kylegilbert

So many great memories made over the summer, and some of them were captured in pixels. I’ve placed a few of my favorites here.

To help improve communications from our two-person communication team to the much larger church staff, we’ve recently implemented a new job workflow. While I know many people are happily using other tools, like Basecamp, we’ve found other solutions to be lacking in some of the key features that are important to our process.

Here’s our new workflow:

1) Ticket Origination via Web Form

Centralized Online Location for Requests

Request Form

This part is nothing new to our organization. For over a year we’ve had a centralized location where our staff can place  IT, graphic, video, or facility requests through an online site. (We use MachForm for our web forms.)

What’s new, is the way graphic and website requests are routed from that point forward.

2) Task Automatically Created in Project Management System

Task Management through Producteev

When the request form is submitted, that email ticket is set up to automatically generate a new task in Producteev, which we’re using as a task/project manager. We recently switched to Producteev because of its simplicity coupled with its impressive feature set and API. (But yes, I hate their logo.)

3) The Person Who Created the Ticket is Redirected to a Status Update Page

Status Update Page

Tag Names & Colors Instantly Updated through Producteev

This is my favorite part: Using the Producteev API, we redirect the staff person who created the ticket to a page that shows all the open and recently completed tickets on which our team is working. This includes the current status of each task, which we can update through tags in Producteev.

Overview

While I assume this system might not work well for every staff, we’ve already found it to be very helpful to ours for a number of reasons:

1. All requests are centrally located.
2. There are no required logins for a staff person to create a new ticket.
3. Anyone on our staff can easily see the status of all projects.
4. Status tags are simple to update, and since its integrated with our task management, it’s a seamless process for our communications team.

I’ve put together the video below to announce the newest step in our life and ministry.  Tip: make sure to watch the entire video.

Any time I’m working on a design project – whether it’s a website, a postcard, or creating a logo, finding the right fonts is an important part of the process.  If you’re like me, and you’ve amassed a large number of fonts on your computer, finding the right ones can sometimes be a daunting task.  Fortunately, there’s a website that I’ve been using for a few months that really helps with the process.

The site is called, WordMark.it, and it’s one of the best free design tools that I use on a regular basis.

All you do is enter part of a word or phrase to preview and then load your fonts.  The site will check the fonts you have installed on your computer and will let you preview those fonts all at once.

From there, you can select your favorites and even preview the fonts on a black background.  It’s very quick, simple, and helpful.

Check it out: WordMark.It

Never let loyalty and kindness leave you!
Tie them around your neck as a reminder.
Write them deep within your heart.

My mother-in-law wears a keepsake necklace.  Inside she has tiny photographs of my two children and the rest of her grandkids, and it’s always a special treat to them when she lets them gingerly open the locket to see the pictures inside.

Without her saying it, it’s clear that my mother-in-law treasures the necklace.  It’s a ever-present reminder of her grandkids and the special bond she has with each of them.

The passage I’ve quoted above uses exactly the same imagery as my mother-in-law.  Only, instead of photos of children, this locket contains two precious character traits that go unnoticed in our world today: loyalty and kindness.

Our culture is consumed with cleverness, humor, and popularity.  We all want to be in-the-know, and we’ve become obsessed with being beautiful and cool.

Tonight, I’m pondering what it is that I keep tucked away in my keepsake necklace.  I have a fairly good guess, and it’s not loyalty and kindness… but in this moment, I really want it to be.

Pretty sure this should be one of my focal verses for the next few months (or years).  You can read this passage as well as the context here.

What about you?  What’s your keepsake?

We’ve seen our church’s engagement on Facebook go from 200 to nearly 3,000 individuals over the past two years.  Here are a few tips that I’ve  learned along the way:

1. If you’re still using a group for your church or organization, don’t wait another day to make the move to a Facebook Page.

There are tons of benefits of pages over groups.  My favorite benefit is that when you post to your organization’s wall, that post will show up in the new feed of the people who like your page.  My second favorite thing (and this is a new feature of the updated Facebook pages) is that as an administrator, you can receive all new Wall posts via email.  This is especially helpful if you maintain multiple pages.  These email updates will keep your Facebook spaces from being polluted by spam wall posts for Russian brides and mail-in pharmaceuticals, and it will also help you to respond to to people in a timely fashion.

