I am back on getting things rolling at Trinity. Expect more posts soon!

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Too many times I’ve implemented projects from the top down, meaning we received requirements from the CEO or CIO (chief information officer) and then design a system to fit what they want. When this new system is rolled out, there is barking and complaining from angry end users. They will use the system but only because they have to. There is no buy-in or ownership. What I prefer to do, and recommend to all of my customers, is for me to understand what the higher-ups want as an end result and then I spend a little time with the end users figuring out what they need it to do.

For example, a VP at a company wants a system that can manage their service vendors across the country. She explains what their process is, how information is handled and in what order. I could walk away from that meeting and build them an application that will do what she said it should do. Instead, what I try to do (ultimately it’s up to the customer) is to meet with the VP, understand the overarching vision and purpose for the application, which is to effectively manage and deploy service vendors and retail stores across the country. I then meet with some key customer service representatives (not all 50 of them, maybe a selection of 5), the managers, the accounts payable department, and possibly connect with a vendor or two. I meet with these people to understand how the daily business is run, from an end user point of view. I get to know what they do day-to-day, suggest improvements (things the application can do for them) and understand some of the wish list items, the things they really want it to do if money wasn’t an object. After review and approval from the VP, I can then go on to build a perfect application. I can say it’s perfect because:
1. First and foremost, the VP (the person paying for it) is happy because it fulfills her vision and purpose. Also, her employees are not complaining about a system that doesn’t work properly.
2. The functionality, business process, workflows, etc. mirror actual day-to-day activities with small enhancements so therefore there is little to no need to relearn a process. The application improves the quality of life for the employees which makes for happier employees.
3. The end users have buy-in! They take ownership in their new application because they’ve had a say in it. It’s hard to complain about a system that you helped design.

I think the above example should be applied to church and its technology. The leadership of a church may want a new system to manage members, giving records, website, communications, event/activity registrations, etc. Following the above example, you’ll want to find out the overall purpose and vision for the new system and then meet with the primary users of the system. In most cases, the users will be staff, ministry heads and volunteers (and since you’re not paying a volunteer you want to make them as happy as possible!) Allowing these people to contribute to the initial brain storming and design of a system can go a long way when it’s time to implement the system. If a brain storming session is too involved, simply getting their opinion on an idea goes a long way.

Now to my church. Like I’ve said before, our church’s technology is lacking and needs improvement. I could’ve taken the vision of the leadership and did what they said and blamo, they would have a new system. Instead, I’m taking the time to connect with the users of the potential system to find out what they want and don’t want. Since there are existing systems in place, I want to know what they like and don’t like. Last thing we want to do is reinvent the wheel.

If I could sum up our church’s technology vision, I could say it is to effectively use technology to better manage and communicate with the community, members and volunteers. A very broad stroke. We have a lot of existing elements in place already: website, Facebook groups, online registration, member management, computers, servers, printers, etc. Throughout the years these have been pieced together as things were needed. We are now aiming to manage the entire ball of wax so we can use all of our tools coherently and effectively.

Following my example, I wanted to connect with the end users to understand how their day-to-day, or week to week, operates. I’ve put together a questionnaire (download below) which asks the staff and ministry heads about technology.

First I question them about their experience with technology. It’s important to understand where the user is coming from to understand what they want. If we have an 80-year-old man who doesn’t own a computer and things twitter is an insult, then when he shares that a system is not doing what he wants it to do, I put a lower weight on his responses. His input on areas is still valuable as a user, but his input on effectivness is not so much. It’s not an insult, it’s just a lack of experience on his behalf. If an 80-year-old woman who is managing the offices and staff, who has some computer experiences, and shares that a system is not dong what she wants it to do, I put a little more weight on her responses. She has a little more experience and has an idea of what things should or can do. It’s important to understand the point of view of the person.

Secondly I ask them their opinion about the usefulness of certain types of technology in general, at our church. Regardless of what we have now and what is running and not running, I want to know what they would find useful and find pointless. My goal is to get their heads pumping for the third part.

