Archive - June, 2009

Your Church Wants YOU!

June 29, 2009 in Blog with 1 Comment

A couple years back I attended a church conference and joined in a break out session about tech excellence. During that session we were sharing how big our tech teams were. One guy shared that they were a portable church that rented a gymnatorium every Sunday and he and one other volunteer did all the setup and tare down of the tech. Needless to say we were all amazed and at the same time felt sympathy for his burden. The problem was they started at 4 in the morning to get ready and when recruiting new volunteers the response was always the same “are you insane?” The truth is if they had 15-20 volunteers each Sunday, they would only have to start at 6 AM, but no one wanted to be the first new recruit.

Or maybe your in the same boat as we are at Lakeside. You start at 7AM finish at noon and pull of such a great looking service that no one ever thinks that you need help. Often the tech team is the “invisible team” that no one ever knows is there and things just seem to work automagically.

Over the past couple of years I have tried a number of ideas for recruiting including bulletin inserts, announcement slides, and a church wide “what involved” recruitment campaign. How well did I do? The bulletin and slides were essentially fruitless. The recruitment campaign got me a couple of names, but the timing was off as we did this just before the summer and I got a lot of “call me in the fall”. Needless to say my highest need is in the summer when our current volunteers want to take some vacation time.

This past weekend we got to man the “Volunteer Service Center”. A permanent display in our lobby that showcases what it takes to make the church work, both on a Sunday and through the week. This has been our best move yet. The display on it’s own with a couple of volunteer recruiters has done well but the best has been when we have the various ministries like Tech and Kids be the recruiters. This reinforces an old sales axiom that I know from my days in the marketplace, the personal ASK.

If you have every listened to or read books about sales and marketing you know the value of face to face interactions. But the best word of advice I ever read was to ASK for the sale. Imagine you’ve spent the last 20 minutes telling your prospective customer all the great things about your company and your product or service and when they are in the height of their big dream you simple ask “So do we have a deal?” You have eliminated the chance to second guess, you have them when they see all the great things that could come from this deal and they just simply say “Yes.”

So how do you apply this to recruiting? It’s a two part process. You need to start with a good pitch about how awesome it is to serve in your ministry. The amazing feeling that you get serving your church and furthering God’s kingdom. Then you simply close the deal by saying “so when can you get started?” Now don’t let me over simplify this, we are NOT selling volunteering. We are offering people an opportunity to serve and this has to align with people’s gifts, their skills and their season of life. But the important thing to learn is the personal ASK.

Our tech team met last month and we made a list of people we felt were potential recruits. We regularly pray for these people and when the timing is right we will personally ASK them to join the tech team.

No matter which method you choose the important thing to remember is the personal ASK. Let’s face it, we all like to feel needed and when you personally ask people to volunteer, we set in motion a series of feelings of being wanted, being trusted, and more importantly being in community. After all, we serve so that we can have an impact on our community, both inside and outside the church walls.

Free or Open Source Solutions in the Church

June 27, 2009 in Blog with 2 Comments

When trying to solve IT problems in the church, money is invariably a concern that must be over come. Not that this doesn’t plague other organizations, but in a church their is always the concern of good stewardship of the church’s money. So when is a good time to spend money on a commercial product instead of a Free or Open Source Solution (FOSS)? A lot of that depends on how you answer the following questions.
1. Who is going to use it? The level of direct contact that the office staffhave with the solution is a large contributing factor in any FOSS implementation. Putting an open source spam filter on the server has such a low impact on the day to day users that this should be an easy answer. Projects like ASSP are a great way to clean up the user’s inbox with little to no user interaction with the program. This was my first experience with deploying FOSS in a office environment and the results were well appreciated by the users. Even those that did not participate in the retraining process. The closer you get to the user’s desktop though, the more you have to look at what your users are doing and how adaptable are they to something different. At Lakeside we are exploring the possibilities of users having Ubuntu desktops and others having Open Office instead of Microsoft Office. You will want to take your time and do your homework before you rush these solutions out. Our big issue with Open Office is our dependency on PowerPoint and the massive library of songs that we have created. We need to be sure that we don’t rush into the migration and have to recreate everything.
2. Is it compatible with the rest of the world? Or, no man is an island. You don’t want to have the best FOSS setup in the world and not be able to share files with people in your congregation or any outside services you may use. Imagine your graphics guru making up that sweet Easter invitation and your print shop only accepting Photoshop files. You will need to talk with your users and get a good understanding of what they do and who they share their files with.
3. Who is going to support it? Many churches don’t have a staff IT guy, it’s just a fact of ministry. You may contract an outside service or have a volunteer IT team. This will be your most deciding factor when it comes to deploying FOSS. Deploying Ubuntu on all your desktops may be a great idea. You have done all your homework, researched your users file sharing and work styles. But when something doesn’t work the way it was supposed to, who are they going to turn to? Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that FOSS are buggy or inferior, it’s just a simple fact that they are different. GIMP is an amazing alternative to Photoshop, but if your users are shortcut junkies, they will be lost. In short, plan out your FOSS deployment and it’s support plan.

There are probably a few more things that should be concidered, but these are what I consider to be the essentials. A FOSS implementation can help your church manage its IT budget, but don’t get stuck with expensive support costs.

