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| February 13, 2008 |
Some time ago, a pastor of a 1,000 member church asked my opinion regarding the need for a server and local area network for the church. At that time I expressed that I believed these were essential tools for any church that is 650 people or larger.
It is very common for churches to add part-time and full time staff as they grow, yet fail to provide their staff with the tools they require to collaborate together as a team. In addition, when a church lacks a server/network, all important files must then reside on each individual staff member's computer. Often, when these staff members leave the church, these important ministry files leave with the staff member.
Microsoft offers organizations an inexpensive virtual server/network solution called “SharePoint Services”. SharePoint is hosted for your ministry by an external service provider, yet your data is secure and backed-up regularly to prevent data loss. SharePoint provides a very robust web-based virtual server and secure network so that your ministry team can collaborate together and accomplish much more than generally possible through a self-hosted server and Local Area Network (LAN). Features include:
- Synchronize team member calendars
- Store important files that are accessible by other team members
- Edit important files while keeping an ongoing record of all edited versions and who did the edits
- Complete integration with Microsoft Office (Outlook, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint)
- Complete integration with Microsoft Instant Messaging for real-time team-member communications
- Set up permission-access levels to various files
- All files can be easily “labeled” with meta-tags so that a file can be located by simply using the program’s search function
- SharePoint also includes a Windows-Explorer-Type tree control for structuring all your data folders
- Access your important files and collaborate with team members on any project from anywhere in the world…you do not need to be at church to use your virtual server/network.
- Back-up of important information
- Many more features
An excellent webinar overview of SharePoint Services can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/sharepoint/demo/index.html.
A company called 1and1.com hosts SharePoint Services for an introductory price of $10/month for the first three months (temporary offer), and then $20/month from that point on. This means that you could use SharePoint Services for 5 years before you would spend the same amount for an in-house server and network…plus your ministry will not have to deal with any of the IT hassles.
To check out the 1and1 program offering, go to http://order.1and1.com/xml/order/Sharepoint;jsessionid=9FE228EEFF012958ED10929D4BA98B8B.TC61a?__frame=_top&__lf=Static. Your ministry will want to find out how much additional online storage may cost when you get to the point of needing more storage space.
| August 19, 2006 |
...You Were Made For A Mission!
For several years, E-Church Essentials has received requests from main-stream churches who were not yet ready for all our postmodern online ministry tools, to output our Online Assessment Center as a stand alone program. We have been working on fulfilling this request over the past year. The result? AssessME.org (http://www.assessme.org) is now alive!
AssessME.org converts any ministry website into an online assessment center designed exclusively for lay ministry mobilization. As an introductory offer, we are allowing ministries to register a FREE ministry account, and we are including five (5) FREE Assessment Packs so that your key decision-makers can try out the program with no risk or contract.
Limited Time:
FREE Registration & 5 FREE Assessment Packs!
| January 18, 2006 |
That's what many ministry professionals often ask me. They have heard about podcasting, but they don't understand its awesome potential for ministry.
Podcasting is literally broadcasting audio files via the internet. The common audio file format is .MP3. Through podcasting, your ministry can broadcast teachings, meditations, announcements, worship...literally anything that people would prefer to listen to rather than read. Just like radio and television broadcasts ministry programming, podcasting broadcasts your important ministry programming online.
Pew Internet and American Life recently conducted a study on the development of podcasting. Their summary states:
More than 22 million American adults own iPods or MP3 players and 29% of them have downloaded podcasts from the Web so that they could listen to audio files at a time of their choosing. That amounts to more than 6 million adults who have tried this new feature that allows internet “broadcasts” to be downloaded onto their portable listening device.