Finally I ask them about their specific experiences and interactions with the technology at church. I can’t possibly name every facet of every system, but it’s my hope that they will share what is working well, what isn’t working well and what we should stop using. And of course there is the “if money wasn’t an object, what would you want the technologies to do for you?” question. This is usually a fun one, but can shed light on what people really want out of their systems.

Technology Questionnaire

Download Technology Questionnaire (docx)
Download Technology Questionnaire (pdf)

If you download and use this questionnaire or have any comments please do share by commenting below.

This questionnaire was sent out by one of our executive pastors a few weeks ago and I’ve only received 3 responses out of about a dozen. Summer time can be busy and we’ll be pushing to get all of the responses back. The end result is to understand what ministries and staff want and need to effectively manage and communicate with the community, members and volunteers. I will share our findings of what people want and don’t want.

Leading up to the trip, the site is more or less unused. We have the team members post their profile information and maybe a blog post (under used, I know). No major traffic on the site, just our team.

While we’re on the trip, the site is used a lot: we have photos from our trip, uploaded daily; team members can post blog-like entries about their trip (yeah, no one wanted to!); and most importantly the message board. This message board was used for family and friends of the team to post “hellos” and other notes of love. Some parents posted scriptures and encouragement for our entire team. Our team members posted back keeping in touch with their loved ones back in Massachusetts. Some of our team members also shared some video messages during the trip! 

This little site helped keep our team connected with their family and kept the people who helped us get to D.C. see what we were doing daily. I suggest any group going on a missions trip to do something similar. It proves to be a very fun thing to do during the slow times on a trip and it keeps parents plugged in and happy .

So how do you do it?

I developed this site 2 years ago for our missions trip to Romania, see www.impact-romania.org. You’ll see the same structure on the Romania site, just a different look and feel. This year I took the Romania website and skinned (new theme) it for D.C. For our next missions trip, I’ll take the same site and put a different skin on it again. For me, it’s a real simple thing to do, takes me about 4 hours to complete. For the average person, this may be a huge task. I’ll cover the major aspects of the site and how you can do it in a few easy steps:

FaceBook.com
You can do all of this quite easily by creating a group in Facebook. This will allow you to have a message board, news, photos and videos. The only issue with this, and why we didn’t use it, all visitors to the site require a Facebook account. A lot of our parents don’t have Facebook accounts. Also, it’s easier to share with others outside of Facebook. If this isn’t a problem for you, then read no more, and go to Facebook!

If you want something available for the general public to read easily and post comments on, read on…

Message Board
The most commonly used feature of the site. There are many free services out there for message board/news groups. Most services will require anyone posting to verify who they are by use of a login. Our site doesn’t prompt for a login since it’s a very small and controlled group of users (team members, family and friends). I will eventually disable the anonymous posting so spammers cannot post.

Google Groups. A free and very easy option to setup. I just setup a sample group in less than 2 minutes.  Using the file upload and pages, you can feasibly post photos, videos and whatever else you may need. Also, the url is pretty simple, i.e. http://groups.google.com/group/fusemissions-2009.

There are many options on the web, bing free message board and you’ll find a lot!

Videos
We took our videos using a digital camera, a still camera. You don’t need a video camera to take videos for the web. As you can see on the few we have on there, they are good enough quality to get the point across. We took the video, downloaded it from the camera and uploaded to YouTube.com. Once uploaded, copied the Embed code and posted it into a message board post. Blamo, we have video.

Photos
Similar to videos, using a digital camera. Google groups will let you upload photos to the group, and that my suffice. If you wanted to, you could use something like DotPhoto.com to upload your images to, and link to it from your message board. All free!

I hope this helps, if you’re interested and would like some more information, please contact me and I’d love to guide you through it!

For example, here’s a slide I threw together in about 2 minutes. And you know what, it shows that I only spent 2 minutes on it! Sure it’s informative, but is it attractive? Does it make people want to come?

Example of Clip Art Announcement Slide

Using a free image from www.photoxpress.com, I created another version of this slide. Hungry?

