Effective Church Communications

Managing Change—advice for ministry assistants, part one

7 March, 2014 By grhilligoss@gmail.com Leave a Comment

Change advice by Gayle Hilligoss — Change is always scary, but the advice in the article will help you navigate it successfully.

Ed. note: Gayle Hilligoss returns to ECC after not writing for a few months and it is great to have her back. This article is so packed with good advice, I cut it into two parts. Take time to think through and apply what she says--change is constant today and this advice in your heart will keep you prepared. Your pastor leaves.

A new pastor arrives. Staff members move or come onboard. Software is upgraded. Computers crash. You gain additional responsibilities. Another assistant is hired. The church moves into a new building. Some members of the church are in turmoil. New programs are started. A birthday brings challenges. Marriage, divorce, a birth or a death causes a transition. A tragedy hits close to home. These are just some of the changes ministry assistants have faced during the past year. Regardless of the type of change affecting you, consider these strategies for managing transition. Each can be adapted to fit whatever change you are experiencing—personal or professional.

• Acknowledge that change is constant and need not be viewed as bad. Review your attitude; is your first instinct when thinking about new circumstances a negative one? Initiate a positive change by simply deciding to look for the good in any transition. See your new situation as an opportunity for growth.

• Resolve to learn from the experience. Rather than being swept up in runaway emotions that may overcome others, stay calm. Assess your strengths; identify skills you already have that will help you deal with your new situation. Then determine what new skills would be helpful and make plans to acquire those skills. Call on your past successes and failures; put those lessons to work and share them with others who may not embrace change as well as you.

• Share any misgivings with someone who has been in your shoes. Ask for insight and suggestions. Likewise, when someone is facing a circumstance you have already experienced, be willing to answer questions and give support. Mutual encouragement helps everyone do better in unfamiliar territory. Knowing someone else has hurdled what may seem an impossible obstacle instills courage.

• Keep events in perspective. There is change and then there is CHANGE. Be careful not to let either take over your life. Don’t allow your conversations to be monopolized by the present challenge.

• Stay flexible. Take the initiative by constantly stretching your comfort zone; learn new skills, take courses, meet new people, try different experiences, take calculated risks. Even small adventures are beneficial; take the long route home, try a new hairstyle, read an unknown author, ad lib an untried recipe. Stretch and enjoy!

Is your church ready for when Microsoft drops support for XP and Windows 7?

12 February, 2014 By Yvon Prehn 5 Comments

How does the decision to quit support for Windows XP and 7 affect your church?

It's good to hold on to some older things: traditions, friends, treasured memories—computer operating systems, not so much.

I confess, though I work in technology every day, with the exception of Camtasia (the program I use to create training videos) I HATE to upgrade perfectly good working software. Like I know many of you, that includes MS Publisher 2007 and 2010.

An operating system is another thing. It is the foundation for everything your computer does and if it is too out-dated, or not supported anymore by the company that made it, like what is happening with Windows XP, scheduled for April 8, 2014, it can be dangerous to the security of your work. Support for Windows 7 is also scheduled for either 2015 or 2020 (more about that later in the article).

If you want more details, for an excellent overall article on the what will happen when Microsoft no longer supports XP, check out the following one by USA TODAY. I like it because it isn't by a particular reseller and so isn't aggressively pushing the purchase of a new machine. It also has a humorous video about the demise of Windows XP.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/baig/2014/02/11/windows-xp-the-end-is-coming-fast/5392269/

What to do? Some personal advice

My advice (and I do not claim to be a hardware/software expert, so what follows is merely my opinion) first concerns what not to do:

DON'T even try to upgrade to Windows 8 on an old XP computer. It won't work, your software won't work, and the bulletin still has to go out and unless you have a typewriter hanging around in the office, you'll be out of luck.

And, unlike what many resellers tell you, I wouldn't rush into a Windows 8 machine. Here are the current stats on operating systems, from the same article above:

Windows 7. . . has a 47.49% share. Microsoft's more recent operating systems, Windows 8 and Windows 8.1, come in with modest 6.63% and 3.95% market shares, respectively.

