Church IT Podcast Discussions Episode 16 September 20, 2007

JASON:

Recorded live, I think it’s working after much technical difficulty and whatnot.

Hello and welcome everybody.  This is episode 16 of the Church IT Discussions podcast, and we’ve had some technical problems but I think they are somewhat ironed out.  If you’ve had trouble logging in, sorry, try again next time.

 Today we’ve got two folks from www.churchpost.com and they are going to give us a little show and tell and demo of their products, so if you are using any sort of an email communications tool, you’ll definitely want to check this out.  You’ll also want to go down, if you’re in the chat window John has posted a URL and a session ID and he’s got a screen-sharing site set up where you can go to www.churchpost.glance.net and enter the session 0489 you can see his screen so we can watch what John is doing there. 

There’s lots of stuff going on in the coming weeks, next Tuesday evening and Wednesday is the IT round table here at Grange Community Church, there’s still plenty of time if you want to come.  You can walk in but I suggest registering so that I can get a count of who is coming and when, that would be awesome, so far 25 currently registered, a couple of vendors, definitely a good time, going to try to do a live screen and turn it into a podcast for later, so our guys have given me a thing with lots of knobs and buttons with a mic input device, should be fun.

Also the official IT Roundtable at the Church of the Resurrection is coming up in a couple weeks you can get to that info from the top of my blog site Jpowell.blogs.com or Tony’s website tonydye.net Monday is the last day to register for that though, if you’re dragging your feet, go register for that now.   A ton of churches. Also Cliff mentioned that he would like for everybody to do the church IT survey, link to that on my blog, google for survey, you’ll find it.  Please put your survey data in there even if you’re not going. 

Congratulations to Trace on coming edition to the family, very exciting news!

What I’d like to do now is hand things over to John and Debra from www.churchpost.com they will give us an overview of their products.  As people have questions, just jump in.

DEBRA

We met Jason in Nashville, we want to say thanks!

JASON

At ministry.com I saw all these cool kiosks at the churchpost area, started talking to Debra, I asked about their product, pretty cool to see their product, target, their idea of constant contact, etc.

JOHN

There are hundreds of email services out there and that’s kind of what we do, we joke that Constant Contact is Outlook, Yahoo groups, and a listserve on steroids, and it really is just for churches, so that sets us apart from anything else out there.  I used Constant Contact for another project I was involved in years ago and it’s fantastic for small business stuff, as well as all the other sites and features are great.  What we did 3 or 4 years ago, I actually am a music director at a church in Michigan and Debra has had some experience as an church administrator and about 4 years ago both of us sat down, my frustration was I was working at a church as a staff accompanist and I was completely out of the loop of what the heck was going on and felt like so was the congregation.  Then I got a job at the Methodist church and found that it was no different, there wasn’t a good handle on using email to get in touch with people.  There were huge budget line items for postage and in our case we were eliminating a youth director because they didn’t have enough money in the budget but our line item for postage was over $1000 bucks a month, which is the salary for the youth director right there.  So it was a personal frustration of mine, so Debra and I got together over dinner about 4 years ago and talked about those frustrations and that’s how the Constant Contact was born and as we went out there and saw what else was out there and there are a lot of great products out there but a lot of this is intimidating for an 85 year old church secretary or even a really young youth director, it really wasn’t for churches, so that’s how this started.  With an email distribution service, members and visitors go to the church’s website and we provide a little bit of code called the Get Connected box, and folks can put their email addresses in and the church decides what groups they’re going to make public on their website and people sign in for what they want to get, and that’s also really unique because at some churches I’ve been involved with, people get stuff they don’t want, huge bulletins or newsletters and they only read the first page of it, so that way people can hone in on what they want to get.  And then as a staff member or volunteer, I get a login on churchpost.com and I’m able to go in and send things to people who’ve opted into my list, literally point and click.  If I have programming I can go ahead an do custom html, if I’m not really comfortable I just go to a really cool template library all customized by ministry and or maybe even by position and say I want to go in as musician and I want to send a really cool postcard to my children’s choir, click the picture and it throws in all the code, I don’t need to know anything, I throw in the content, click send and it takes care of all the deliverability.  So it’s really kind of point and click for the average user but there’s a lot of other hidden and embedded features for those who want to explore more.  And I think that’s probably the most noteworthy thing is the fact that there are multiple logins, for instance my church here we have a staff of 9 or 10 and I don’t have to create an account and then go share my password with everybody, everybody gets their own unique log in and that is attributed to certain permissions that they have depending on who they are at the church, so as a music director I can’t email the entire congregation because that’s not my permission setting but I can email all the music groups, I can create my own music groups, etc. so depending on who I am at the church I have certain access to get a hold of certain people.

