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Paid subscriptions that save our church Pt. 3 -Wufoo

The 3rd and final monthly subscription service that our church has come to depend on is Wufoo. We just recently began using Wufoo when we redid our website about a month ago. We have already come to love it!

Wufoo is a formbuilder service that allows you to create forms and integrate them into your site. With it you can easily:

• Create online event registations
• Generate automatic responses to users and automatic notifcations to event organizers
• Tether online registration payments with the actual registration process
• Make online applications available
• Seamlessly integrate all forms into your website

Here are a few samples of Wufoo in action on our site:

• Our Volunteer Application
• Our Biblical Counseling request form
• Our Biblical Counseling Class registration form

Wufoo has already been a huge help to us and we have plans to get even more usage out of it for small group sign-ups, special events, surveys, etc.! Check it out.

Paid subscriptions that save our church Pt. 2

Another paid monthly subscription that saves our church a lot of time and effort is Constant Contact. As a disclaimer I know there are a lot of great newsletter options, so my advocacy is for the idea of this service more so than the particular brand. However, since we use Constant Contact, that's the brand I'll focus on in this post.

Before we used Contact Contact I crudely sent eblasts with Outlook. This had many limitations and finally had to be eliminated because our list just got too big to manage that way. Here are some of the benefits we have enjoyed since using Constant Contact for our newsletter needs:

• The ability for people to easily opt in. In addition to submitting their info at a church service, people can easily opt in to our newsletter on almost every page of our church website
• The ability for people to easily opt out. Sometimes people move, leave your church, hate your church, etc. By having a "please remove me from your list" feature people can automatically be removed without them having to feel awkward about sending you a request
• Giving people easy options to stay informed and connected by having links for people to learn more, to register, to listen to recent messages, to give, etc.
• Statistics. It's nice to see how many people actually open up and read your e-mails (hint, it's much less than you think!)
• Aesthetics and professionalism. The driving reasons for using a service like Constant Contact is function, however it's a nice perk to have everything look so much better!

If your  church is getting started, it may be a good idea for you to implement use of an e-newsletter. If your church has more than 100 people attending regularly, it is probably a necessity.

Pt. 1.: Planning Center

Paid subscriptions that save our church Pt. 1

Regardless of the size, almost every church is short-staffed. Fortunately, there are many tools that can help churches save a lot a lot of time and effort for a very modest amount of money. At Calvary Fellowship, we use several subscription-based services that are worth their weight in gold. I'll be highlighting one each day for this series of posts.

Planning Center Online

We discovered Planning Center at at time when we had outgrown our existing volunteer scheduling system. This was exactly what we needed.

You can use Planning Center to:

• Create an online schedule that anyone can review at any time
• Send automated reminders to people when they are schedule to serve
• Allow people to confirm or decline on the schedule -giving everyone more control and flexibility
• Allow people to block off in advance when they are away or unavailable 
• Attach music sheets, mp3s or other docs for your worship team
• Create an order of service (which we use at our pre-service Sunday AM rundown meetings)

There are more features we haven't even tapped into. It even has an app for smart phones that people can use to review or confirm their schedules with on the go.

The monthly subscription fee varies based upon the size of your church and the amount of storage you use. For us, it has been worth every penny!

A Bad Apple

I'm very shocked by Apple's response to the apparent issues with the iPhone 4. They have worked hard to build an amazing product line and an amazing brand. When I think of Apple I think of high quality and strong customer service.

I would expect this type of response from many of their competitors, but it is surprising for Apple. Sure a recall would be expensive, but not as much the fallout that can be generated from sticking good customers with a "bad Apple" and then telling them it's their fault!

In "Buzzmarketing" author Mark Hughes uses Apple as an example of "policing their product" to maintain the highest quality standards. Maybe Steve Jobs should read that chapter.

UPDATE: The class action lawsuit is on!

UPDATE #2: Not an antenna problem, but a software issue Apple claims.

The Calvary Fellowship podcast: Now 33% better!

Why is the Calvary Fellowship podcast better?

Better teaching? Nope.

Enhanced sound quality? Nope.

Fancy bumper music? Nope.

The answer: a brand new podcast logo!

Yes, substance and sound will change in time; in the meantime you'll have to settle for style!

Design by Annmarie

The future is now

Machines are definitely in control

I was reminded of that  by our latest technical issue. Our website host's network is down, thus so is my  e-mail and our church website.

It is a shocking reminder of how much I depend on technology. I feel frustrated because 1) I have so many things that I need to handle via e-mail and 2) We've been doing a lot of promotions and the "front-door" of our church is closed as long as the website is down...and there is nothing I can do about it!

UPDATE: The bots have released our church's website from their evil clutches. They were just flexing to let  me know who is in control!

We're on the cutting edge!

At least that's what the folks at Simon Solutions say about us when they mentioned us in their online newsletter in reference to our update podcast. The newsletter has some other great articles too, check it out.

Monthly church updates via podcast

We are always seeking to help our church body be more aware of and more in prayer of the things happening at Calvary Fellowship.

To that end we are launching today our new monthly updates via our podcast. Each podcast will highlight new events and activities, ministry updates, current teaching series, what's on the horizon and so forth.  Each one will last from 10-15 minutes.

There is no bumper music and no editing; it's no frills as far as production! But I really believe the quality will be in the content! The goal is for it to be informative and useful to our church and outside supporters.

If you get a chance, check it out, and please give me your feedback about how we can make it better!

To hear the update you can click here to download the podcast from iTunes or click here to download it or listen online from our church website.

Pando

I'm probably late to the game, but I just got turned on to Pando a few days ago. If you need to transfer large files P2P this definitely is a solution worth checking into!