I love my Windows 7 machine and simply haven't had the money or time to switch to Windows 8 (and it doesn't seem like many other people in the world have either). You can get really great deals on Windows 7 machines. Walmart sells them online as does Amazon and many other reputable online resellers. If you want to make the big jump to a Windows 8 machine--that will save you having the face the upgrade decision again in few years or depending upon when Microsoft stops supporting Windows 7. The question follows: "When will Microsoft end support for Windows 7?" There are various reports floating around, but the best answer I've found is following:

Microsoft will stop mainstream support on January 12, 2015. But the company will keep providing extended support until January 14, 2020.

"Well, thank you," you're probably saying. "That's as clear as a new industry acronym."

Let me explain:

Through January 12, 2015, Microsoft will provide the same complete support you have today. You'll receive both security and non-security updates. Your warranty claims will be considered and possibly honored. If your license came with no-charge incident support (yes, it exists), you'll continue to receive it. Microsoft may even add features and change the design (but not, I hope, removing the Start menu).

But in 2015, Windows 7 will go onto extended support, which just covers the basics. You'll still receive free security updates, but non-security-related hotfixes will only be available on a paid subscription--and you'll have to start the subscription before April 15, 2015 (if you live in the USA, that's a date with unpleasant associations in any year). There will be no free support, Microsoft won't honor warranty claims, and the company will not add new features.

By the way, XP's mainstream support ended on April 14, 2009; Vista's ended on April 12 of this year. So if you're satisfied with the support you're getting on this operating systems, you probably won't have much to worry about with Windows 7 for another seven years.

For what it's worth, XP's extended support ends on April 8, 2014. Vista's will end on April 11, 2017.

from: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2010820/how-long-will-microsoft-support-windows-7.html

One more reason that adds to the uncertainty in this situation is that Microsoft just got a CEO and since Windows 8 has clearly not been embraced by the buying public, it's uncertain what we'll see in the coming year. It could be a more recent repeat of the Vista disaster and may be discarded or modified in a similar way. I have no idea, but I also wouldn't spend a lot of money getting a system that may change drastically.

What to do in your church office?

The most important thing is to know what is happening and when. You do need to deal with the ending for the support of XP primarily because when Microsoft no longer supports security updates, with all the malicious virus and other harmful material on the web, your computer could easily become infected and make life very difficult for you.

Take time to talk about it with your church business manager, pastor, technology adviser. The decision will be totally different for different churches based on your size, complexity, budget, and the time and skills available to people who must use the programs. Don't let technology or the latest updates be your master. Technology is your servant to help you do ministry more effectively and considering the people and ministry implications must be an important part of your decision. What might be essential for a large, urban church with a big budget might be a ministry nightmare for a small, cash-challenged church where one person does all the office work.

Talk to other churches in your area. Pray for wisdom—the Lord cares deeply about your everyday tasks in the church as you work hard to share his message. Trust him to help you make your decision and He will.

As I said earlier, my opinions here are based on my situation and I know many ministry communication situations are different. Personally, I may get a Windows 8 machine if the new CEO announces support for it,but I know I'll switch over to it kicking and screaming. How much I keep running Windows 7 will depend on how well the Windows 8 machine (whatever version that might be t the time) handles the software I use to help all of you. With Windows 8 there is also the question of Office 360 and I'm not ready to tackle that yet. I'm doing a lot of work with Google Docs now and I'll pass on that after I learn it better (am really liking it so far)—it's free as opposed to a never-ending cost for Office Cloud subscriptions—which is a definite bonus for cash-challenged ministries.

***IMPORTANT UPDATE: Skimming the New York Times online today (2-14-2014), I came across the following article that I strongly recommend you read--it gives additional practical advice on the challenge of ever-changing technology. One caveat--we can't all afford Apple hardware, so ignore that part if it doesn't apply, but good overall advice anyway. Just click the title here to go to it: How to Survive the Next Wave of Technology Extinction

If you have comments or experience in this area, please do share them in the comment section here! Really need/want your comments on this!

Can your congregation read your newsletter on their mobile phone?

22 January, 2014 By Yvon Prehn 3 Comments

You may have noticed that this newsletter came in a new format –and this was much more than a simple design decision. It was a change from a simple layout using a newsletter template to a text-only format and it was from a non-responsive to a responsive format.

