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March 15, 2007 - Electronic Ministry
Present
Announcements
Websites
Blogs
Podcasting
Feeds
MySpace
Instant Messaging
E-Newsletters
Forums
Other Ideas
Other Tools
PowerPoint
Present Peg Mowery, Grace, Fairmont
Connie Larson, Central, Winona
Karen Surprenant, Faith, Winona
Geraldine Williams,
Our Savior’s, Spring Valley
Christine Stuart, Trinity, Hayfield
Joanne Hamilton, Our Saviors, Rochester
Marge Maetzold, First, Le Sueur
Wendy Kauffman, Zion, Stewartville
Stacy Thorson, Zumbro, Rochester
Amy Olson, Christ the King, Mankato
Kathy Voigt,
Little Cedar, Adams
Barb Anderson, Hosanna, Rochester
Niel Wiegand, Hosanna, Rochester
Gale McEvoy, Good Shepherd, Plainview
Kristin Knudson, Gloria Dei, Rochester
Evie Wallin, Christ, Byron
Katie Butler, Southeastern Minnesota Synod
Announcements
Registration is available for the Charris
Ecumenical Center's biennial conference for church secretaries and office staff
at Concordia College's, Moorhead, MN. Get more information on their
website.
Schmidt Goodman, the office
products distributor, has a rebate program for congregations. They'd be happy to
talk to you about it.
The February
retreat went really well and it will hopefully
happen again. If you are interested in working on planning for future retreats
OR the August workshop, .
One thing that came out of
the workshop was the suggestion to ask pastors what they would most like their
staff to know about their jobs. I plan to send pastors a letter with some of our
comments (things I have collected over time) and ask for their feedback. If you
have things you want to make sure are included in the letter to the pastors, .
Websites
Must-Haves
This is a loose list, not necessarily absolutes, but they're good things to
have:
-
Name and location prominent
on homepage, present (or easy link) everywhere else
-
Contact for pastor(s) and
staff - PLEASE put e-mails on there. Deal with the spam through filters or just
deleting them. There are ways to avoid having spammers find them. One quick way
is to make the e-mail addresses into images instead of text. Don't put a link on
them or spammers can find that too. This makes it a little less user-friendly
(no fast clicking or copy and pasting), but it is safer. Check out this
blog post for an additional way to hide an e-mail and still link.
-
Contact for websteward
-
Prominent, easy-to-understand
worship schedule
-
“Find Us” (directions, etc.)
- written directions are great, a link to
Mapquest results for your location is also great. Photos also can help.
-
Calendar, events, etc. -
There are several services that do this. The synod uses
www.mychurchevents.com. A regular
typed event list is also good.
-
Evangelistic things (devos,
Bible readings, etc.) - This gets one step beyond the must-haves. See dynamic
info below for some help with this.
-
Ministry teams, etc. - Put
info about your ministry online so people can see what your church is about!
People new to the area will judge a church by its ministry, so this is
important. It's nice to put leader contact info on too, but make sure to get
their permission first.
Links
A links page can be a useful way to share information that doesn't really
have another place to go. Organize it and pick specific information rather than
just putting every website that is suggested or that you visit on this page.
Here are some ideas to get you started:
Dynamic Content
This is content for your website that changes frequently without you ever
having to touch it. For an example, go to the
NewBytes page or the Bible readings and
prayer
pages. Below are some examples of places to get dynamic content (they include
instructions, but you basically copy the HTML code they give you into the coding
of your page):
More Help?
Blogs
What are they?
Basically they are online journals (the word is short for web log). They can
be about anything and everything and can be posted on multiple times a day or
only once a week or less. Here are some basic terms to know:
-
Post - what the blogger
writes
-
Blogger - the one who owns
and manages the blog (a blog CAN have several "approved" posters
-
Comments - readers (anyone,
registered users of the service, or a restricted group) can be allowed to submit
a comment on the post.
The process of blogging has
the following characteristics:
-
Connects communities in
conversation
-
Personal (usually a mix of
formal and informal writing and allows a person inside the blogger's personal
life/thoughts a little bit)
-
Hospitality (this can be a
huge function of a blog for a church)
Focus?
Blogs need a focus. Not all blogs have one, but to hold an audience they
should.
-
Telling about congregation -
Just tell readers what your congregation is up to. This is a great place to
start because anyone in the congregation can do it and the information is easily
available.
-
Short term - Talk about
special events. This includes events like baptisms, funerals, and weddings as
well as church suppers, bazaars, and musicals.
-
Long term - Short term blogs
for mission trips, Bible studies, or members serving in the military can be
useful. A long term "event" focus can also be talking about an ongoing ministry
like a food pantry or youth ministry.
-
Teaching - This will probably
come from a pastor, AIM, or other educated person (such as a parish nurse). Have
the blogger write on theological issues or other issues (the parish nurse could
talk about health issues) that the congregation could be educated about. One
suggestion is to have a pastor write one based on questions (s)he is asked after
services, on the phone, in meetings, in e-mails - anywhere. Have the pastor
answer for the benefit of everyone.
-
Discussing - Since comments
are allowed on blogs, the blog can be used to have any kind of discussion from
theological to a blog with limited people allowed to comment on issues for a
certain ministry group. This differs from a forum because there has to be an
initial post to begin the topic of discussion and should be posted on regularly,
not just once to start a discussion.
-
Sharing - You can share just
about anything on a blog, but this could be sharing good websites, books, and
other resources, favorite quotes, thoughts for the day, or anything else a
blogger wants to share.