Unfortunately, there’s nothing automatic about making the change from a Facebook Group to a Facebook Page, but it’s fairly painless.  Set up a new Facebook Page and then message all the people in your existing group to let them know that you’re making the switch.  Make sure you provide a link to the new page, and let them know that you’ll be shutting down the old group in a certain number of days (a week seems to work nicely).

2. Give the responsibility to the right person.

While you’ll probably wan’t to hand off your Facebook admin rights to someone who is technically savvy, make sure that their love for people exceeds their ability to write code or navigate the internet.  Responding to people’s questions and concerns in a public setting requires tenderness, compassion, and discernment.  Pick someone who will represent your church well.

3. Make sure that your updates are interesting and engaging.

If you can, post videos and include photography. Posting short highlights from past weekend messages and upcoming events has worked very well for us (I would guess that 75% or more of our wall posts include graphics or video).  None of these things require new video footage – we just re-purpose existing video.

Also, when you post content, spend some time crafting the words.  There are many ways to say the same thing, so try to craft your phrases in a way that they elicit curiosity and spark interest.  This takes practice, but even a little effort will take you a long way.

Note: If you find yourself posting the same wrote message over and over again, or if you only post times changes and cancellations, you’re on the wrong track.  Always ask yourself, “Is this lame?” before you post something to your church’s Facebook Wall.  If the answer is yes very often, it’s time to change your strategy.

4. Don’t mess with your logo.

While you may be tempted to think it would be good to update your Facebook Page profile image to reflect a current sermon series or upcoming event, I would highly suggest that you reserve the profile image only for your church’s logo/brand.  Sermon series graphics are great, but post them to your wall instead.

5. Be strategic about your communications hub.

While Facebook is an excellent tool, I think it’s a good strategy to keep your church website, not Facebook, at the center of your communications. For Faith Promise, we’re deliberate to keep our website and blog at the core of our communications.  Facebook is one of the many tools we use to engage the congregation and open up dialog. (For some of the other options, check out our “Updates” page.)

What about you? What features make a Facebook Page compelling?  What can we do to better engage our congregation through Facebook?

Not sure how long I would survive riding one of these things, but the acceleration is amazing.

Late last week we rolled out a brand new look to the website and blog of Dr. Chris Stephens, my Senior Pastor.  I felt that it was time to simplify the navigation of the site, bring the blog to the forefront, and implement more of a minimalistic design.

The design was created by Ryan Myers at uberdm.com, who also did the design work for the 2011 LIT Conference site.  From his designs, I built out the site using WordPress.

I’m very pleased with the final result.  You can check it out here.

I’m pretty much a productivity junkie, but until recently, I’ve never come across a to-do app that was helpful, simple, and awesome enough to have on my home screen.  That has changed with Wunderlist.

It’s not often that I post about apps that blow me away, but the aesthetics and interface on this app make me want to share it with others.  It’s packed with features, but check out some of my favorites:

• You can make updates and changes on the Mac or PC app.
• The mobile version is available for iPhone, iPad, and now Android.
• They’re nearly finished with the development of a webapp.
• And my favorite feature: You can share lists with other users, making it very helpful for a team to stay on the same page with regard to priorities and project lists.

Oh, and it’s free.  Yeah.

Now, I’m not going to lie to you – it’s new, and it’s still a little buggy.  But even still, it’s an awesome app.

OK.  Enough talk.  Go get the app now, let me know you did, and get some stuff done.

———–

UPDATE: The Wunderlist web app was launched just a few hours after I posted this.

One of my favorite things about my job is getting to watch graphics come together for upcoming sermon series.  As we finalize designs and begin to implement them in print and on the website, my excitement about the series builds, and I begin to imagine the impact that those weekends will make in people’s lives are changed through their encounter with Jesus.

Over the past few days, we’ve finalized a couple of new graphics, and I wanted to share them here:

I’m pretty sure the graphic above is the first graphic I’ve ever personally created for a sermon series.  I used a photograph of a typewriter and drew it out digitally from there.

Our Graphic Designer, Heather Burson, creates 95% of the graphics around Faith Promise, and as usual, she knocked it out of the park with the graphic above.