The popularity of podcasting is growing at a sky-rocketing rate. Two things are necessary for your ministry to begin taking advantage of this new broadcast technology:
- A blog site that supports podcasting. E-Church Essentials offers full multimedia blogs, with MP3 podcasting capabilities for only $7.99/month. If your ministry is already a member of the E-Church Network, you may activate your blog by loging in and going to the Relate > Weblogs menu. If your ministry is not a member, but you desire a personal blog, simply register with E-Church Essentials by selecting REGISTER NOW. Registration is FREE. Once registered, you may activate your blog by going to the Relate > Weblogs menu.
- A podcast reader that your listener's may use to receive your broadcasts and listen to them automatically. E-Church Essentials also provides your ministry with a FREE podcast reader.
The podcast reader is an essential element if your membership are to receive your broadcasts. The reader is simply configured to "subscribe" to your blog's broadcast. Then whenever your ministry posts a new broadcast, all of your members who have the reader installed on their PC's (a Mac version is also available) will automatically receive your broadcast right on their computer.
To download and install the FREE podcast reader from E-Church Essentials, select the link below. You will need a program like WinZip to unzip the executable file.
| December 21, 2005 |
E-Church Essentials and Online Deiscipleship are pleased to announce a new Assessment that will be available for purchase in the very near future. The current assessments found within E-Church Essentials and within the soon to be released AssessME.org all focus on mobilizing people for ministry. However, it is just as important, may be more important, to know how to nurture people in their spiritual development.
The Spiritual Formation assessment is very different in format than any of David's previous assessment tools. The Spiritual Formation assessment is designed to be highly portable so that you can post it on your church website, blog or even email it to your ministry membership. The assessment has two parts. In part 1, the immediate felt-needs of the individual is determined; in part 2, the spiritual maturity of the individual is assessed over five maturation categories. For a small hourly fee, David will even customize this assessment for the unique needs of your congregation. The assessment report is printable.
David has also created a secondary tool to accompany the Spiritual Formation Assessment. This tool is called the Brochure Builder. The Brochure Builder enables ministry leaders to create printable and web-capable brochures for promoting classes and programs that will address the spiritual formation issues raised by the assessment. The natural response of an individual once they print and read their assessment report is, "now what"? With the Brochure Builder, your ministry can clearly convey the appropriate "Next Steps" for each member of your congregation.
The Spiritual Formation Assessment and the Brochure Builder are bundled together, and will soon be available for as low as $49 (price will be determined by the size of your ministry). Try it now for free by clicking on the link below.
>> Take the Spiritual Formation Assessment
Coming soon, targeted for March of 2006, is AssessME.org. AssessME.org is a new division of E-Church Essentials. But where as E-Church Essentials is an all-inclusive online ministry system that may be beyond the present scope of some churches, AssessME.org has one specific purpose...to unleash the ministry team mobilization assessments, as well as the data search and sort capabilities found within E-Church Essentials, for use within your own ministry website.
AssessME.org will create a portal that shines seamlessly through any website. In addition, the portal will be usable with ALL major browsers including FireFox and Safari for Apple computers.
Assessment costs are targeted to be as low as $1 each. Your ministry will be able to pre-pay for blocks of code keys. Projected alotments are in blocks of 20, 50, 100, 250, 500, 1000 and 2,500. The larger the block, the lower the per-assessment cost. The secure payment gateway will support Visa, Master Card and Electronic Checks. The entire program is 100% automated and requires little to no manual management what-so-ever by your ministry team.
For more information, select one of the links below to preview (pdf documents) the AssessME.org website design as well as take a sneak peak at how the portal will appear within your website.
> Website Design (pdf)
> Portal Interface Examples (pdf)
| November 11, 2005 |
I want to encourage you to watch the video teaching associated with the link below. I would be very interested to hear from my readers about their perspective on the teaching. I also wonder about how our gospel presentations online could accommodate sharing the Gospel message according to the principles embodied in this video.
>> View Video Teaching (60 minutes, but worth the time)
| October 12, 2005 |
- Provide Resources That Your Visitors Repeatedly Need
- Provide Interesting Interactivity
For this brief resource article, I want to focus on FREE sources of interesting interactivity...namely, online games and cartoons.
