kylegilbert

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.

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?

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.

Two years ago, Keri, the kids, and I flew to Knoxville, hung out with our friends, Josh and Kim Whitehead, visited Faith Promise Church, met up with Pastor Chris and Michele for lunch after the services, and visited a small group. That weekend marked the beginning of our transition from Fort Worth, TX to Knoxville, TN.

Wow, we had no idea what we were getting into!

Honestly, these past two years have been the best years of my life in so many ways.

Thank you, God, for the privilege and joy of serving at such a great church and with such an amazing staff.

(This is a repost from my guest post over on the Faith Promise Blog earlier this morning.)

Over the past few months, we’ve made plans for a major update to the Faith Promise Church website as we prepare for the launch of our Blount County Campus in October. As Brad Roberts and I worked through the process, here are a few things we had in mind:

Let’s help people easily find information that is accurate for their campus.
While the vision, direction, teaching, and core ministries will be consistent across campuses, there are many small variations between campuses, such as different location and contact info, different service times, and different ways of getting integrated into groups. We set out to make sure that people get the correct information based on the campus they attend or plan on attending. This means that depending on your campus, certain page contents, graphics, and menu options will be different.

Once people have chosen a campus, don’t make them pick again.
Rather than the annoyance of having to choose your campus every time you visit the site, we’ll store that information for you and take you straight into the site.

Make it easy and intuitive to switch between campuses.
Forced selections on a website make us feel like we’ve stepped into a choose-your-own-adventure book. (One bad choice, and you’re trapped inside a spooky house or dragged off into the woods by Big Foot.) Instead, we tried to make the campus selection feel like a light choice that can be easily switched at any time.

Provide a solution that scales well with additional campuses.
Rather than build a system that will only accommodate three campuses (Pellissippi, Internet, and Bount), we’ve built a system that will scale as we continue to add new campuses in the future.

While we were at it, we also enabled mobile video and overhauled the blog.
When you visit the Series Media page on your HTML5 web-enabled mobile device, you can now watch sermon videos. In addition, our church blog got a significant facelift.

As of this evening, we’ve rolled out the update. We’re still in the tweaking process, but you can check it out!

Last week, I had the opportunity to make a quick trip to Dallas with Justin Petrowski, Heather Burson, and Kyle McClain to attend the Echo Conference. It was a fantastic conference, and we had a great trip.

Here are a few pics:

The last post was a little heavy, so I thought I’d write this one with a little less seriousness.

Looking for some great opportunities to wreck you job? Here’s a list of six things that will shake things up in the workplace:

1. Bring a machete to work, and keep it on your desk.
2. Get some bright pink sunglasses, and never take them off.
3. Always refer to yourself in third person, and insert “silly” before your name. (eg. “Can you meet about that proposal with silly Kyle today?”)
4. Unless you have a uniform, wear the same thing to work every day.
5. Remove all of the letter e’s from your emails and letters.
6. Always bring your pets with you to work.
7. Spend your lunch breaks under your desk.
8. Send out a daily photo of yourself to the rest of the staff. (Childhood photos should work fine.)
9. Pretend like you have an imaginary friend who lives in your desk drawer.

Oh, I love my kids! I love how they are growing and learning, and I love that I get to help direct their lives to Jesus and living for Him without reservations.

One thing that I’ve discovered is that it’s a little bit hard to come by resources that are really great for helping my kids learn about the Bible. Either the stories tend to be poorly written, miss the point, or have lame illustrations. Fortunately, Keri has a collection of books that she and her siblings grew up reading, and they’re fantastic. I don’t personally know about newer editions, but these 1966 Arch Books are my favorite. I read one with the kids every night.

Anybody else have kid resources that you’d recommend for teaching about Jesus and the Bible?

There are quite a few blogs that I follow on a daily basis. Keeping up with friends and family as well as trying to stay sharp in the area of technology and communications. One of my favorites is a blog called ChurchCrunch. Because of that, I’m pumped to be a guest blogger there today.

Maybe not the most exciting article unless you’re into video, but it’s cool to get to contribute there today.

I never thought that a video about Google searches would nearly make me cry. What a great example of engaging people’s emotions through media.