MARK YOUR CALENDARS…Elders, Deacons, Committee Chairs, etc…Church Calendar Planning Meeting, September 2024-February 2025, following worship on August 25 in the Gathering Place.

Facebook Pages VS Facebook Groups  
According to Facebook, "Facebook Pages enable public figures, businesses, organizations and other entities to create an authentic and public presence on Facebook". In many ways, a Facebook Page for ministries is like a church webpage. It's where people can learn about your ministry and see announcements. We've had a Facebook page for FPCE since 2012. Most of you already like and follow the page, and we share updates with the public using the page. If you don't already like our page, click the Facebook icon at the bottom of this email and hit "like" or "follow" to see our updates in your news feed.

A Facebook Group is a place designed for small group communication. It's a forum where people can talk about a common interest, ask questions, and more! When it comes to getting church members active and engaged... it's really hard to beat Facebook Groups.

In 2019, Facebook made a massive shift into placing more focus on supporting and promoting groups. A big part of this shift was changing their algorithms to prioritize group conversations and posts. People are more likely to see posts and announcements coming from a church group over the official church page.

With that in mind, we've created a new group for our membership, "FPCE Church Family," which is linked to our page. We've started sending invitations out, but not all of our members who follow our page may have received one due to their profile privacy settings. Shaun sent out several more invitations from his personal account to those he is friends with on Facebook, but we have likely missed people. If you have not received an invitation (and then accepted it to see the group activity), you can go to https://www.facebook.com/groups/fpcechurchfamily and request to join. Anyone already in the group can approve the request, so whoever sees it first can let you in!

Our hope is that we can use this group as yet another way to connect to each other. We can send quick updates, folks can ask questions or share prayer requests, and all those in the group will be able to reply to the posts in real time.