Online games can cause young adults to visit your website, return repeatedly to your website, and even cause young adults to direct their friends to your website. Games are "Sticky". While I have always known that online games could make a website "Sticky", I have been strongly reminded of this fact by a recent event.
My wife Tamara is responsible for Global Communications for Johnson Controls International. We recently attended the company picnic and won a Sony PSP in a free drawing. If you don't know what a PSP is, it is a hand-held video, music and game player that is an extremely hot item with kids and young adults. In fact, we had several offers to buy the PSP from us right on the spot.
The PSP came with one game included. Well, my kids are hooked. Even though we have tried to keep our children from playing computer games, it only took a few minutes for the PSP game to totally engage them.
Games and cartoons are not spiritual. But they can help draw an online crowd who may explore your website further once they have finished playing the games or viewing the cartoons. In some cases, you may even be able to draw analogies from a game or cartoon to apply spiritual principles.
I have included below some good quality FREE Flash games that you may wish to include on your website, especially in the the children's and student ministry sections of your site.
- Video Game #1: SkidWRX...Spiritual Metaphore: "Who's Driving Your Life?"
- Video Game #2: Pochi...Spiritual Metaphore: "Running From God"
- Video Game #3: Archery...Spiritual Metaphore: "Targeting People for Christ"
- Video Game #4: Moon Landing...Spiritual Metaphore: "Will God Let You Crash and Burn?"
- Video Game #5: Pong...Spiritual Metaphore: "Get Positioned to Bounce Back"
- Video Game #6: Ball In The Hole...Spiritual Metaphore: "Meaningless Pursuits"
- Cartoon: The Sheep...Spiritual Metaphore: "Flee From The Evil One"
You will require an un-zip utility to open the zip files. WinZip is Free!
Many of you are quite acquanted with E-Church Essentials and it's monthly membership dues. However, did you know that if you properly utilize and manage the program, E-Church Essentials can literally become a FREE ministry resource? That's right...FREE! Furthermore, it can even generate revenue for your ministry over and above weekly tithes and offerings.
To learn more about how E-Church Essentials can be "Virtually Free", please download our white paper (pdf) which will highlight just four simple ways in which E-Church Essentials can both save your ministry money, while at the same time generate revenue that can be re-invested into ministry.
| September 15, 2005 |
*This is not an advertisement, but simply a free resource David wishes to share with your ministry.
Churches and potlucks go hand-in-hand. But typically, trying to find out how many people to plan on and making sure that not everyone brings a bag of chips and a coke, is a daunting task for some small group of church ladies who spend hours on the phone and signing people up in the church lobby.
That was then, this is now. Today there is a FREE resource called www.rsvme.com that can help your ministry email anyone or everyone on your database, and send them event-related announcements that include survey options such as:
- Are you planning to come?
- How many people in your party?
- Are you bringing guests?
- What food will you commit to bring? (Select from the list)
- Almost any question you want!
The data is held on a server so your ministry leadership can simply login and view a report, rather than get overwhelmed with email responses. In addition, you can email out the survey results so that everyone in your church can know the results.
The free software can integrate with many email clients including Outlook and Outlook express. It can read your email database directly from your email client so there is literally no data entry or data migration issues.
A few months ago I told you about another FREE survey resource called www.SurveyMonkey.com which is a great tool for formal surveys and polls of your ministry community. RSVME is different in that the purpose of this survey tool is to pull people together for events. If your church has alot of events, and what church doesn't, RSVME has great potential for increasing people's awareness of the event. It also helps them feel personally invited to the event (This is reason enough to use it), and it enables them to participate with the event and feel like they can make a worthy contribution.