DEBRA

I do want to bring up a couple of points, other than the public version that people can sign up for through the website, clearly we also offer more private versions that are for more sensitive information so that the church leader or whoever is in charge can have specific control over who participates in those groups. And also as John mentioned because of the permission nature of the sub-users, there is one master account, like an admin account on the church’s churchpost account and they are the ones who decide and invite the other users, and because of the permission settings being so malleable, not only is it for staff but churches run by lay-leaders, and all the groups in the church have leaders that can be very responsible for communicating with their groups, so it frees up the administrative task from the church office, so you’re not dependant on anybody to post your information or communicate with your group for you, you can do what you need to do.

JOHN

For those who are online with us on Glance, I’ve logged onto what is a master user account and that’s just basically an admin and that person sees things nobody else sees and one of them is what Debra just mentioned, this tab called User Privileges and that allows them to invite the users and it can literally be done down to the actual group so I can literally select somebody and say I want them to have access to just these groups or I can give them default access to everything as a full-access user and they can create their own groups, so it really can be managed down to having a volunteer who only organizes the cookie walk every Christmas and that’s all they are able to do so they don’t have to worry about emailing 10,000 people in the congregation about ordering Girl Scout Cookies; it’s all done to manage different levels of users in the church.

Something else that’s really important from an IT perspective, as we work with a lot of churches who have webmasters who are either volunteers or folks who are doing this on the side, they’re not dedicated to doing it just for the church, and they are swamped, they get calls saying, “Can you update my music page, etc” and there are getting to be more ways for people to control their own content but this is one of those things that once the code, the Get Connected box, is put on the website, and once that’s there, I don’t need to bother anybody who manages the website, I go in to manage my groups and literally with a checkbox, that group appears next time somebody goes on in the modified section, I can just display it in the Get Connected box or I can take it off the Get Connect box and I can also be notified when somebody signs up for that group so with just the click of a button, each group owner can say, Hey I want to create two groups, one of which I want to actually post on the website and within a matter of 30 seconds, it’s done, then when the next person goes to the website, it’s there and they don’t have to bother the webmaster or anything like that. So it’s powerful in the sense that it consolidates the control of certain privileges but it also means that individual staff members can empower themselves to do what they need to do and communicate with the folks they want to communicate with.

DEBRA

John is controlling the computer screen, but you’ll notice when he was just on that groups page, there were two boxes and John, I wonder if it wouldn’t make sense for you to pull up the website page so they can see the functionality of the Get Connected Box and the group description box.  There are a couple of different things that happen when you create a group and the group leader can decide what text to put in the group description box and that is what appears in the popup box with all the different public groups. When you hover over it you can update the text as much as you want and it actually can give you a little blurb about what the group is, so if it’s got a strange name you can do that, so if someone goes up here and checks off the information they want they can get a little bit of information from that hover-over feature. As soon as they submit, a welcome email gets sent automatically and that text can also be controlled by the group leader, you can customize that as often as you want, make it warm and fuzzy, etc. and at the same time, the group leader is being notified specifically about who just signed up for their group. It does a lot for communication, the group leader gets excited to see that people are signing up for their group, the congregation realizes that the church is making an effort to communicate better with them and that’s never a bad thing.