The truth about blogging

June 14, 2009 in Blog with 0 Comments

So I was doing some reading the other day, because I’m good at reading other people’s blogs, and came across some points of effective blogging. As usual I didn’t bookmark the site so I don’t have a link for you, but here is my paraphrase.
1. Have a consistent theme. This can seem obvious, but if you look at my own blog, you’ll see that some times I can get off topic. It’s a far stretch to put plastic bags and e-coupons on a blog about church or tech.
2. Be consistent. This is where most blogs fail. The truth be told a good blogger posts ATLEAST once a day. A sporadic blog like mine can leave followers wondering if the blog is even active.
3. Be knowledgeable. This is some times confused with be opinionated. Blog followers want to get something of value from your blog not just listen to you spout your own personal opinion. We get enough of that in the news and 3 dollar trash papers at the checkout counter.
4. Be well known. This can be difficult if you don’t follow steps one, two and three. It’s also a classic chicken and egg. People will follow you if your blog is popular because it becomes a source of conversation with their friends. Like standing around the water cooler and discussing the previous nights episode of The Office or the hockey game. It can be difficult to get this started, but step 5 is the solution.
5. Be persistant. Not every blog is a hit wonder in the first month. Blogging is like starting your own business, you make not make a dime in the first year, but your build a reputation.
6. Don’t give up. If you can follow the previous steps diligently, then you have a chance at being a successful blogger. If you break any of the previous steps then feel free to break this one as well and turn in your digital pen, Blogging may not be your cup of tea.
7. Solicit feed back. A good blog has a two way dialogue feel to it. Like a good seminar, you always want to leave time for Q&A. But as a blogger, time is not the issue, it’s content. Challenge the satis quo or be suggestive in a way that others will want to share their experiences or opinion. Don’t soap box. People will be just as likely to keep on surfing to some other site as to rebut your personal rant.
8. Don’t preach. Pastors please pay close attention. Often pastors will think of their blog as an extension to their Sunday Sermon. It can be, but it should be of a more personal nature, like how you are succeeding (or failing) at applying the previous Sunday’s message to your own life. We recently did the 60-60 experiment and used a mini-site blog for everyone to share their thought, opinions, successes and failures. It keeps it real.
9. Promote your blog. And I don’t mean buying into Google’s advertising program. There are several good ways to promote your blog and it won’t cost you a dime. Peer promotion is one of the best ways. Put enough content online, then ask fellow bloggers to include a link to your blog. If they like your contribution to the blogisphere, they will usually be happy to link to you and become some of your early followers. Often your blog will be relevant to something else you do that has a website. Pastors can link to their blog from their church website. Or maybe you already contribute to an e-zine or printed magazine.Twitter is also a great medium for a little self promotion. If they follow you on twitter, chance are good they will follow your blog. What ever you do, don’t assume that if you blog it, they will come.
10. Be consistant. I can’t impress this point enough. The percentage of failed blogs is extremely high. It’s hard to measure the actual success fail rate, but let’s just say you may get struck before your blog gets featured on the cover of Time Magazine. But if you manage to develop a large following with great dialogue, consider yourself among some of the blogisphere elite.

Church Media Design

June 5, 2009 in Blog with 0 Comments

The infamous Brad Zimmerman @cmdtv stopped by the other day to fix a bad typo on my blog. seems a swapped some first names and last names around on one of my posts. But more importantly it got me over to his site where I was impressed to find some video podcasts. Brad covers all sorts of cool church media topics like Marketing 101 for the church, using after effects and live stream. Take a few minutes and pop over and see Gurus of Tech in Louisville in July.

What’s that knob do?

June 5, 2009 in Blog with 0 Comments

Often church sound people are volunteers that have an ear for sound but don’t have a lot of technical experience. One of my favourite and most often heard questions is “What’s that knob do?” so I try and explain it in as non-techy a way as I can. Today a twitter pal posted a link to ChurchSoundGuy where they have compiled a cool Dynamics 101 from Rick Naqvi of PreSonus. Who better to learn about the ins and outs of compressors and limiters then the guys who make them. It may be a little more techy then my tutorials, but once you read through this, I highly recommend that you take some time and “Go twist some knobs”!

Are you a GURU?

June 2, 2009 in Blog with 2 Comments

I promised a morning blog post, so here it is.
If you haven’t heard about it yet, then you have to check out the up coming conference/learning group Gurus Of Tech in Louisville on July 13-15. This is going to be an awesome time of learning and sharing with some of the greatest minds in technology and creativity like Barton Damer and Brad Zimmerman, but more importantly we want you to come and share too. Because everyone has some experiences we can all learn from. Check it out and I hope to see you there.

Something to make you smile

June 2, 2009 in Blog with 0 Comments

Ok, so it’s been a while since my last blog post. I’d be lying if I didn’t say I’ve thought about posting something, but things have been busy at the church and my personal life was on the brink of going out of control. I love being a foster parent, but some days I wonder if I bit of more then i could chew.
So today instead of getting into some deep techy debate over virtualization platforms or the importance of training your volunteers, I’ve decided to post something fun.
For a couple of years now I’ve been following an e-cartoon called Userfriendly.org by Illiad. It’s a great saga of some happy go lucky geeks working at an internet company. I get up every morning and religiously check for the daily update. It’s guaranteed to put a smile on my face, so if Dilbert just isn’t cutting it for you, give userfriendly a spin and see if it doesn’t put a smile on your face each morning.

Next blog post will be sooner, I promise. Maybe even tomorrow morning.