I hope this tool can help your ministry build a more intimate and effective Christ-centered community.
| September 7, 2005 |
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Announcing www.davidsdesign.net It has amazed me how many calls and emails I have received wondering whether or not I provided custom design and development services. Obviously, I have not communicated very effectively. YES...I would love to help you ministry create a dynamic multimedia presence on the internet. Select the links below for just a few samples of recent custom projects. |
| September 3, 2005 |
The downloadable zip file contains three file options:
1) Click and drag the .exe file to your desktop to launch radio and television stations directly from your PC. (Internet access is still required)
2) To embed the radio portal within your E-Church Network website, save the .swf file to your PC. Then open your wesbite editor, select the Flash button, and browse to find and insert the file. Your field size must be set to 300 px wide by 100 px high.
3) For non E-Church Network members, we have also included the html page so that you can ftp the SWF and html file into a common folder within your website server, then utilize a button or text-link to open the html file.
Please enjoy this radio portal, and tell others about it! >> Download Here
| August 9, 2005 |
August is the month for gearing-up and mobilizing our ministry teams. However, before you get too far along in the process, please have all your staff and key lay leaders view my FREE online webinar entitled “The Dynamics of Team Building”. The content within this webinar will help you construct effective ministry teams as never before, and also help you understand why some teams you have created in the past exhibited minimal impact.
I have also included in the webinar an integrated assessment to help your leadership understand the organizational personality of your church. If you think about it, people have personalities, and your church is comprised of people, therefore people in key leadership roles help define a personality for the organization. Why is it important to know your ministry’s personality? All personality types possess strengths and weaknesses. Your ministry’s personality explains why your organization may thrive in some areas of ministry and struggle in others. However, unlike an individual’s personality which cannot change, organizational personalities can mature and transform according to the influences of the people who are unleashed into key leadership roles.
To maximize your ministry’s ability to mobilize highly effective ministry teams: go to http://www.echurchessentials.com/features/teams/ and click on the "Team Dynamics - FREE WEBINAR" link.
| July 2, 2005 |
Just this past week I spoke with a person who is on staff with the Communication department of a major Christian college. The Communication department evidently had developed a survey, seeking input for the future direction and offerings of the department. Their survey had been developed in a traditional paper format for mass-mailing. Although I do not know the the specifics of this project, let's do a little cost-accounting analysis using approximate expenditures:
- Staff Development: 25 hours at $20/hour = $500
- Printing & Stuffing of 5,000 Surveys: $1,200
- Addressing & Mailing:$1,600
- Pre-Paid Return Postage: $1,100
- Manual Data Entry into a Custom Database/Report Generator: $600
Total Cost: $5,000
Survey's delivered through the mail tend to have an approximate return rate of 3% and may take a month or longer to recover data. This means that the college can expect to receive at best 150 returned surveys. This is a per-unit cost of $33.33. An additional complication is that people over the age of forty tend to be the one's most likely to return a paper survey in the mail. If the goal of this survey was to generate future direction for the Communication department, then a survey should have been created and distributed that would target adults under the age of 35.
In short, this is an antiquated and expensive method for polling a membership base.
Could your church benefit from an easy and effective way of polling your membership base? (And, by the way, the survey methodology is extremely cheap). Use an online survey. For less than 1% of the investment made by the college in the example above, your ministry can create unlimited surveys. What is more, you can create your survey in minutes and have instant feedback from the present and emerging generations within your ministry membership base.
As an example, I have created a FREE (free for me and free for you...how cheap do you want!!!) survey using SurveyMonkey. Please take a moment to complete the ten question survey. I hope to post the results in next month's newsletter.
>> Take Survey
Sign up with E-Church Essentials before August 15, 2005 and have your choice of:
- Five hours of free design & development! ($250 value)
- First three months of E-Church Network membership free! ($240 value)
Register your ministry now! Cick the Start Now button to take advantage of this limited time offer:
Once your ministry is registered, simply email us and tell us which promotional offer you prefer...it's that easy.
