Church Tech Geeks

8th February 2010 | Comments (View)

Text reblogged from Church Tech Dump

Roll Your Own Digital Signage 2.0

ChurchTechDump has an amazing post about digital signage:

A while back, I wrote a series of posts detailing how I created a digital signage solution of Henderson Hills Baptist Church using modified AppleTV.

While the hacked AppleTV worked well enough, it was not quite as robust as I wanted, could not play video well, and would not auto-scale for different display sizes. So I’ve been working on a new solution.

Now I have something ready to show. We’re using this solution at our Edmond Campus and it’s been received well. The video below shows it working:

See how it all works over at ChurchTechDump

9th July 2009 | Comments (View)

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Other Resources

While I love that your hear and reading my blog, there are a lot of other excellent resources out there.

ChurchTechTalk - A weekly church tech podcast by an amazing group of tech leaders.

ChurchTechMatters - A blog by church tech volunteers.

ChurchTechArts - A blog that focuses on sound/video/light.

ChurchCrunch

Church IT Help

ChurchTechy

If you have another one leave it in the comments.

20th June 2009 | Comments (View)

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VBS Registration

Three years ago I was approached by my church’s Childrens Pastor about moving all our paper registration we do online.  This was done for a few reasons:

1. Cut down on admin time entering all the information into excel database.
2. Cut down on the last minute payments or no payments.
3. Allow people to pay with credit cards.

So with our church not having a merchant account (an account with your local bank to accept credit card payments) we needed a provider to deal with that.  The best option we’ve found is called RegOnline and its amazing.  Mainly for the image below.

This was after our first 110 registration, we have 90% of registration paid for and done and RegOnline will wire the money into our account.  They charge about $6 per registration including the credit card processing fees and $4 if they pay by cheque, best spent money ever.

Setup is easy, I got the entire form done in about an hour and half done with our logo and everything nicely looking on the form.  Added a registration button to our VBS website and done.

Some extra benefits we liked:

• No more confusing excel spreadsheet only the person making it understood.
• Easily accessible information for medical/missing children.
• Nametags for the kids are all ready to print out.

Questions about this? Leave it in the comments.

5th May 2009 | Comments (View)

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Forms & Registration

Church’s are using their websites for more than just a few static web pages.  You have your calendar of events, your church documents, some even have a membership database online.  For my church getting information from a user has been something they recently have wanted to do, for submitting prayer requests and being able to sign-up for the upcomming church picnic.

Obviously running on a church budget free or close to free is required also being able to use and export to an excel spreadsheet is important.  I decided to use Wufoo which makes a pretty form like this.

Five minutes of work and I gave the login information for Wufoo to the staff member who can any point of time login and download a excel spreadsheet with everybody who’s signed up information.

We’re also using this for our VBS volunteer sign-up; but, use something else for kids registration as we collect payment online which doesn’t work so well in Wufoo.

Collect information online another way?  Let me know in the comments.

28th April 2009 | Comments (View)

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Church Email

Hey Everyone,

About two months ago my church’s server hard drive crashed and was gone.  For their email system they use Microsoft Exchange.  To get the server and Microsoft Exchange back online took about a week due to we don’t have a full-time IT guy, only a volunteer.  So emails for all their pastors were down for a week, if you work in a church you will find whenever your email doesn’t work you will have no idea what to do.  Your meetings, discussions, and a whole look of organising is done through email.

If your a small church I see no reason why you should be running this for yourself outsource it!

If your stuck on your Microsoft products and want to stay with Exchange then 1and1.com can provide you email accounts for $7 per account per month.

Google Apps is hosted email by Google along with a few other applications; but, you can just use the email part and for non-profits its FREE! And downtime?  There is so little you won’t even notice it.

23rd April 2009 | Comments (View)

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Websites for Ministries

Hi Everybody,

I’ve worked with a few different church and even been helped run a few ministries and people seem to be still stuck in the old world of “advertising”.  People aren’t looking for their local church in the newspaper anymore its online!  They do a google search and find out all the local church’s and their respective ministries their interested in.  So if your youth, children’s, young adult groups have no web precense good luck!

Your missing out on such a great promotional item to your community that requires a very little capital investment and more of just a pastor or lay worker time.  Not saying its easy, just compared to probably a lot of other things your church is doing or thinking about doing its simple.

And it gives everybody going a great resource too, in this Facebook/Twitter world we are living in now people are checking your website for events not calling the church or looking at their bulletin.