Mister Nifty

A few years ago I came up with an idea to help leaders stay connected with their congregations/leadership teams. This concept was birthed out of observation of many leaders only connecting with their congregation/leaders on a personal basis only during times of crisis or conflict.

We often view relationships as a time-consuming process that involves large chunks of our time. A leader who leads many people or leaders can feel overwhelmed with the burden of connecting. Many simply run from this burden and never make an effort to have any form of personal contact outside the functions of the church. Thus, the concept I call “2MPH” was birthed.

Two things about 2MPH

• The Premise – Two Miles Per Hour
  • Slow down from the busyness of life.
• The Application – Two Minutes Per Hour
  • Take two minutes out of every hour and connect with someone.

Get Your Calculator Out

I took this idea of two minutes per hour to the calculator and was amazed at the impact of these small time investments. Before I started my mad calculator skills, I factored in a 40-hour work week which equals 2,400 minutes of work time.

Here’s what I came up with:

• 2 minutes X 8 hours = 16 minutes / day
• 16 minutes X 5 work days = 80 minutes / week
• 80 minutes X 50 work weeks (minus Christmas and Thanksgiving) = 4,000 minutes / year (66 1/2 hours)
  

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If you’ve read my posts, you know I’m a huge WordPress fan.  For those who don’t know what WordPress is, check it out at WordPress.org. One of the latest themes that has caught my attention is the P2 theme that turns WordPress into a Twitter-like interface.  It’s a great way for your team to communicate and post items of interest in real-time on the web.   When a user posts, it automatically updates on the post list of everyone who’s viewing the site.   Users can reply up to five levels depending on your configuration.  Here’s how I got my own installed and working.

Install WordPress

• Install WordPress – I used a subdomain (http://team.mydomain.com)  Most hosting companies have a One-Click application installer so you don’t have to mess with setting up a database or ugly FTP interfaces.   All you have to do is fill out a simple form where you want WordPress installed, give it a few minutes, and viola, it’s up-and-running.

Install the P2 Theme

• Log in to the admin interface (http://team.mydomain.com/wp-admin/) and go to Appearance->Add New Themes
• Search for “P2″ in the search box and install the theme.
• Activate the theme under Appearance->Themes
• If you have problems, download the theme files to your computer and upload them to your WP directory using an FTP client.

Make your WordPress Private

• You probably don’t want the world reading your posts, so let’s make your WordPress private.  Go to Plugins->Add New
• Search for Private WordPress and install the plugin (Install button is to the right of the search results table)
• Make sure Private WordPress is activated under Plugins->Installed

Setup Your Preferences

• Go to Settings->General and give your portal a name and description.
• Go to Settings->Reading and enter the number of posts you want to appear on each page under: “Blog pages show at most”
• Go to Settings->Discussion and enable threaded nested comments (Choose how many levels you desire – this is basically how many levels down people can comment on other’s comments)
  • To keep non-users from commenting, check “Users must be registered and logged in to comment”
  • Un-check “An administrator must always approve the comment” and “Comment author must have a previously approved comment

Force Posted Links to Open In New Pages

• Go to Plugins->Add New and search for “Target Blank In Posts And Comments”
• Install and activate this plugin.  The functions will work automatically without any additional settings.

Add Your Team Members

• Go to Users->Add New  Create profiles for your team members.  Assign them the role of author so they can only edit their own posts.  To assign a moderator, give them a role of administrator, or editor.
• Team members can have their own personalized user icon by registering the same email address in their profile at: http://gravatar.com  This is a universally recognized avatar that will work on any site they use the registered email address on.

Install Additional Features

• Try installing other plugins for added functionality.
• Allow users to be notified of additional comments with the plugin “Subscribe To Comments”
• There are dozens of YouTube plugins that allow users to embed videos right in their posts.

If you’re like me, I hate meetings.   Sometimes meetings are so inconvenient for your family because you have to leave the house and drive somewhere, exchange pleasantries, engage in small talk, and then get to the “agenda” if there is one.  All the while, you could be sitting at home relaxing in your house clothes.  Enter TokBox.  This is a free service that lets you invite your entire team to an online meeting.  The Box behind the name is part of this awesome function.  Everyone gets crammed into a box on your screen.  Those who have web cams can broadcast themselves like movie stars.   Those who are cheap and only have a microphone will be represented by a simple black box.
This is a great way to get your team together for a quick tag in.  The guys over at ChurchCrunch had over 60 people in their TokBox!  You can also hook up your AIM, Yahoo, Gmail chats up.  TB allows you to record video mail and send it to your friends.  I recorded a nice Mother’s Day video for my sweet Mama. (Tip: Use the heart overlay – Mom went nutz!) It’s loaded with great features.  Go try it out now!

