Tuggle is an online community designed with ministry in mind. First, check it out in action here: Collegelife (Denton, Texas). Collegelife is using Tuggle effectively with over 900 active members.
Unlike church management software (ChMS) designed to be used by a few select people on a church staff, Tuggle is specifically for individual ministry leaders. Ministry leaders don't work with accounting, child care check-ins, or Sunday attendance records. Instead, they work with the people in their specific zone of oversight and with that segment's ministry events. Tuggle is perfect for the leaders who want to nourish interactive communication between a designated group of people. It's like a "back-end" management system for your ministry web site and isn't meant to provide any design or presentation content to your site visitors.
Since Tuggle is designed to serve individual ministries, a large church will have several Tuggle accounts running at the same time, one for youth or student ministries, one for college, one for any special interest ministries, etc. But smaller churches will do fine with just one Tuggle account for the whole church.
Like many Web 2.0 applications, Tuggle is free. No matter how large your church is, no matter how many members use the service, you won't pay.
The Tuggle web site and it's graphics, fonts, layout, etc. need some work to come up to web glory standards. But, their blog is beautiful and I of all people should know about a work in progress, right?
Maybe you could fill me in a little better.
I went to the site and checked it out, but I don’t see any difference between this or a MySpace or Facebook account. Except maybe a thought that you are more sheltered? We are doing just this with our youth ministry, youth staff and volunteer staff at church right now on Facbook.
What would Tuggle offer that I can’t get there?
hi inWorship – The parallel that comes to my mind is YouTube vs. GodTube so I think you’re correct in the similarities aspect of MySpace & fb but with the “sheltering” that comes from a product that is specifically targeted to ministries.
I’m hoping some Tuggle users weigh in on the benefits here.
And please understand, my questions are not to criticize, just to understand.
There are so many great resources out there right now, I really have to be careful to not over stretch myself. If I think it can be accomplished in the environment I am in right now, I may tend to stay put.
With that said, I am always looking to make my life simpler!
Hi inWorship, that’s a great question. The differences from facebook are dramatic. We’re still working to communicate this on the product site, but we did a podcast on this very topic, just search in iTunes for “tuggle”. It will help paint clear picture of Tuggle’s potential in youth groups.
In short, Tuggle has a much safer, community-centered feel than a global social network. New people connect faster and ministry leaders have more tools to manage events and small groups than FB/MySpace provide. Take a test drive and signup or contact us for a live demo!
Daniel Elmore
Tuggle Founder
Daniel, thanks for your response. When I get a free moment I will go check out the podcast and get to know your service a little better.
When I was at your site, it was hard at first glance to see a difference. I do understand your desire to resource leaders with more tools and the ability to network easier. I can see how a service like this would allow that to happen quicker because of a smaller scale.
I am not sure what you would determine to be “safer” about Tuggle than another network as they all have safeguards in place and you can live quit nicely inside of them without any issues from surrounding people.
Thanks for stopping by and answering my questions!
Brent
By safer I mean your data, your private data. Do your students put their phone numbers and addresses on Facebook? Of course not, but Tuggle has the concept of “administrators” where members can enter this information on their profiles but allow only leaders and admins to see. So when you need a phone number, you can look it up. Also, age is a huge factor in creating small groups. Tuggle can list all your members and sort by any profile field, even age. It’s a management tool, FB/MySpace is not, and they are not trying to be.
If I told our current users that we’re closing down Tuggle and that they’ll have to manage their ministry from Facebook, they’d said “How in the world am I going to do that?!”
I understand what your are saying. It does sound like the management tools will be great.
I’ll be checking into it.
Thanks!
I am the student ministries pastor at Denton Bible and we use Tuggle for our ministry and I can’t begin to tell you how valuable this tool is. We use Tuggle for all the reasons mentioned above and have found some creative ways for it to be used for some administrative functions that it was not created for
Tuggle has sown up some of the communication gaps in our ministry and as anyone in ministry knows, effective communication is one of those indispensable tools in ministry that is always sought after yet difficult to attain. Tuggle is not just a large church resource either. I have some friends that are youth pastors in smaller churches and they are finding equal value in Tuggle as well. I don’t think Tuggle has or will or was even meant to replace Facebook or trashspace but it is a ministry tool that you cannot afford to ignore regardless of whether you are a youth pastor, college pastor or senior pastor.
Hi Brent, I’m the college pastor at Denton Bible Church- one of the first ministries to pilot Tuggle. Thus far we have almost 1,000 students using our tuggle site- and I’d say just about all of them also use Facebook as well. As far as I can tell, our ministry will always be married to BOTH Tuggle & Facebook. Both have many similarities- and both offer a variety of differences.
From my own perspective, as an administrator over our ministry- what makes Tuggle unique from Facebook is some of the communication aspects and organizational database options. I can collect and filter through needed data concerning our students in ways that Facebook never could. I can also mass text message our students from Tuggle (which helps for last minute changes in our events). On top of that there is an unlimited amount of possibilities for shaping and assimilating our small groups. As Joe said above, Tuggle isn’t a replacement to Facebook, but simply a much needed supplement to it- that allows for much more effective ministry organization to take place. But thankfully, as a bonus, Tuggle does offer some unique networking options that do help our students to communicate with one another in some very intentional ways.
Anyway, as these guys have said… take a test drive. I do know, that for nearly 1,000 of our students, it has been an effective tool for them (and even more effective for my staff and I)
Hey thanks all for the tuggle feedback.
Shea – with 1,000 student users your perspective counts tremendously.
Thanks for the responses to my questions everyone.
I can see how Tuggle really focuses on key items that allow it to be a great management tool.
I’ll be checking it out and seeing if some of our guys would enjoy it!
Brent
Tuggle Myths
hi you guys said it was free but when i went to the website its not free