A New Approach to Marketing
Take a look at at the video by beyondrelevance.com. This video is a parable “If Starbucks Marketed like a Church”. It’s a constant reminder that we should take a guest friendly approach to our marketing and environment.
Flow Chart 2.0
So, I can’t take credit for this one, but still worthy of passing along…
Most churches (at least the smart ones) are taking a team approach to ministry. No longer is one person the one stop shop for an entire ministry or branch of ministries. Most Student Pastors and Children’s Pastors now have a team, Worship ministry has a team. This is a great idea…and highly recommended.
My problem is, when creating a flow chart or workflow, it’s really hard to communicate that team concept. It always seems so starchy and so power-trippy.
Recently at WOLC (the greatest church on the “freakin” plannet – www.mywayoflife.org) we implemented a new structure to our team of leaders. The table chart. Maybe it’s stolen, maybe it’s not, but I give credit to Pastor Wade for bringing it to our church.
The center of the table is your vision, sitting around the table is 4 or 5 chairs (depending on your structure). These chairs represent the major categories of ministry (ours are student, admin/operations, discipleship, worship, and eventually evangelism). Each of these chairs are also sitting at another table (these tables are represented by circles on the chart). At the center of those circles are the vision for that branch of minstry and around that table sits ministries that fall under that branch. For example, in my “admin/operations” branch falls: Production Team (lighting, media, video, sound), Marketing, General Administration, and Event Management. Obviously those ministries are represented by teams as well.
What a great way to convey a team concept. Starts in and works out, not starts up and falls down like a big-chief on a high chair.
Email me for a copy of ours for reference: blankenship1@gmail.com
Peace!
Out: Paper In: Synchronization
I learned something last year… it’s really easy to mis-communicate about calendar changes and updates when everyone is responsible for managing their own calendars. In fact, I can’t even remember how many times I had to reissue printed calendars and documents to ministry leaders over the first part of 2008.
I decided that I wanted to change that over the last quarter of of 08 and the future. Why not create one master calendar and have the other ministry leaders tap into this calendar, rather than managing their own?
No more printing, no more asking, “Do we have anything on the 30th of April?” This idea has brough huge clarity to our administration. Not only do the ministry leaders have an up-to-the-minute update on calendar changes, but I now have someone to serve as a second set of eyes on my calendar. If I have something wrong, I now have a team that can communicate that to me. It’s about teamwork.
So here’s how it works::
Apple Users: Stop using Entourage now, use iCal. iCal allows you to add layers to your calendars that gives you functionality to only give certain levels of ministry leaders the access to the events that pertain to their level of ministy need. You can also set up specific calendars to share tasks between yourself an ministry leaders to reduce the, what I call, “I’ve got it, you take it” tasks.
Create your calendar and then sign up for iCal Exchange or MobileMe. iCal Exchange is a free service that will host your calendar online. This allows you to publish, and have your team “Subscribe” to it using iCal by entering the URL supplied by iCal Exchange.
You can then use an inexpensive software calling “Spanning Sync” to sync your iCal to Google calendar so you can effectively communicate with the less-fortunate or as I call them: PC users.
Windows Users: The best option for you is Google Calendar. Please use an online resource if you need help with this service.
Feel free to post any questions you may have or help needed with setup.
Paper users: Can your daytimer or franklin covey do that?
Old Blog- New Idea
So I’ve decided to make a change. Doesn’t everyone have a blog about their thoughts, or their day, or what they think about this or that? I’ve realized that I want my blog to be about something that I can offer to help others in my role.
I’m learning every day and I want someone else to take what I learn and move forward.
Recently at Catalyst Conference Seth Godin talked about “Tribes”. People travel and live in tribes and that’s how most information is transferred today. I belive there’s a tribe of people yet to be created that change the way churches are organized.
Take what you need and throw away the rest.
I’m glad to be back. We’ll talk soon.
Gambling with fake money…
Yesterday we had our semi-annual company-wide meeting at work. A morning full of long — detail oriented presentations about finance, development, marketing, and more. What a bore (I’m a poet and didn’t know it). So after our long morning of meetings and catering… they had a nice afternoon planned.
UPS hired an entertainment company to come in and set up a casino in a large tent next to our meeting room. We each got 25,000.00 of UPS bucks to play with. Black jack, hold ‘em, craps, roulette, and more. What fun! We didn’t even have to lose any money.
The coolest part about it was, for every 10,000 we ended up with, we got tickets issued to enter in drawings for prizes.
I’m not a very good gambler, so, after the first 25,000.00 was gone there was a man walking around with more green to hand out.
totally free.
even if you blew yours.
he keeps you in the game.
What a great comparison to God. There were plenty of people wandering around after they blew their money and all they did was watch others play and win, and continue to play. But… there was a man giving out more money!
So often we find ourselves wandering around on empty. Watching others enjoy abundance, when we can have our own the whole time.
You. just. have. to. ask.
God has the amazing ability to refresh and restore our lives by simply asking. So why do we choose to wander around and get nothing and just wait for the game to start over. He just so happens to be wandering in our midst waiting for people to ask.
Stay in the game. Just ask God, he gives it. We just forget to ask sometimes.
