Facebook for pastors?
Facebook is fast becoming the main social network for teens and young adults. Facebook is how I best communicate (other than in person) with my college students at both a secular and Christian campus. Some of my friends are very reluctant to use Facebook while others see it as a vital tool to serve, evangelize and disciple the people they are called to impact. Here are my self-imposed rules, to help me stay on track:
1. Profile pic is of me and my wife (I am clearly married and happily so)
2. I post very few public comments on people's "walls" and use very few applications.
3. I try to balance my friends to be wide ranging, both male and female, believers and unbelievers, near and far. In other words, everyone who sees my page knows I'm not trying to communicate with just one type of person.
4. My wife knows how to get into my facebook account, and she knows about any email I'm getting from female friends. She pretty much knows anything that is posted on my site.
5. I don't let my kids browse my Facebook since some posts are not very clean (remember, this is a site that connects you to unbelievers).
That's about it. I found a good downloadable resource "Facebook for Pastors" that is worth looking at. I don't know how long this link will be valid but look for it at http://www.churchplantingvillage.net/atf/cf/%7B087EF6B4-D6E5-4BBF-BED1-7983D360F394%7D/facebook-for-pastors-by-chris-forbes.pdf or search for it at www.churchplantingvillage.net
Tuesday, June 03, 2008
Podcast your sermons for free on Sermon Cloud
We are currently uploading audio files of sermons to sermoncloud.com and embedding a link on our website that points to our St Joe Sermon Cloud page.
Pros: Free online storage of audio sermons, great categorizing tools, easy to group a series together, very user friendly to upload and publish files, publishes you in a public forum which can be researched by anyone (we haven't seen any hits yet though).
Cons: Only stores 52 files (1 year), the oldest file is deleted when you upload the 53rd file, not a unique podcast source for your church since it is actually a different site completely from your main website.
We are currently uploading audio files of sermons to sermoncloud.com and embedding a link on our website that points to our St Joe Sermon Cloud page.
Pros: Free online storage of audio sermons, great categorizing tools, easy to group a series together, very user friendly to upload and publish files, publishes you in a public forum which can be researched by anyone (we haven't seen any hits yet though).
Cons: Only stores 52 files (1 year), the oldest file is deleted when you upload the 53rd file, not a unique podcast source for your church since it is actually a different site completely from your main website.
Tuesday, October 02, 2007
Creating Websites
Here are sites I used for all our web related needs.
www.misk.com This is for our domain registration (then I forward everything from there to my host site). This also gives us several emails (using our domain name) which forwards email to whatver account I choose. Mine go to me, prayer email goes to our prayer team leaders, etc.
www.freewebs.com This hosts my site. If you fish around, you’ll find the “No banner ads” option for $10 per year. This has given us plenty of memory to store our files, etc, and we've not had enough traffic to shut it down. We average about 500-800 hits per month total. Very user friendly to edit from anywhere online.
Use a blog. Some churches/groups use a free blog to create a site. I just don't know how to edit mine quickly enough, plus we already have everything uploaded at Freewebs.
Promote your site: Speaking of hits, load up the meta words and description boxes that are provided by Misk and Freewebs. Use as many common words to describe your site, location, city, ministries, etc. You will see that by googling "chapel ridge lions" or "st joe community church" that we are on the first search page, and we don't pay anything for web promotion. My goal is to simply be very easy to find if they know our name, or at least part of our name.
I get great ideas for webs stuff, podcasting, etc. from www.churchcommunicationspro.com They have a blog entry on how to get free podcast hosting. They also recommend using a blog to create a church website, but I’m not so familiar with using that. Our ideas on this blog entry are a drop in the bucket compared to their resource ideas. They create and host sites too, but we're still happy with ours.