JOHN

That’s it in a nutshell, we are not really sales people, we just love showing the idea to folks, we’re happy to keep going over the features or if you guys have any questions as far as features or concerns, etc.  We always error on the side of caution where privacy is concerned and people’s information, for instance, when you first create a group, the default is that it will not appear on the website, we assume that it is a private group unless you decide to check that box and make it public. It’s all individual from the sender to the recipient so there’s no Reply to All, there’s no displaying of who happens to be in that group, it’s all geared toward the very specific needs of the church which are different than other businesses and things like that.

DEBRA

Another thing I want to mention while we have this on, about nine-tenths of what you see as far as features is a direct result of us asking for feedback, we gave it to a bunch of churches and said tell us what you like, but more importantly, tell us what you hate, then we re-vamped it and released the second version back in March. If anything pops out at you guys ever and you want to shoot us an email like I’ve got a question about this or a thought about that, our mission is to focus on church communication using this tool and to do it really well.  We’re not going to expand out into a bunch of different things and do everything half way, we really want to nail down this product and have it so that every church, no matter what their size is, they can use this because of the modular nature of it.  So it’s really important to us to continue to get feedback, we’ve had a Christian ministry use us that was emailing to 50,000 members at a time and were able to deliver those within a few minutes, everything is on a totally encrypted secure server, we think of the robust nature of it as being very important but the interface needs to be warm and fuzzy.  We tried to pick easy colors and big buttons so that no matter what the users computer literacy is they are going to feel comfortable on the site. So please feel free to ask us questions and check us out, and even if you decide not to, we still love feedback of any kind and that’s why we are so appreciate to even be talking to you folks.

JASON

Very Cool! Does anybody have questions?

??Speaker

I’ll jump on my typical soapbox that I ask every vendor that comes to our podcast, do you have any plans to interface this with any CMS products? My big thing my soapbox is not representing a data set outside of our existing church database and is there any way to utilize that data you’re collecting in a new source for the main database?

DEBRA

We’ve been approached by a couple of CMS vendors that have wanted to incorporate our code. The fact is a lot of CMS programs either claim to or say they have in the works some sort of communication piece and the fact of the matter is because it’s a side module, it just isn’t done very well. It doesn’t allow a lot of the features we talked about, the integration to the website and the user permissions and all that kind of thing.  It’s not really user-friendly for the church.  So we’re hoping that that will be something that a year from now we can say, yeah CMS programs are working with us or use our code, or however that ends up working out. 

JOHN

It’s great to have one database source, but if you have a profile or a parishioner or somebody in the congregation or a visitor and it’s got a database entry from everything from gender to age to interest and one of those fields is email address and sits on that server or hard drive, it’s not any good, that data is not being used.  We have 2 or 3 churches that don’t use a CMS product but 90% of them do and all of them don’t use them to maintain their email addresses because they don’t interface with the outside world, somebody has to manually enter them in there, so that’s data that they don’t even both collecting anymore on their Shelby or ACS interface because they don’t use it. They said, “Why even bother trying to post it in two places, churchpost is the only program that interfaces with our website…” All we collect is the first name, last name, and email address, there’s no other profiling and people can just very simply say, “I just want to sign up for these groups.”  This is the actual tool you’re using to communicate so churches tell us that they don’t even have a need to export it out, although you can do it but it would just sit there.  So this is not to discount what Debra said because we are in discussion with them, because if they want to use our code and our technology to actually distribute messages, but many of our churches don’t even use their CMS to maintain emails anymore because they are out to date.

DEBRA

Somebody just entered in a chat question about importing, we do allow for easy importing, ‘click of a button’ deal and easy export too, so what most of our churches are doing is using our email database as the master database and re-uploading that into their CMS product to keep that clean because this is just so much more efficient.

