I’ve written about Dan Stevers’ videos on more than a few occassions:

• Change the World
• Parables of Jesus
• God-o-nomics
• The Veil
• and a couple of Christmas videos

I even interviewed Dan earlier in the year.

Good news for us all – Dan’s videos are 25% off this week. Check it out.

Copyright 2010 Steven Kryger.
Post from: Communicate Jesus. Follow Communicate Jesus on Twitter.
25% off high quality church videos

When I was living in Canberra, I was the thankful recipient of the influence of a humble and godly man – Dom Fioco. Dom started a workplace ministry in my area (meeting in my building in fact!), with fortnightly Bible talks for people working in the Parliamentary Triangle. This regular teaching and Biblical encouragement from Dom (and others), was just what my soul needed in the midst of a busy week. Not only did this ministry serve me – a Christian, but it was a very regular and easy opportunity to invite colleagues to come and hear the saving work of Jesus.

Proclaiming the gospel to workers is the aim of City Bible Forum, and if you are a web developer, you might like to get in touch with them. City Bible Forum shares the gospel with workers in five Australian cities and is keen to redesign their website. If you’re interested (or know someone who might be), download the project brief, and read the following:

• The point of contact at the CBF is Ken West.
• If you wish to bid for the work, please contact Ken to discuss.
• Your bid should give us an accurate estimate of costs and timeframes, a sense of the quality of your previous work, and confidence that you understand our needs.
• The current site is at www.citybibleforum.org – it’s implemented in Joomla.
• The proposed Drupal site is available to view – contact Ken for details.
• If you want to bid for part of the work (eg, graphics and site plan, but not Drupal theme), we’d find it helpful if you could recommend someone who could do the other pieces.

Copyright 2010 Steven Kryger.
Post from: Communicate Jesus. Follow Communicate Jesus on Twitter.
Job available: web developer (Sydney)

Sarah is a Christian and a graphic designer and is moving to Sydney (from the U.S.). Sarah contacted me about job opportunities in Sydney from December (or freelance work in the meantime) – she has a particular passion to use her skills to make Jesus known. Below is a brief bio from Sarah – if you’re looking for a designer, or know of organisations that are, Sarah’s details are below. Over to you Sarah:

I just launched my website, Odgers Design, and my email address is sarah AT odgersdesign.com. I’m available for freelance work right now (I currently live in West Virginia in the US), but once I graduate this December I will be open to accepting a full-time or part-time graphic design job in Sydney. I am proficient at Adobe Photoshop, InDesign, and Illustrator, and I’m also a writer and copy editor. I work quickly, am very organized, have an eye for details, and love what I do. If anybody has any questions for me, they can send me an email.

Copyright 2010 Steven Kryger.
Post from: Communicate Jesus. Follow Communicate Jesus on Twitter.
Job wanted: graphic designer

Twitter is a really useful tool for staying in touch with people, meeting new people with similar interests, and keeping up with news on the topics that you enjoy.

More tools are becoming available every day to assist you to manage and grow your Twitter account. I’ve been checking out some of these tools, and thought I’d share what I’ve been discovering with you over a series of posts. This will help me to remember what I liked and didn’t like about different tools, and perhaps (hopefully!) be helpful to you too.

I didn’t find any of these first five tools particularly helpful for my Twitter management, but give them a go and share what you thought, and how they can be applied in a ministry context. Over time, I’m sure I’ll discover some crackers!

1. BrandChirp

BrandChirp has a 30-day free trial, and costs US$12 per month thereafter. You need to sign-up with your PayPal account, and if you want to cancel your account, you need to do this through PayPal.

• Brand Watch allows you to “follow Tweeters discussing your keyword, or reply instantly by clicking the related button.” This tool worked really well – mentions of keywords appeared almost instantly, and it’s very easy to follow the tweeters, or reply to their messages. However, it didn’t show me which people I was already following, and allowed me to follow people I was currently following. There’s also no way of sorting or filtering all of the mentions that start flooding in!