-
Preparing for Sunday -
Another good way to use the blog in congregational life is to have the pastor
post readings, thoughts, and other materials to prepare congregation members for
the upcoming Sunday's sermon. It can also go the other way and continue the
theme of the previous Sunday's sermon through the next week.
How to Start?
To get started blogging, you only need a blogging service. This may come
form your web site provider or other service. A couple of the most common
services are (there are more and these can be used WITH your current website):
Examples from Our Synod
Other Examples (from
The Blogging Church, not necessarily from me)
More Tips
-
The Blogging Church by
Brian Bailey (check it out on
Amazon.com)
-
ProBlogger - just one example of MANY
online blog resources (guess what, it even has a blog!)
Podcasting
-
Mostly the same as blogs, but with audio
and/or video
-
Adds mobility
-
Do NOT require an iPod (just a computer with
sound or an mp3 player, iPod or not)
-
Different from a direct download because it
can be automatically downloaded (see the section on Feeds)
What to Podcast?
-
Most common is sermons
-
Conversations with pastors (not confidential
ones obviously)
-
Interviews with staff, volunteers, guests
-
Youth services/events
-
Bible studies
-
Special events
What Do I Need to Podcast?
-
Computer
-
Microphone (you don't need an expensive one)
-
Headphones (regular little earbuds will
work, you don't need big fancy ones)
-
Audio editing software - Most Macs have
Garage Band. Audacity is a
free software for Macs and PCs.
The "What Do I Need..." information came
from the section on podcasting in The Blogging Church.
What Services Do I Need?
-
Hosting – your website or something like
Ourmedia.com
-
Blog - or your website, but something that
can have a feed
-
Feed –
Feedburner.com is one good, free example. The blog may have this part
too.
Examples from Our Synod
Feeds
A feed is what makes a blog and podcast
different from any other information on the internet. It allows "feed
readers" to find that new information has been put on the site and tell
you. For a blog, this may appear as an e-mail or just show up on a
website. For a podcase, one of the most common services is iTunes (again,
don't need a Mac or an iPod) which automatically downloads new content.
The new Internet Explorer 7.0 allows you to subscribe to feeds and it
saves them on pages kind of like favorites. There are many other
feedreaders out there too.
This picture is the accepted image for feed.
If you see this icon, you know you can subscribe to the content you are
looking at. Read more about feeds from
Wikipedia.
MySpace
MySpace
is a social networking site. It is designed for individuals, but can be
used for organizations. The site is kind of difficult to use if you won't
want to do exactly what you want, but it can be managed. The pro is that
this is where young people are, so it can be a good way to reach them. It
is also free. The con is that parents have concerns about this type of
site and some think the church should stay off rather than encourage kids
to be on it. An argument against that is that this makes a safe place for
kids to be when they're on it anyway. This is a discussion to consider in
your own church.
One common way for churches to get involved
with MySpace is for youth workers to have their own space for the youth
group.
There are common networking sites including
Facebook.
Instant Messaging (IMing)
This is a common way for connecting online,
but mostly for people who already know each other. It has been used
successfully for both pastors and youth workers. Any other group of people
who want to connect can also use it successfully. The internet lets people
be a little more open so they often feel more comfortable asking
(especially pastors) tougher questions.
Some common messenger services include:
Want to connect with each other?
your instant messenger type and username (or e-mail).
E-Newsletters
E-mail marketing is a good, easy way to
reach congregation members. We discussed this at an earlier meeting, so we
didn't go into details. See those minutes for
details.
The synod does use
Constant Contact, a paid
service, for our e-news. A regular e-mail distribution list also works.
Forums
Online discussions - forums - are a good way
to have conversations so that everyone doesn't have to be at the same
place at the same time. The difference between this and a blog is that
there is no single starting post, just a basic topic. The problem is that
many people just want to "lurk" and not contribute, so it can be hard to
get participation.
One way to have a discussion is through
LutherLink (a Lutheran section of
Ecunet).
One congregation in our synod uses
vBulletin.
Other Ideas of Stuff
to Put Online
-
Online photo albums - one available one
(that the synod uses) is
MyChurchPhotos.com (go to the
2006 Synod Assembly
news page for an example of how it looks)
-
Webcasting live (different from a podcast
because it is streaming - you get it directly from the website, not saving
it to your computer) It can eliminate/lessen some of the copyright issues.
-
Intranet (internal information for only
people in the office and/or the congregation) and/or password protected
content (such as a directory)
-
Online forms - either find a service to
submit them online, or just put printable PDF forms online.
CutePDF is a free PDF writer. Note
that this program acts like a printer, so you have to tell Word,
Publisher, etc. to PRINT not Save As.
-
Online gifts - the synod uses
SPORG for online registration (not
gifts), but it can also be used to collect donations. Don't forget to put
information about Thrivent's
Simply Giving program on your website too!
-
Fun stuff, like coloring books
Other Tools
A couple other popular online tools that you
can explore are YouTube (put videos
online, you can link from your site) and
Flickr (storage for photos).
One other "techy-type" service mentioned was
a service that allows you to send a voice message to a large (or small)
network of phones at one time rather than a traditional calling tree.
OneCall is one such service.
PowerPoint
We didn't get into this because there was a
meeting on it last year. Check out those minutes
if you want info on the process.
Submitted by
Communications Director
Southeastern Minnesota Synod, ELCA |