JOHN

We have a number of people come to us and say, “I would love to use your service but I maintain all my email information in yahoo groups and I can’t figure out how to export that information, and that’s really frustrating.  Same thing with different CMS programs, with file formatting, it can’t get the information out, and that is something we are really adamant about.  The data can go in and out as the church wants. You want a list of every single email address you have by first last name sorted by email address, you got it.  It’s just a one two three click and you got it.  So as far as export, you go to the group, click on export, choose what you want to export by email address, export it and it’s gone. So it’s your data, it’s up to you how you want to import or export it.  But back to the original question, it really is something we would love to integrate, but we haven’t found any CMS product that does very well with email at all, without getting bogged down or whatever, so we’ve just had people saying they use churchpost for communication and my CMS program for management.

DEBRA

We hope churches realize that this is another specific tool in their tool belt and while we would love to give them a multi-use tool as some point, it really is more about changing the church mindset from “well we’re using yahoo groups or whatever and it’s working just fine..” but the mindset that we are hoping they will understand is that with the opt-in, this allows the congregation and visitors to the church or people who are looking at the website for the first time to find a church home, to get linked into what they want and have power over that, which means that they are going to be a lot more receptive to whatever information the church is sending out. So it really is a different communication mindset, it’s not just about the administrative side, it’s kind of evangelistic and about creating a very inviting atmosphere with every aspect of your church because the website’s great but tell me what I can do with that.  Unfortunately not every church updates and has a great website like Granger.  So we want to give them a tool to get the information out that really represents what the church is all about. 

JASON

What about pricing structure?  How is that based? 

DEBRA

It’s based on the number of unique email addresses in the database.   Much like Constant Contact and we try to keep the tiers very broad and that’s on the website too, depending on the number in the congregation the church typically falls very squarely into one tier or the other.  We so talking $180, $360, or $600 a year total and that’s unlimited everything, no hidden fees, no catches, you can send as many emails as you want, as many groups as you want, as many sub-users as you want.  The other thing we really focus on is great customer support.  When I used to work in a church administratively it was a nightmare to get good support for things that I needed because church work-life is really crazy, you really need it when you really need it, so we do our best to give everybody the level of support they need at the time they need it.

JOHN

There was a chat about the kiosk, the company is called Friendly Way and I’ve got it on my screen now for those who want to check it out, www.friendlyway.com It’s a German company but they have a California distribution center, they have a whole bunch of different solutions as far as kiosks go, the Classic is the one we used at the ministry workshop, we had so many churches come up to us because of the kiosk saying that the kiosks would be really great for their church lobby or any area for people to get interested in what’s going on the church.  We don’t get any kickbacks from them, we just wanted to share that information. Kiosks are not cheap, these are expensive, I think they are solid titanium or something, touch screen, flat panel, but that’s there basic model and it’s a couple thousand dollars.

JOHN

As a point of reference, since this is a much more technical and knowledgeable crowd, we have a really great help center on line, part of that is an online download section and for those who really want to know about the core of how we’re programmed, our back-end hosting platforms and everything, there’s a really great technical sheet which has answers to everything down to how we actually distribute messages and other ‘techy’ questions are available online as is really non-technical “hey what do we do” questions like how do we present this to our church.  Most of our churches put the Get Connected code on their website and then stand up and say, “Did you know we have a website?”  “And if you didn’t know we have a way you can sign up to get information, we do!  Sign up!”  And within a couple days, they get people going to the website and signing up in the Get Connected box, and they don’t have to type anything in, it’s all self-maintained and everything, so it’s kind of the best way to do it.  It’s all online and there’s downloadable flyers and stuff like that too. 

DEBRA

And obviously a full knowledge base that’s searchable too.  And if anybody wants to check it out, there’s buttons all over the homepage that say Try It Free.  And that really is the case, we allow everyone to start a live account, it’s not restricted in any way, it’s a full usable account, you just sign up, use it, and we won’t invoice anybody until we’ve spoken to the church and say, “Do you love us?” and they say, “Yes!”  Then we talk about payment. So we’re kind of old-fashioned in that way, we want this to be a viable business but we’re not into just getting the check and walking away.  We want to make sure they are using it well and that they are a good, happy customer. 

??

Debra, are there different features that are available according to which tier?

