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Q Place… Where you come to know God, others and what you believe
When Mary Schaller became the CEO of the 47-year-old Neighborhood Bible Studies, she knew it would have to re-branded in order to reach a younger audience. Nine months later, the ministry re-launched as Q Place, the place where you can ask any question you have about God and spirituality.
A basic premise of Q Place is that volunteers, called Initiators, provide a safe and welcoming environment to which individuals are encouraged to attend. Q Place is all about building community and, through that community, helping people question, discover and grow in their relationship with God.
Raising awareness online
Along with a new visual name and presence, Q Place needed to ramp up its online presence. Creating their website they realized that they needed a place to cultivate an online community. Options such as Facebook did not integrate well with the existing site and provide a private environment. That’s when Q Place turned to CircleBuilder.
With a small staff, Q Place has hundreds of volunteers. Any community-building tools would have to allow for interaction between the organization, leaders, and individual groups. A single Initiator might lead five different groups and would want to “talk” to all the groups at once or with individual members. CircleBuilder gives Q Place the flexibility to do all of this.
Increased effectiveness and efficiency
CEO
Mary Schaller states, “I love CircleBuilder because it has the
potential to help Q Place Initiators interact regularly and effectively
with group members, and it allows group members to continue the
question process between meetings.”
In
addition to creating community, Q Place is enjoying the way that
CircleBuilder is increasing its ability to work more effectively and
efficiently. As a virtual organization, key Q Place staff work in six
states. CircleBuilder has become a great place to post shared blogs,
podcasts, documents, list upcoming meetings and events and other
information only viewable by staff.
Finally, to
encourage more of its customers and volunteers to utilize the
CircleBuilder site, Q Place now allows people to connect through the
main Q Place website or their Facebook page. After a few short months,
the Q Place CircleBuilder site has grown its community and numerous
staff, regional and neighborhood circles.
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Meeting Q Place’s mission
Everyday, Christians invite their friends and neighbors into a discovery process to question, discover, and grow in their relationship with God through small group discussion. The mission of Q Place is to mobilize Christians to facilitate group discussions with spiritual seekers so they can find God as revealed in the Bible. CircleBuilder helps Q Place by providing an online network—private interactive collaborative community—that meets their mission to provide resources to followers of Jesus.
CircleBuilder’s platform enables faith-based organizations to easily start their own private, branded, rules-based, Christian social networking group for any size church, ministry or group. CircleBuilder’s platform met Q Place’s specific requirements including:
- Their own private, moderated member’s-only site where Q Place Initiators and group members can candidly share their thoughts, study and prayer.
- Member-generated content—blogs, events, photo, audio, video and text—to facilitate member dialog and learning.
- Easy to post (and moderate) interactive prayer and praise requests.
- Instant and unlimited Small Group creation and interests management.
- Seamless authentication and single sign-on from a wide variety of popular social media sites including Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Google, Yahoo and AOL.
- Reports on community activity.
With the help of its new online community, Q Place is rapidly becoming a global resource for spiritual seekers to question, discover, and grow in their relationship with God through a facilitated small group process. Learn more at www.qplace.com.
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