Mister Nifty

This free service allows you to access a multitude of demographic data on the area of your church. You can get a look at what problems your area is facing, especially with marriage, unemployment, and education. Compare your zip code with up to 20 other zip codes in the surrounding area. This service is tapped into the US census data. It’s way cool! Check it out!

Free Range Stock is a community of photographers that supply free photographs to anyone who wants to use them. Their limitations are extremely loose for usage rights. You don’t even have to put a credit on the photos that you use. If you don’t see what you need, they can post your topic or theme on a board for photographers to submit photos for that category. It’s really a great site that frees up churches from ‘stealing’ (did I say that?) photos from high priced stock websites.

Copying images from the internet without permission is STEALING. If you don’t know where your creative team is getting their images, check them out. Find out of they are using a pay site, or just scrounging images anywhere they can get them. If it is the latter, get them to stop, and do that by giving them this free resource and a good lecture. Your church could get in serious trouble if you are using someone else’s image without their permission. There have been multi-million dollar lawsuits over single images. For example, three years ago, our local Walmart was sued for 1 million dollars because they duplicated a professional photographers work. The photographer won hands down. Don’t think this can’t happen to a church. Use this free resource until you can get a photo budget for your creative team. Here are some stock sites I use (pay sites) that are extremely cheap. bigstockphoto.com stockxpert.com

Are you tired of paying out chunks of money to advertise your church? It seems as though any time you try to put your church name out in the public, someone wants money for it. Not anymore, Google is giving you a free listing on their wildly populal map software. YES!!! This is free advertising for your church. Thousands of people use the net to find churches in their area and places they travel or move. You need to make sure you are on the list.

I recently updated our listing on Google Maps with our service times, website, and a brief description of our church. I was even able to upload up to ten images on the listing. What’s even cooler is that they allow you to create coupons that will be listed when people pull up your location. You can create a printable coupon for a free worship concert at your church or a free coffee at your weekly youth coffee house. The tools are there, they are free, and just waiting for you to use them!

I’m sure you’ve seen this icon somewhere in your internet surfing. You definitely have seen it while suring MisterNifty.com. It is the first thing you see on our home page. Many people are confused as to what RSS does. I hope this short explanation will give you the courage to dive in to RSS feeds and learn how to use them for your personal productivity and your church evangelism efforts.

RSS simply means “Rich Site Summary” or “Real Simple Syndication” for the common man. Simple huh? You’ve heard radio/tv shows are syndicated which means they are broadcast to a number of markets across the country and around the world from one home station/base. Your church can be syndicated too for free. Wouldn’t you like to get your message out to hundreds and thousands every time you posted something on your website? Wouldn’t it be great that every time you posted a sermon online, people get notified without ever visiting your website. Here’s how RSS feeds work.

1. Your website creates an file with all of the data from your website. It is called your RSS feed. Whenever you add something new, it adds it to the file.

2. Visitors using your site have what is called a WEB FEED AGGREGATOR. This sounds horribly complex, but it really isn’t. It’s just a program or web application that reads these feed files from websites. Visitors can subscribe to your site feed through their aggregator. Instead of visiting a dozen favorite sites per day, all the up-to-date information is piped into their aggregator, and they read it all under one roof.

3. Whenever you post something new on your website, it automatically updates on the aggregators that are subscribed to your feed. What this means, is you don’t just have a casual crowd coming to your website on a casual basis. You have a solid audience you can speak to with minimal effort. With a few clicks, you are able to speak your message whether audio/text/video to everyone following your site.

So, how do you use RSS on your site? It’s easy. There are two main ways to do it.

1. Integrate a content management site for your website. Usually these CMS softwares have RSS built into them. (i.e. Joomla, Drupal, WordPress, etc.) If you don’t know about CMS software, please read my introduction to dynamic websites and tutorial on installing a CMS through GoDaddy.

2. Create your own RSS feed and then upload it to your web server. This can be difficult for the non-techy person because it involves a bunch of back-end coding. However, there is a nifty solution for non-techy people who have static websites (i.e. built in FrontPage or Dream Weaver). Download the free program ListGarden that is a no-brainer way to create a feed file.

All you do is fill out the forms and hit create. You can even plug in your FTP or uploading information for your web server so that it updates your website whenever you add an entry. It’s a breeze. You can also create a HTML file that displays all of your posts even if people don’t have an aggregator, they can read it online. There are more detailed instructions at the ListGarden site. If you have any questions, feel free to contact me by adding a comment to this post. That way others can read my response.

One last thing, if you have MP3 files of your services, you can link them in your feed items and it will broadcast to all of your subscribers. It’s so nifty and free!

Here is a list of free aggregators you can use to start subscribing to websites!

1. Google Reader – My favorite because it integrates with Gmail. (online)

2. Netvibes – A cool interface that has a widget style page for all your different feeds. (online)

3. Bloglines – Very clean interface that allows you to do a ton of stuff with RSS feeds. (online)

4. NewsGator - Nifty corporate looking aggregator.

5. Check your Microsoft Outlook settings to see if your version accesses feeds. Also you can download Mozilla Thunderbird e-mail client and use it as an e-mail/feed reader.

Opening an account is a measily $6.95/month. For that price, you get your own shop and custom merchandise you can sell from your church website. The beautiful thing is you don’t have to stock anything, cafepress is an on-demand printer. Some of the customizable products include: hats, mugs, shirts, bags, bumper stickers, calendars, post cards, greeting cards, coffee cups, coasters, clocks, magnets, buttons, and EVEN a tshirt that fits your dog. You determine your merchandise, you set your profit, and they send you a check. This will blow your customizable socks off!

Letterpop.com is a free online tool that allows you to create newsletters with no programming skills needed. They have over 75 templates to choose from. You can drag and drop your own images and send your newsletter to 100 people. The best part is….IT’S FREE!!