• Follow Stats shows you who you are following, how many followers they have and when their last tweet was. This function is less unique – other tools such as Refollow and Tweepi can give you these stats and allow you to unfollow.
• Target Follow allows you to follow the friends (followers) of another Twitter user, or follow users by search term (and even restrict by geographical location). Unfortunately, there’s no way of sorting this list, nor does the list reveal which of these people you’re already following. Tweepi’s Geeky Follow provides more tools for this type of following, and is free.

• Other features include the ability to ‘Automatically tweet the title and link of any RSS feed to your Twitter account’, and schedule your tweets (I’m currently doing this with TweetDeck, which is also free).

2. Friend or Follow?

This free tool will tell you:

• Who’s not following you back on Twitter,
• Who you are not following back, and
• Who your mutual friends are.

You can also export the results as a CSV file.

Unfortunately, there’s no way to bulk follow (or unfollow) people with Friend or Follow – again, you can do this with Refollow.

3. Twollow

Twollow offers a 7-day free trial, and accounts begin at US$14.99 per month. As with BrandChirp, you need to sign-up with your PayPal account, and if you want to cancel your account, you need to do this through PayPal.

The interface is basic, but I wasn’t able to test this out because when I tried to add my Twitter account I got an error message I haven’t seen before: “Invalid callback request. Oops. Sorry.”. This seemed to be a problem with the tool, and not with Twitter, so I gave up and cancelled my account.

4. Twitterator

“The purpose of this little script is to allow a Twitter user to “follow” a bunch of other Twitter users in one fell swoop—a Twitter friend list generator if you will.”

As you can see in the screenshot above, the interface is simply and gives you two options:

1. Enter a URL that points to a list of twitter usernames, or
2. Enter the list of usernames manually.

I’m not sure where to find a URL with a list of usernames, and I think that entering names manually could easily be done just by typing them into your browser. But perhaps I’m missing something?

5. TweetMetrics

TweetMetrics is a free tool that allows you to:

I had a lot of difficulties logging in to TweetMetrics with my Twitter account – it doesn’t use the same process as most Twitter tools, and repeatedly refused my password. Once I eventually got in I could see some interesting statistics that I haven’t come across in other Twitter tools (see below), but I wasn’t sure what I’d do with this information anyway. For example, what do I glean from knowing that my average tweet length is 104 characters?

Copyright 2010 Steven Kryger.
Post from: Communicate Jesus. Follow Communicate Jesus on Twitter.
Tools to manage and grow your Twitter account (part 1)

Ian shared this advertisement with me:

The advertisement is almost correct – there’s one person who is good enough for heaven, and praise God – he makes it possible for the rest of us no-hopers to make it in the front door. What sentiment do you think that advertisement is picking up on? I’m not sure where those ads were displayed – but how do you think they would have been received by Australians? There are a couple of other advertisements in the series that you can see on the Ads of the World website.

Advertising intrigues me. When done well, advertising is well researched and taps into the thoughts, attitudes and desires of a cross-section of the community. Some ads grab my attention because of what they reveal about the people they are seeking to connect with, and how they seek to motivate their audience to respond. Here are a couple of ads that have caught my attention. What ads have caught yours?

• Envy – a powerful motivator
• The strange omission from Australia Day advertising
• Lilydale – ‘it’ll have you saying grace again’
• Loyalty in marriage strikes a cord

I was also interested to see recently that Alpha is using Bear Grylls to advertise its courses on Sydney Buses.

Copyright 2010 Steven Kryger.
Post from: Communicate Jesus. Follow Communicate Jesus on Twitter.
Nobody is good enough for heaven

The latest poster from Outreach Media – the first of a two-part set focusing on forgiveness:

Copyright 2010 Steven Kryger.
Post from: Communicate Jesus. Follow Communicate Jesus on Twitter.
Poster: It Can Be Forgiven

After writing ‘Avoiding church calendar overload‘ and pondering some of the comments and feedback I received, I’ve decided it would be worthwhile conducting a survey of church members to evaluate the effectiveness of current communications methods, to help plan future communications approaches.