Go To TokBox

If you’ve been around me long enough, you’ll know I’m a huge Google productivity suite fan.   Gmail is by far my favorite email interface.  It’s simple, and powerful.  I’ve got a ton of filters and a good set of labels to streamline my email workflow.  A relatively new feature in Gmail is the superstars that are attached to every email.  Basically, they twelve different styles you can choose from.  There are six stars and six orbs or circles with a variety of markings on them for different purposes.  Here are the superstars Gmail offers now.

Organizing Your Email

If you aren’t familiar with the native star tool, just click the little star in the upper right hand corner of each email.  If you have superstars enabled in the settings properly, you can click multiple times to iterate through the list of superstars.  You can tag an email with on of the above stars or orbs to identify that email later on.  I have four categories for my star usage:  Urgent, Important, Info, and Reply-To.   By simply adding star I can easily file that email, archive it and retrieve it later with all other emails that need the same action.

Creating Quick Links

Stars are great, but to get a list for a specific superstar you have to enter a cryptic code in the search bar.  Entering “has:green-check” will give you a list of all the starred items with a green check.  But, who wants to do that every time?  Gmail created a great little feature called Quick Links.  It’s basically a quick way to save frequent search results.  I use it for action folders to organize my email and access my action items quickly.

Gmail Superstars Cheatsheet

I created a handy dandy cheatsheet for you to use when searching for each superstar in Gmail.  Download it and make your Gmail experience more fun and productive!

Tranparent PNG’s

You can use these recreated images for your own projects.  Here are the transparent PNG images.

Keepm is a secure online contact manager that let’s you keep your data fluid rather than sitting in a drawer or scribbled on a sticky note or business card someone on your desk.  For churches, this tool can prove invaluable.  Have your secretary store all of your vendor contact information on Keepm so that the entire staff can access it at any time.  Also, import the information of your key leaders so that they are accessible without having to make a call to the secretary.  This is collaborative contact sharing.

What’s slick is that you can import from almost any well known communication software so grabbing your current digital information is painless.  You can also share contacts over multiple Keepm accounts.  The thing I like the most is that you can add dated notes that keep track of all of your communication with a contact.  This could help minus out some headaches!  For instance, a guest speaker will be arriving next month.  The point person who speaks to them can notate their flight information, their food preferences, etc.  Then, when other team members need this information, they simply log in and view his contact profile instead of tracking down the person who made the original contact.

Lastly, it’s FREE!

Go to Keepm

Many people don’t see the value of Twitter and the microblog community. I’ve heard people say, “I don’t want to know what others are doing!” Well, that might be true when it comes to casual friendships, but in a work environment, knowing what your co-workers and colleagues are doing can be productive. If you are working on projects or collaborating on ideas, Yammer.com provides one central place for everyone in your organization to communicate.

The beauty of it is that people outside of your organization are not able to join your private network. This keeps communication free from external distractions and allows tracking of important conversations. Another feature I really like about Yammer is the ability to create groups. For instance, during our leadership retreat, I created a group for ideas and the minutes of our meetings. I had several people with laptops join the group and begin documenting the meeting with short posts. All posts were saved in that group and are easy to find when I need them. You can create private groups for more sensitive conversations as well.

You also can use hash tags which help you search for posts later with keywords. For example, one of my posts looked similar to this: “#todo09 Increase the soda machine price to $.75 from $.50.” Yammer then gives you a link to all the hash tags you create and with one click of a button, you have a list of every post where you used that tag. By the way, I haven’t changed the price yet, so come by for a cheap soda.

Last, but not least is the portability of this app.  They have a desktop software that is simple to use as well as the basic web interface.  You can post just like using Twitter or an IM service.  They also have an iPhone and Blackberry app that allows you to submit posts on the go.  Receive SMS updates on your phone or right in your IM client.  This is a free service for companies and organizations. There are a few paid features that you might want to check out. If you need to centralize your team’s communication, sign up for an account and check it out. You have nothing to lose.

Here are a few ideas for using Yammer in churches:

• Creative meetings
• Event planning and coordination
• Weekly staff check-in with posts about what’s going on in their ministry this week
• Corporate to-do lists of things needing completed around the church
• Personal prayer requests group for staff members
• Microblog about missions trips
• Traveling pastors can update staff with minimal effort.

Yammer.com