resource and build apps and services for the Church could model after this in some very affective and beneficial ways.
You see, for the most part the existing businesses that create products for the Church at large are simply using business practices that model the secular business world and existing marketplace. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing but it assumes that the same systems work perfectly in a different context.
I like Facebook’s move toward Mobile Zero in that it does the following things:
- Provide value at no additional charge to its existing users.
- Partners with other businesses to create value for their existing users.
- Both Facebook and partner businesses eat the costs associated.
The net-net result is that the end-user benefits. Period. There is no guarantee of return for either business but there are definitely possibilities of future and long-term loyalty and, of course, increased usage of the device and the FB service.
It’s risky perhaps but what it doesn’t do is cannibalize the user seeking to provide an upsell to them.
I feel like we do this all the time and force people to “pay” for services that we probably should be giving them for free.
Part of the startup that I’m creating, SoChurch, definitely has a mobile-app as part of the available packages but it’s not going to take advantage of the existing user to provide the “marketed” upsell. The goal is to provide increasing levels of tangible and practical value at minimal to zero costs to the end user.
And we can always do better.
We need to be less mercenary in our efforts of creating value for the Church and more altruistic, both in theory and in practice.
herbhalstead says
One of the things I see in a lot of “tiered services” is a bias against smaller organizations that seems absolutely counter to the reality of smaller entities. The most blatant area is mobile access. It is assumed that larger organizations have a more legitimate need for mobile access.
The truth, I believe, is far from that assumption. In my purely anecdotal observation, it seems to me that most of the savvy self-starters are mobile-centric in their business models. I actually screamed “yes – someone gets it!” when I saw that square focused on the individual proprietor before targeting businesses and non-profs.
My biggest fear concerning SoChurch is that it is going to do what so many others do and make mobile access part of something you get in a higher cost tier, rather than a base feature. Most churches in the US are still relatively small, fewer than 100 members. And contrary to what some would think, there are tons of “hip” technogeeks in smaller churches. In fact, I saw one “study” that suggested that genY is proportionally higher parishioners of smaller churches than genX. I would guess that the percentage of small church goers who access facebook is nearly identical to the percentage of large church goers who access facebook.
My church is “small” yet we are predominately under 40, and huge on technology. We trying to squeeze every bit of usable awesomeness from the open source and low-cost products that we can find so that we can enjoy great experiences, access and communication for our folks, who incidentally, sport iPads, Droids, iPhones, etc. throughout all of our experiences, whether they are ice-cream socials or bible reading and note-taking during services or whatever.
The beauty of the facebook thing is not that it’s free, but that they get it – they understand the pervasiveness of mobile technology and are doing what they can to get as large a piece of it as they can – by making it cheap to implement and free to access.
Excuse my rambling.
Martin Hathaway says
As someone who has participated in the development of several “tiered service plans” (mainly for church software), I can reveal that a lot of the time the choices are pretty arbitrary.
The tiers are usually pre-determined by financial considerations and you find yourself retrospectively assigning and justifying every feature included. As mobile apps tend to support the core features of your product, they are classed as luxuries and are relegated to the higher-tiers.
Creating tiers in this way is a painful process, but there are far worse methods of structuring service plans. My personal enemy is church software that uses tiers based on the number of members. Don’t they see that this type of banding actually discourages the growth of churches!
Steve says
As someone who has participated in the development of several “tiered service plans” (mainly for church software), I can reveal that a lot of the time the choices are pretty arbitrary.The tiers are usually pre-determined by financial considerations and you find yourself retrospectively assigning and justifying every feature included. As mobile apps tend to support the core features of your product, they are classed as luxuries and are relegated to the higher-tiers.Creating tiers in this way is a painful process, but there are far worse methods of structuring service plans. My personal enemy is church software that uses tiers based on the number of members. Don’t they see that this type of banding actually discourages the growth of churches!