Cause to Pause

As a rule, I like things that work and play well with together. It’s no secret we are an ACS shop. A big part of that is the support department, the other is the tie in between their online member offering (AccessACS) and their web CMS (siteExtend). As a CMS, siteExtend is the easiest I have worked with because of the way the back end is laid out. Everything is listed in a series of “cabinets” or “managers”. There’s one for content, one for media, one for channels, etc. The handling of local and global CSS and JS files is the easiest I have worked with so far. It’s a nice piece, but where they really shine is in the linkage with AccessACS. You can read about how we used that to streamline our Elder meetings and reduce paper costs here.

This is all driven from your local database. If you have a group, it doesn’t matter what the group is, you can create a private “channel” on your website that you can then populate with various information. How does it look? It looks like this:

As you can see, it is pretty easy to set up the private channel. Once you create a new small group, activity, class, etc. and do an upload, it will automatically become available within Extend. In this case, anyone who is a member of the Activity Group Leadership>Current Elders and Staff can log into the private channel. Once they are removed from that group, such as an elder rolling off their term, their login will no longer work for that channel. You can go all the way down to the “fourth element” in an activity group, which in this example would have been Leadership>Current Elders and Staff>Hospitality Commission>Fall Festival Committee>Chairperson. Yes, you can get that “granular”. You can also create a channel that is as wide as available to anyone with an AccessACS login. No matter what group they are in – or not in.

When churches talk about integration between our websites and our groups, we generally think “How can I get a list of groups on my site.” which results in some type of iframe or “finder” device. But, if you are going to use your site as more than a “digital brochure”, and there are content pieces that you don’t want to  out and around….or worse yet – PRINT. How are you going to do that? There is some information that your members or regular attenders may want to see, but it really wouldn’t be appropriate for a visitor or someone checking your church out. How would you do that? Could you set up a channel or a whole group of channels tied to logins in less than a minute?

ps. We did set up a wiki site for our budget and controlled the login via Extend.

Better late than never.

A little over a week ago the annual ACS Technologies convention took place in Louisville, Ky. Here’s some of my random thoughts:

1. IT Roundtable. Dean Lisenby always hosts this. This year it was opened to non-ACS customers. Guess what, we all have the same problems. Treading the line between “equipping for ministry” and “letting them do whatever they want”, between “securing the resources we have been entrusted with” and “hampering ministry”. That is what makes CITRT so valuable. Join it today.

   Lot of discussion on Google apps and who “owns” the data. If a staff person uses their personal Gmail account and leaves, gets hit by a bus, etc. then what? If you don’t provide easy tools, they will just find their own and guess what – you end up supporting them anyway.
   If you do “go Google” do you “go all the way and ditch Office” or use a combination approach?

   Darryl Hunter was there, as was Jason Powell and a host of GCC folks including Kem Meyer. Funny how when she spoke all the keyboards went silent.
   I am guessing there was somewhere around 45-50 people in the room.

2. For the conference itself, it was supposed to be completely different than previous years. And different it was. Each morning and afternoon there were three main sessions taught by teams made up of ACS users. Not employees. These classes changed the focus from “you can do ‘x’” to “here’s what we did, what worked, where the holes were and how we overcame them….or didn’t”. Instead of having someone who knew the software, but happens to volunteer in their church, – or used to work in a church; you have someone who still lives and breathes the same environment you do every day and but happens to use some of the same tools. Subtle shift, but big perception change. As big as going from “theoretical” to “practical”.
3. There was also a “main stage” in the display area that had the equivalent of “live 10 minute infomercials” to show the “what you can do” aspect. I give those presenters a lot of credit. That had to be tough as people would basically just walk by, but I was able to catch the ones I needed to and it helped.
4. There seemed to be less ACS staff there, but a lot more interaction. The set-up was less “convention/trade-show booth-y” and more circular.

My personal takeaways:

1. I picked up a lot more information on topics I had been over before. Stewardship and Communications strategy were the two big ones.
2. I left with some serious projects I would like to get moving on. Done right, it will probably keep us busy for about three years. One of which may be MobileCause or some other form of mass text messaging.
3. This was a much better format. It is hard to quantify “interaction” without a lot of surveys etc. but from a customer standpoint it was definitely higher.

The big one:

Monvee
Multiple keynotes this year, including from John Ortberg and the founders of Monvee. Monvee officially “came out of beta” the day before the convention.
(continue reading…)

This past Tuesday was our second month of going “paperless” for our monthly Elder meeting. Let’s put that in perspective: As a denominational church with history and structure, our normal “docket” included:

• Agenda
• Membership Report
• Minutes of the previous month’s meeting
• Minutes from all six leadership commissions (Education, Missions, Stewardship, etc.)
• Minutes from the Council meeting of all six chairs
• Minutes from the Deacon’s meeting
• Minutes from the Sanctuary Guild
• Minutes from a few smaller committees
• Various other correspondence
• Closing devotional and worship

Total packet would be between 20-30 pages – or basically one ream of paper each month, plus a lot of time spent organizing and stuffing folders.
For years we have been emailing the information out prior with limited success. There were still several volunteer leaders who “brought copies” of their minutes at the last minute. With everyone having full copies of the minutes in front of them, and their focus being the table directly in front of them, it became a type of “story time” with each person reading their report. Needless to say, this made for some long meetings.

Solution: Paperless

So here’s what we did:

1. Created a private channel on our website. Login is tied to their member login and participation in the Church Leadership>Session activity group set up in AccessACS. As soon as someone is added to this group, their current login allows them to see this channel: 
      
   We have been putting reports online for a while getting leadership used to looking here. Minutes are still available to the congregation at large by contacting the church office, just not online. ‘Cause when it comes to visitors, nothing says “”love of Jesus” like committee meeting minutes.
2. Put minutes submission templates on this page (see right side of image). Submission is accepted via two formats. An MS Word template for download and an online form.
3. When minutes are submitted to Staff, they are added to one content block or “page” for each month. (see above)
4. Run the meeting completely from a projector.

Meeting result

1. Minutes submitted more timely. If the office doesn’t get them in time to be online, there is no backup plan.
2. No more “story time”. When it came time for each department’s report, it was either “My report is up there, that pretty much says it all.” or “My minutes are up there, I just want to highlight a couple items.”
3. Speed. Only the items that need to be addressed are given air time and not because of a mandate by the Moderator.
4. Efficiency. Those items that are discussed get sufficient attention and brains aren’t already fogged over.
5. Each month’s agenda is built as the month progresses. Instead of springing all the info at once, leaders can view the page (or RSS it) and have access to meeting minutes as they take place. They can view and comment directly from their browser.

For the last two months, it has made these meetings remarkably smooth. Next stop: Annual Budget process via wiki.