Online Surveys/Registrations: We used www.icebrrg.com to create an online registration form for our VBS (we called it Day Camp). Up to 500 entries for only $9 per month, and you can cancel anytime. It puts all the data in Excel form, so you can download the file and manipulate the registration info any way you like, mail merge for letters, labels, etc. You can do a "How are we doing" survey, or any other online poll you want. The best part is that anyone can enter data for you. For instance, when we had people register by paper for our Day Camp (almost all of our 120 kids registered online), I just gave them to a worker who went home and registered them for us by using the registration link on our website like everyone else.
About online registration for events: if you are targeting anyone under 40, this is a must for any community event that requires registration. By the way, Freewebs offers a way to receive online payments/donations from people using Pay Pal. We haven't used this yet.
Here are sites I’ve created. Nothing fancy, just the basics. And by the way, if you aren't going to update much, keep it very simple. Don't complicate things for online visitors. Cut to the chase. Businesses and outsiders constantly comment on how professional our site looks. If you don't know how to make it pop with all the bells and whistles, go simple and streamlined. In fact, I think the less busy sites communicate faster anyway.
www.chapelridgelions.org for my lions club I joined last year. This is as simple as it gets, but everyone seem to like it.
www.churchatcarmike.com which points to one page we created on our St Joe site, then gives the link to our home page. Purely to advertise where we are. This only cost us the fee for registering the domain at Misk.
Please let me know about any easier and/or cheaper web hosting ideas.
Here are sites I used for all our web related needs.
www.misk.com This is for our domain registration (then I forward everything from there to my host site). This also gives us several emails (using our domain name) which forwards email to whatver account I choose. Mine go to me, prayer email goes to our prayer team leaders, etc.
www.freewebs.com This hosts my site. If you fish around, you’ll find the “No banner ads” option for $10 per year. This has given us plenty of memory to store our files, etc, and we've not had enough traffic to shut it down. We average about 500-800 hits per month total. Very user friendly to edit from anywhere online.
Use a blog. Some churches/groups use a free blog to create a site. I just don't know how to edit mine quickly enough, plus we already have everything uploaded at Freewebs.
Promote your site: Speaking of hits, load up the meta words and description boxes that are provided by Misk and Freewebs. Use as many common words to describe your site, location, city, ministries, etc. You will see that by googling "chapel ridge lions" or "st joe community church" that we are on the first search page, and we don't pay anything for web promotion. My goal is to simply be very easy to find if they know our name, or at least part of our name.
I get great ideas for webs stuff, podcasting, etc. from www.churchcommunicationspro.com They have a blog entry on how to get free podcast hosting. They also recommend using a blog to create a church website, but I’m not so familiar with using that. Our ideas on this blog entry are a drop in the bucket compared to their resource ideas. They create and host sites too, but we're still happy with ours.
Online Surveys/Registrations: We used www.icebrrg.com to create an online registration form for our VBS (we called it Day Camp). Up to 500 entries for only $9 per month, and you can cancel anytime. It puts all the data in Excel form, so you can download the file and manipulate the registration info any way you like, mail merge for letters, labels, etc. You can do a "How are we doing" survey, or any other online poll you want. The best part is that anyone can enter data for you. For instance, when we had people register by paper for our Day Camp (almost all of our 120 kids registered online), I just gave them to a worker who went home and registered them for us by using the registration link on our website like everyone else.
About online registration for events: if you are targeting anyone under 40, this is a must for any community event that requires registration. By the way, Freewebs offers a way to receive online payments/donations from people using Pay Pal. We haven't used this yet.
Here are sites I’ve created. Nothing fancy, just the basics. And by the way, if you aren't going to update much, keep it very simple. Don't complicate things for online visitors. Cut to the chase. Businesses and outsiders constantly comment on how professional our site looks. If you don't know how to make it pop with all the bells and whistles, go simple and streamlined. In fact, I think the less busy sites communicate faster anyway.
www.chapelridgelions.org for my lions club I joined last year. This is as simple as it gets, but everyone seem to like it.
www.churchatcarmike.com which points to one page we created on our St Joe site, then gives the link to our home page. Purely to advertise where we are. This only cost us the fee for registering the domain at Misk.
Please let me know about any easier and/or cheaper web hosting ideas.
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