Example of Using a Stock Photo for an Announcement

Just as informative. Took me about 5 minutes to find the image, about another 2 minutes to rearrange the text on the slide and it’s 100 times better. Imagine all of your announcements looking this mouth watering…

Though clip art images were very very cool in the late nineties, they are not clean and appear anything but professional. There are SEVERAL sites out there providing free or low cost images perfect for sermon illustrations, powerpoint, announcements, website images, marketing, whatever you can think of! Below is a collection of sites I use for my digital marketing uses at my church. I have used these in some of my messages to the youth, announcement slides, website and posters.

IMPORTANT These sites may have nudity on them. However, I have yet to accidentally find nudity, but I did search for it for the sake of this posting. Searching for day to day stuff (teens, summer, barbeque, computer, etc) will not return anything dangerous. Purposely search for it, and you’ll find it! The sites do NOT use the images maliciously, they are simply part of the catalog.

www.istockphoto.com
My Favorite! Real cheap and real good. You can download a decent image size for $1.00. In most cases, for digital media, this is plenty. If you’re looking at printing anything larger than a sheet of paper, then buy the next size up. The keyword search is great, the images are very well cataloged. They also offer a newsletter which I love receiving. It showcases their latest featured artists and their work. Very cool stuff.

www.photoexpress.com
Completely free! Starts you off with 1 free download a day, but you can get more after filling out more information about yourself. I entered my contact information and my cell phone number and after receiving a confirming text message, I can now download 6 images. Join their Facebook application and get 4 more! Their photo selection is not as impressive as istockphoto.com, but it’s free!

www.stockxpert.com
Similar to istockphoto.com, $1.00 images. Unfortunately I haven’t used them yet. I keep finding what I need on either of the two above!

www.vecteezy.com
Free vector based images. Not a large collection but sweet stuff for slide backgrounds and such. Vector based images are high res, layered images and require a robust application ($600+) to use them effectively. Some applications however will open a vector file in a single layer and a set resolution. In most cases, the single layer version will be most useful.

www.interfacelift.com
This is actually more a desktop background site. All images are free to download, and come in exceptionally high resolutions (1920×1280). Great images to use as background for worship or announcements. I go to this site daily and simply change my background to the latest coolest image. Check this one out!

What’s better than stock photos?

Your own photos! That’s right! That pizza slide would be even better if I had a great shot of a few teens or children making or eating pizza.  Using your own photos can be tricky, as image quality, lighting, etc. can ruin a great photo. But go through your photo collections, if you have them, and try using some of your own images!

So now I have the images I want, what do I do now?

If you’re looking to throw them into PowerPoint, Media Shout, Easy Worship or the like, simply Insert/Import/Open the image file and blamo!

If you’re looking to use them in marketing or need to clean them up, trim them down or alter their appearance in anyway, you can use applications like Adobe PhotoShop, Adobe Illustrator for vector images, or try GIMP. GIMP is FREE image editing application comparable to Adobe PhotoShop. I have PhotoShop and Illustrator and I still find myself in GIMP once in a while. I like it a lot, and it’s FREE! After the install, you will open it and see a few randomly floating windows, don’t worry, it’s not broken. If you’re use to a Windows computer where your applications are always within a single window, you now see what Mac users are use to. For some reason, Mac users think it’s okay to have floating windows everywhere, out of order and confusing. If you are not familiar with image editing software, check out the GIMP tutorials for some step by step instructions on some basic tasks.

Back in 2000 or 2001 my friend Dan and I developed an interactive website for the youth ministry at the direction of the youth pastor. The site had a message board, announcements, youth database, photo albums and polls. We had a lot of fun with it and at the time, we were on the cutting edge of technology. Our students used it a lot and we were connecting with them more frequent than Sundays and Wednesdays. It really was exciting to be a part of! Since then, we’ve modified code but haven’t rewritten any code since. It’s a little antiquated, but works. For better or worse, our youth ministry has recently embraced Facebook as our primary tool for getting information out to students, RSVP to events, share photos and simply keeping in touch. I hope to talk more about Facebook and ministry later.

Some time after that, we (I think it was more Dan than I) copied the youth ministry site and created a children’s ministry site. We tailored it for parents and volunteers more than the students. Also, the church received a basic, single page website which linked to these two sites.