David Posthuma, of E-Church Essentials, has many years of graphic design and marketing experience. He has developed marketing campaigns for numerous nationally released products.
E-Church Essentials not only provides your ministry with the software to develop powerful online ministry programs, but we can also help your ministry with everything you need from branding, design, media development and marketing.
Our services include:
|
Banding Services |
Website Design |
Blog Design |
| E-Learning Course Development | E-Book Development | Flash Multimedia Presentations |
| Brochure Design | Service Program Design | Marketing Services |
Some examples of previous work include:
Parent Pager
E-Church Essentials
ExploreGod.com
(Fall 2005 Launch)
Free Pics 
Genesis
Common Creed
Click on the banner above to print the pdf online brochure (1.5MB) for more information. Or call David toll-free at 1-800-724-1159.
| June 16, 2005 |
It was an interesting process for me personally, as I reflected upon what faith perspectives within me have mellowed over the years, and what perspectives have become more solidified.
To view my personal results (please to not use this information to hold theological arguments with me) and to launch the quiz for yourself, click here.
| June 3, 2005 |
A new online ministry is soon to launch...iMediaFeed. I have talked much about the new broadcast medium called podcasting. iMediaFeed will make broadcasting your blog-based MP3 audio meditations, songs and teachings extremely easy.
Todd and Joe of iMediafeed write:
"iMediafeed.com created a global partner RSS network for churches and other organizations seeking to spread the gospel of Jesus Christ. We encode, host, distribute and manage all your media. Simply send us your content and then watch the results. We use open, standards based formats to ensure the widest possible audience. With guaranteed results, we are the best solution for your Godcasting needs. Check out our website for more information and to signup for the special introductory price!"
We have received many requests from ministries for discipleship curriculum that they may utilize within their e-learning training centers. While our e-learning system was designed to enable your ministry to create your own courses quite easily, many pastors and staff would still like to have other course content to draw upon.
This Fall, E-Church Essentials plans to begin releasing editable curriculum including a New Testament Survey, an Introduction to Christianity, and an Old Testament Survey. With additional courses to follow. Course may be purchased individually. We will provide more information as the materials become ready for launch.
In addition, we are actively seeking to network with publishers and professional curriculum authors who may be willing to make their curriculum available for use in an e-learning environment. (Note: Curriculum placed within an e-learning environment is secure from theft, printing and re-distribution unless intentionally made shareable). If you are aware of curriculum authors who may wish to make their curriculum available for use in an e-learning environment, we will soon be adding a curriculum resource guide to our corporate website. Please contact David at info@echurchessentials.com or call toll-free at 1-800-724-1159.
Check out these curriculum suppliers:
>> World Christian Resource Directory
>> Abide In Christ
>> Southern Baptist Convention
(Click on the banner to visit the website)
E-Church Essentials is releasing hundreds of FREE photo-art for use within your ministry websites, blogs and e-learning courses. These images may be used even on websites and blogs not hosted by E-Church Essentials. High resolution CD volumes are available for $99/each.
If you are a photo-artist or a graphic artist, and would like to include your artwork within the FreePics website so that they may benefit ministry, please visit the FreePics website and select the "Submit Photos" link within the website header for contractual information.
Click on the banner to download a FREE News Reader. A News Reader enables you to create a custom "News Paper" on your desktop from which you can read the blogs of your choice.
To use your news reader once you have installed it, look for either the
or 
news feed pictograms in pages of websites and blogs that you enjoy.Place the mouse arrow on one of the above pictograms (in your desired blog) and click the right mouse button, then choose "Copy Shortcut".
Start RssReader and go to add(+) channel/feed and then paste (click right mouse button) the url and press "OK". Add as many feeds to this free RSS reader as you want and use it as a free news aggregator.
I want to encourage you to download the software, it only take a moment. I also want to encourage you to point your news reader to this newsletter blog so that you can receive articles, information and resources to help your ministry be more effective in our current postmodern culture.