When you go to buy something on eBay, you look at the seller’s reputation, their “Feedback Profile.” It’s that magic number that says this person is okay to buy from. What is interesting to me is that a rating of 97% is great, but you may not buy from the person if you see two people saying the same bad thing about the seller, even if there are 300 people saying the opposite same good thing about the seller.

If you’re looking at ChMS products for your church, don’t throw Fellowship One out of consideration because of one post that I’ve written.  For my church, ACS is the right solution.  For your church, Fellowship might well be the direction you need to head.  Weigh the pros and cons of each heavily before making such a spendy decision.  I write posts, good and bad, about what I know and who I’ve interacted with.  To me, not sharing what I know would be burdensome, so I hang it out there.  The decisions are always yours to make.

Please hear me well that I am not bashing Fellowship Technologies.  My interactions with them otherwise have always been positive.  They seem to be a terrific company overall.  In fact, I’ve personally recommended them to a couple of churches who have ended up purchasing the product.

I am very encouraged by the quick response of Fellowship on yesterday’s post, and I wanted to share that with you here.

Curtis Harris wrote in this morning:

Matthew, I can’t apologize enough for the blog comment that apparently came from our company.  This is nothing we would ever condone and certainly not something I would want to be a part of; for so many of us, me included, this is a chance to use our God given skills for His purpose… it is our mission field.  I am very embarrased that this type of thing has happened and prior to this took some pride that we were above all that.  Sorry again.  Curtis Harris, Co-Founder and Director of Product Strategy.

Ah, just as I’m writing this post, I noticed that Jeff Hook, the CEO of Fellowship Technologies commented on the previous one.  It’s certainly worth a read.
Read the rest of this entry »

For most of this week, I have been working on a news blog for our church. This has been a fun process, and it looks like it will be a tremendous success for our church. I still have a lot of work to do, namely making it look like the rest of the site, or making a new template for both at the same time, or bringing the rest of the site into Wordpress. I’m just not sure about all that yet.

This begs the question, why would a church want a news blog? For us, it’s simple, we’ve got a ton of stuff going on all the time and only pockets of people knew about what was going on. Yesterday, our adult minister posted about the Thursday Club, an Alzheimer’s respite program. I’ve been on staff for over a year, and I didn’t have a foggy clue that we organize such a program.

So, here are some of the benefits of operating a news blog, which is basically just a regular blog (don’t all blogs post “news?”):

• Increased communication of news with our members, visitors, and community
• Syndication through RSS is great. Now, posting one time can result in headlines being shown on the individual ministry’s page, Facebook, MySpace, Upcoming, Twitter and more.
• Syndication through Feedburner’s e-mail delivery is awesome. Now, for those who are interested in a daily digest of our news items, we don’t have to remember to send it to them directly - Feedburner does it for us!
• Since Wordpress is easier to use than our CMS, the staff are more likely to update more frequently! Woot!
• For those who are really computer challenged, I can set up Windows Live Writer to get them going!

I could go on listing benefits, but I’ve got to tell you that I’m thoroughly excited about this. No one else on staff is quite as excited as I am, but that’s how it is with all techno-victories - we celebrate alone: no ticker tape parade, no fiesta, no cheers of loud applause at the finish line, just the silent satisfaction of a job well done.

I am proud of our staff too, in the two days that I’ve been pushing them to write, I’ve had 8 of them post 13 news stories… not bad at all!

I love blogs. I love reading them; I love commenting on them; and, mostly, I love the connection that they bring. For instance, I am associated with a group of Church IT bloggers, called the Church IT Roundtable. Even though I have never met most of these guys and never attended an in-person roundtable, they still consider me part of the group.  This group has been my life-line and has bailed me out of a number of problems.  I don’t have to know all the answers; I just need to know how to find them.

I have been training our staff recently on how to use Google Reader to subscribe to blogs. Yesterday, I trained them how to set up a blog on Wordpress.com and gave some of the simple rules of blogging. Why am I pushing this so hard? Below are a few of the examples of why I love blogs:

• When we needed new solutions for printing check-in labels, Jason Powell gave me the name of a good vendor. That began a profitable relationship with deep discounts.
• When I posted about iSCSI frustrations on Twitter, Ed Buford immediately offered to help me out.
• When I posted about our backup strategy, Stuart weighed in on the discussion and gave me some very timely insights.
• The blogs of various Church IT guys have formed a network that provides strength to each church represented. We’re not alone.
• At the ACS Convention last week, Linda from Northwoods asked me how I know Jason Lee. She was a bit surprised that the only connection we have is from blogs. Now he and I can unite to pick on Dean.

This only scratches the surface of the power of blogs and the community that can be created by them. I’m curious if you are a part of a group similar to CITRT, perhaps for Children’s Ministers or Church Business Administrators. Let me know if you are, our staff would love to join the conversation.

Props to Kevin McCord for his post on why you should subscribe to him:

Let me give you my bottom line:

1. You are too busy to visit my website.
2. You don’t want to be frustrated when I don’t have anything new posted.
3. Subscribing will solve both of those problems.

I like that, a plain and simple reason that you should subscribe to blogs. Today, I took 45 minutes to explain the process of subscribing to RSS feeds to our staff.  I showed them the beautiful tools that Google has to offer, including:

• iGoogle - You make your Google frontpage look like you want it to and include gadgets that you want displayed.
• Google Reader - The easy way to subscribe to feeds and read them
• Google Reader Gadget for Personalized Home - Read all of your feeds without leaving your home page
• Google Blogsearch - Finding blogs of interest just got easier with Blogsearch.  Find all the important children’s ministry blogs, for example.

For the CITRT readers, this is a GREAT topic to train your staff on.  We, as uber-geeks, know how much benefit can be gained from the conversation platform that blogs provide.  Our staff aren’t typically there yet.  However, blogging is becoming more and more mainstream and less of a thing that only the geeks are doing.  Let’s get our children’s ministers, business administrators, bookkeepers, and others involved in a community of others who do the same thing they do.  I bet it’ll make a tremendous impact.

Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll be teaching our staff how to subscribe to RSS feeds, use Google Reader, and start their own blogs. I love this video from the fine folks at CommonCraft.com about what blogs are and why everyone should have one.

I really believe that each minister in every church should, at a minimum, read blogs from others in similar ministries. However, as I’ve seen with the CITRT folks, it helps the whole when each of us write too. We all have something to offer.

So, ministers and ministerial support staff, I encourage you to start getting involved in social media.

Also, check out Aaron Marshall’s post on RSS feeds and Social Bookmarking. This is a great start for your journey.