Around 2006 I developed a new website for Trinity, for the rest of the church not the youth or children’s ministry. Another member of the church designed it. The website allows church staff to update any and all pages as needed without my help. This empowers the staff to use it for what they need, when they need, without waiting for a volunteer. It’s proved to be a very useful tool. The announcements on the website are updated weekly and we just finished off functionality for weekly podcasts!

Also around 2006 our church purchased a server through my company. JJ (my boss, friend and co-techie for Trinity) and I setup the new server. Initially it was installed as a central security domain, basic file share and print share. Slowly, other benefits of a having server were used: Exchange server for emailing, SharePoint for document sharing, data backups and secure file management. Since the use of the server has increased over the last 4 years, we’re now in the process of replacing the server.

Around 2007 our church moved forward with ACS Technologies and their web component Access ACS. This new tool was great, it allowed the church and staff to keep a central database of members, manage events and small groups. The software does a lot more but that’s where we started. Since then, it’s been used only as that and only used by a couple of ministries. Unfortunately, it’s a really large application and requires someone with a MBA just to understand the permissions levels. Okay, I exaggerated a little. It’s a big application, one we have under used but hopefully we’ll use in its entirety in the coming year.

This summer Trinity has decided to take a serious hard look at its technologies. I have stepped up to assist in managing every aspect of technology at Trinity from the website to staff computers to Facebook. Our first step will be to question our staff and volunteers to find out what is working well, and what needs to be removed (in about 30 questions :-p). I will be sharing the questionnaire as soon as it’s finalized. Our goal from here is to understand our ministry needs and act upon them in an effective manner.

If you haven’t noticed yet, technology is not a fad, and it’s not going away. People ages 3 to 90 use technology (my son started at age 3), including cell phones, computers, social networking, emails, texting, blogging, etc. It’s a part of our culture, part of our lives, that churches need to embrace. Check out my first post that dives in a little deeper why I think churches should care about technology.

Check out the following for other churches, pastors, and volunteers who agree!

http://andrewconard.com/2008/07/25/business-of-the-church-technology-2-of-5/

http://bikerschurch.wordpress.com/2008/04/24/technology-the-church/

http://stanhargraves.wordpress.com/2009/04/16/finding-the-balance/

http://cwest101.wordpress.com/2009/02/12/new-technology/

http://cbfportal.wordpress.com/2008/09/16/technology-for-the-church/

That’s just a few I found here on WordPress.com. Just bing church technology and you’ll find loads more!

I believe the proper use of technology is critical for churches to effectively reach a lost world desperately needing Christ. Our youngest generations are still learning to talk, read and write, but technology is assisting them in so many ways, improving their skill sets younger and younger. Junior and senior high school and college students just ooze technology: Facebook, texting, instant messaging, emailing, MP3 players, streaming videos, etc.  Post college to pre-seniors (you tell me where the senior line is :-p) know about it, will use it but can do without it. Our seniors usually look at it and say something to the effect of “crazy kids”. What generation are you focused on? How can we embrace these technologies to keep our younger generations plugged into church to become our seniors? If the church in America plans on reaching today’s generation the church will need to understand it and use it!

We are doing a terrible job. And I mean the collective “we”, not me or my church, but in general, the church in America is doing poor job at properly utilizing technology to reach people. Most churches I’ve found will have a simple website that displays a hokey piece of clipart (nothing related to their church), service times, mission statement and a list of ministries. Big churches have amazingly huge websites: pod casts, live video feeds, digital resources, blogs, social networking and more. From a small church point of view, this can be a very daunting thought and unfortunately, to do anything more than a simple website will require additional resources: money, time, and volunteers. Is this type of a website effective in communicating with the community what your church’s heart is?

Like I said before, technology runs in a wide range of avenues. My desire is to share the technologies that I think best fit the church, and share the best (cheapest, fastest, effective) ways of implementing these technologies. My church, Trinity Evangelical Church, has utilized technology to benefit its ministries and members for a few years now. In some areas we have been successful, others we flopped. Our youth ministry has had an active message board since 2001, but recently has unknowingly abandoned it for Facebook. The larger church body has had a decent web prescence for the last 3-4 years, before this we had a single page website simply showing our addresses and service times.