The goals of the survey are to:

• understand how church members perceive the current frequency and effectiveness of communication,
• understand what communications channels church members regularly use,
• understand what gaps exist in our current communications, and
• understand what communications channels church members would prefer to be communicated through.

The survey hasn’t gone live yet – I’m asking for your feedback before it does! Take a look at the survey, and let me know what you think – what’s missing, and what could be included.

Thanks!

UPDATE

Following feedback from readers, the survey has been refined and updated. You can see the updated version here.

Related Surveys

A couple of examples and articles I came across as I prepared the survey:

• Communication Survey – a discussion at Church Marketing Lab.
• BranchCreek Summer Communications Survey
• St Matthew Lutheran Church Survey
• Church Communications Audit from United Methodist Communications
• The Church Communication Conundrum

Copyright 2010 Steven Kryger.
Post from: Communicate Jesus. Follow Communicate Jesus on Twitter.
Church communications survey

In a couple of weeks time, as part of my church’s ‘Weekend Extra‘ training morning, I’m running a seminar entitled: “Digital discernment: using new technology and social media to the glory of God”.

It’s a topic close to my heart – how to use technology in a discerning manner – neither writing it off, nor accepting it wholesale without consideration.

Here’s my question – what to include? What issues to explore? What questions to ask? How does the Bible help us to think through these issues? I’ve got my thoughts, but I’d love to hear yours. Are there any resources that I should check out on this topic?

Here’s a short interview with N.T. Wright to get you thinking…

NT Wright on Blogging/Social Media from Bill Kinnon on Vimeo.

God’s Technology is a recently launched video by David Murray that walks through four Biblical principles for approaching our use of technology. I’ve also ordered a copy of The Discipline of Spiritual Discernment by Tim Challies, to help me think through the topic of discernment some more.

Copyright 2010 Steven Kryger.
Post from: Communicate Jesus. Follow Communicate Jesus on Twitter.
A seminar on digital discernment

I needed to print 5, A1 posters for church’s upcoming I Heart Kirribilli art exhibition and prize. I went to my usual provider – Officeworks, who print A1 posters for $19 – bargain! Unfortunately, they were busy, and couldn’t fit me in.

Officeworks suggested I go to Snap Printing – their printer was broken. They suggested I visit another printer up the road and good news – their printer wasn’t broken and they could fit me in. As we were arranging a time to pick up the posters, I thought I better check the price.

Total: $456! Ouch.

I thought the prices would be more expensive, I didn’t think they’d be 4.5 times the price!

I’ve emailed the files to another Officeworks store, and saved myself $361. When it’s a service that lots of businesses can provide for little to no difference in quality, it pays to ask around, and get a good price.

Normally I go to my usual provider, but today I was in a hurry, and they couldn’t turn the job around in time. However, $456 was a high price to pay for a quick turnaround!

Here are some suggestions for churches on getting larger print jobs done at a good price.

Copyright 2010 Steven Kryger.
Post from: Communicate Jesus. Follow Communicate Jesus on Twitter.
A lesson in checking the price before going to print

Song Manager is a good looking tool that meets a more specific need – organising songs and developing set lists. Here’s an introduction:

Obviously Song Manager doesn’t share the same functionality as Elvanto or Planning Center Online, but if your church doesn’t need help with rostering, but does need help with getting your music team/s organised, this could be a handy tool for you.

Using Song Manager is pretty straightforward.

Step 1. Create a database of all songs, and apply tags (e.g. praise, Jesus, confession, etc).

Step 2. For each song, you can add author details, copyright details, the key and lyrics and chords.

Step 3. You can then create a set list from any of the songs in the collection:

Step 4. Then, you can export the list in 4 different formats – for PowerPoint, PDF, Song Sheets and ProPresenter slides:

Copyright 2010 Steven Kryger.
Post from: Communicate Jesus. Follow Communicate Jesus on Twitter.
Review: Song Manager