I actually feel pretty dumb it took me so long to do this about this because I firmly believe in the present and growing importance of mobile phone communications.

I'm far from the only one who thinks this. According to a recent article in Litmus.com, a site that tracks email effectiveness:

It’s official: mobile now accounts for the majority of email opens, with a 51% share. That’s an increase of three percentage points since the previous record of 48% from September and October. Desktop opens now make up 31% of opens, while webmail has dipped to 18%.

https://litmus.com/blog/mobile-opens-hit-51-percent-android-claims-number-3-spot

In spite of knowing the importance of mobile and working very hard to make my website compatible with mobile phones and tablets, and making it a responsive site, I forgot all about making one very important part of my communication ministry compatible with mobile phones: my newsletter.

Ways to make a newsletter easier to read on your mobile phone

Below I'll share with you what I'm doing to make the newsletter easy to read on a mobile phone. This includes some of the changes I made before this last week.

I decided to have my newsletter be a blog broadcast of the latest articles on my website. What this means is that the newsletter program I use (AWeber) sends the newsletter out automatically.
I use AWeber as my newsletter creator because it does blog broadcasts better than the other programs I tried.
AWeber has recently created templates for mobile phone newsletters, but to use them, you have to create your newsletter using them. Here is the article about them: http://www.aweber.com/blog/email-marketing/mobile-responsive-email-templates.htm
Because I use the automatic blog broadcast, that doesn't work for me.
Currently even the templates for the blog broadcast aren't mobile compatible. This is where I made a mistake—when I switched to the blog broadcast, I tested the blog broadcast template I chose on my computer, not my mobile phone. This week I was reading an article about making sure your newsletters are compatible on your mobile phone and I realized I hadn't tested mine on it.
When I did, as they say, "my bad!" –I realized how hard it was to read. The template was not responsive. It was a shrunken version of a computer screen-complatible newsletter. It was hard to read and none of us have time to pinch and move the screen around.
I went back to AWeber and after trying other templates and modifying them, I realized that the text-only format was the only one that would work.
That was fine with me because on a mobile phone, we don't really need graphics for a quick newsletter skimming of topics that go back to your website for longer articles for the complete article. The purpose of most newsletters is information--not to share great artwork and this format does that well.

If you are reading this on your mobile phone, you see the result. If you don't have a mobile phone--borrow one and check it out.

The bottom line is that making our newsletters easier to read on a mobile phone is simply one more tool to help us better share the messages on our websites and ministries that will help people find Jesus and grow to maturity in Him.

How to get any color from the web into MS Publisher

13 January, 2014 By Yvon Prehn Leave a Comment

This video shows you how to solve the challenging problem of when you see a color that you like on the web and want to use it--but how do you get that color into MS Publisher so you can use it? Not a similar color, but the exact same color--how do you do it?

This short, but incredibly helpful video will show you how to download a tool that will identify the color and then will give you the RGB values you can put into MS Publisher to make the color available to you. Don't worry if you don't know what I just meant about "putting RGB values into MS Publisher"--the video shows you how to do that also.

The video is one of our "FREE for 48 hrs" videos and after that it will only be available to Effective Church Communication Members.

Below the video are the step-by-step instructions for what was shown in the video.

How to get any color from the web into MS Publisher

•Process for Firefox Browser

•Go to http://colorzilla.com

•Download

•It will automatically go into the tools in Firefox

•Open a web page

•Click on Tools—Colorzilla

•The RGB numbers will appear

•Copy and put them into MS Publisher and use as you want!

Colors of the year for 2014 and inspiration on to use them

8 January, 2014 By Yvon Prehn Leave a Comment

Pantone's color of the year 2014 is Radient Orchid-- a great accent color for church communications.

Using the colors of the year isn't essential, but learning about them is fun and trying them can add a contemporary and timely feel to your communications. Below is a short video tour of the colors of the year from 3 organizations, plus some ideas for how to use them.

As you'll see the various organizations have different opinions on what the most important color is and two of them (you'll see which ones when you watch the video) would work well as accent colors in church communications. For instructions on how to get the colors into MS Publisher, check out this video: How to get any color from the webs into MS Publisher.

Below the video is a list of direct links for all the resources in the video.