DEBRA

No, wysiwyg, everybody has access to everything. We have a line on the pricing page, if your congregation is very small, if your database is 50 or less or unique email addresses, we actually offer that to the church or ministry for free for life.  Just because you’re a small ministry, those people’s souls are just as important as those in a church with 50,000, and those small churches struggle with resources, and time, and staffing, so we set it up that way.  So in answer to your question, we just want to put a good product into people’s hands no matter what their size. 

JOHN

We have done a couple of extra things for some folks, depending on the needs of the church, for larger congregations that say we already have a brand or logo, we have this and that already, we have a cool feature called My Templates so a church that wants to create their own template so that every time someone goes in, they pull from that so we have a consistent look, so that’s something that’s available.  We’ve also done custom design work for churches.  

DEBRA

We will also do a staff training.  Our support is included, but if they want us to come out to their church, if their local or do a webinar, take an hour or two to get their staff acquainted, it’s pretty point-and-click but we do offer that.

JOHN

The only one feature that is screened on the trial account for security reasons is imports. You can upload up to 5,000 lines at a time, but you can do as many of those 5,000-uploads as you want, we just limit it to 5,000 per file until we validate that it’s actually a church, etc.  We only use opt-in lists, so if they know it’s only people who want to get information, we approve those usually within a couple of hours, the longest is 24 hours.  Once we know they are really who they say they are, we have the ability to flip a flag and they don’t’ have to wait anymore, so that information is available whenever they do uploads.  So that’s the only limitation on the trial account.

DEBRA

We allow people to do a real blast, they can send an email out to a couple thousand people just to see how it’s delivered and the functionality and all that before they latch on and say, “We’re good to go.” So we encourage people to try it.

??

What kind of reporting do you have built in to show deliverability or click-throughs, etc?

JOHN

Good Question, we do not do anything with click-throughs because we have so many different churches who want to do it so many different ways, and we have not yet found a nice, simple way for them to be able to implement that.  The number one recommendation we make, because most people are linking back to their website, is that they adopt google analytics or some other site on the server to track who’s coming to their pages.  We haven’t had any churches who have the need to figure out how many people click on a certain button within an email, but we do track accurately and specifically non-deliverables, so we give you an accurate reporting for that and if it bounces more than 3 times, we remove the email address automatically and that information is always available to the church on our reporting section.  If you wanted to see for the last seven days who has signed up for what group on the website, you can generate a very specific report for that. 

DEBRA

Because of our unlimited group nature and being able to customize things, they can tell the interest for each ministry and group because the small groups either grow or shrink.  Our product opens you up to doing more than click-through anyway in gauging the interest in ministry and groups a different way. 

JOHN

We do create an online version of every message; it’s encrypted so that only the recipient can view it.  A lot of churches will use that to archive stuff like newsletters, so it’s available for viewing, it has also come in handy for mail clients that didn’t retrieve a message for whatever reason, it’s online.

Another really cool feature, the unsubscribe link is a subscription manager obviously, it will allow the individual to get off the list, and it allows the recipient to blacklist themselves from getting any message from that church, for whatever reason. 

??

What steps are you taking with the new rendering engine in Outlook 2007 being the word-rendering engine verses the IE engine?  Have you had that as an issue, that’s its not displaying information correctly?

JOHN

We have, and the only issue is rendering background images with Outlook 2007 because it won’t do it.  We are in the process of gutting our template library so that it is compatible.  We have used background images but they’ve been programmed in a way that if the background image doesn’t appear in the content of the message, it’s still looks nice; it’s just not the original template.  So we are revamping our templates to take all that into account, to make them compatible, etc but other than that we haven’t had any issues.

JASON

Debra, could you talk about what somebody just asked in there about is there any throttling (?), …our ISP blocks if we sent over a certain number of emails per hour…

DEBRA

I was just reading that, John do you see that?

JOHN

We haven’t had that issue. Comcast is notorious for doing that, but we have whitelisted relationships with ISPs that we’re adding every week, we proactively register with them, we have a dedicated IP as our mail-server, so we haven’t ran into any issues of nondeliverability other than people’s individual spam filter settings and literally 99% of support issues we’ve have is that people have too strict filters or they haven’t whitelisted email addresses, so the only issue we’ve had is with people’s individual settings and they have been able to correct those.  As far as throttling, for scheduled mailings, we stagger those for the wee hours of the morning, but we don’t do any intentional spacing out based on ISPs. So it hasn’t been an issue yet, but we are monitoring it.

??

Is it configurable as to what email address it appears to come from?  Is it always gonna come from the same address?

DEBRA

No, group leader has it’s own email account and it comes from that email address and they can re-associate a new address at any time so you can tweak the first name and last name field to have that be different but if I’m sending it from my churchpost account, it comes from debra@churchpost directly to you. 

??

So if I’m the owner of that list, or if I’m allowed to send to that list, when I send, it looks like it came directly from my email address, not some other generic email contact list?

JOHN

Correct.

Josh is wondering about out-of-office replies and those sort of things, where do those go?

JOHN
We receive those back to our server, and as long as it is delivered, it does not get counted as a bounce message, so we absorb those, the send wouldn’t.

DEBRA

I would say from my customer support end, depending on the relationship that I have with the church, I’ll make notes in the account and keep them up to date with what’s happening with out-of-office and those kinds of things just to keep the church in the loop. 

DEBRA

We appreciate chatting with you guys.  Your IT podcast is a great thing, we’ll let some other people know about it. Thank you all very much.

JASON

It would probably be a good idea to shoot this over to your Communications folks and web developers at your churches if they are more in charge of email distribution stuff for your church, get this into the hands of the people that have oversight on that.

DEBRA & JOHN

We can set up another one of these for those other people in your church if they want/need it.

DEBRA

I just posted my direct line up there if anybody needs to get in touch with me.

JASON

Very Good.  This just helps reinforce how valuable communication is, with emailing our congregations, what kind of stats you can pull from it, etc.

DEBRA

We also talk to our churches about making sure they are sending good, responsible information, don’t abuse the tool, make sure it’s valid information.

JASON

We’re approaching the hour mark so we’ll probably drop off here in a little bit, but for those that are still around, I wanted to have people try out this online meeting tool, screen-sharing tool, and it’s supposed to also allow people to control screen so if you would go to churchitpodcast.com and then there’s a link on the side that says screen-sharing info link in the mid left hand side, take you to a little box, you put your email address in and click join, and what should happen, you’ll get an email shortly with a link up to us, so it’s letting you right in.  You should be seeing my screen, a very tiny version. 

Can you make the box bigger?  I’ll try it…

??

We can see about ¼ of your website, we can scroll.  I can zoom out but not really visible.

JASON

Via Flash, default, I wonder how you change that.  Craig wants to control my computer.  So if you joined directly in, you can go back and change, you want the Active X version, not the Flash, that’s what’s on my other computer and I can see everything quite well with it.

??

How did you acquire that?

JASON

Let me see if I can find…

??

The chat window doesn’t appear on our screen either.

JASON

Can you see the big ZOHO meeting crash page?

No

JASON

So now the meeting is started back up…I can see people joining in. I think I got it, you can send an email with that link, let me see if I can put that URL on Talkshoe.

Close that browser window, go to zoho.com click on zoho meeting and it should ask you to click in the meeting code, I just posed the code, put this code into that box, it will shoot you to the page to ask if you want ActiveX.

??

We don’t have the option to join. 

OH I gave you the wrong code!  My fault, try this one…you want Active X.  If this works, this will be a nice tool to not only talk about stuff but we can see somebody’s screen. 

??

Full screen now!  Very nice!

You can request to take control, up at the top.

If you have a white screen, it’s still loading.

The meeting has stopped.

Note to self “Never let anyone else have control!” 

You have to have Active X to control…

I’m working on getting some competitive bids on Adobe Connect.  I’m hoping the non-profit pricing is much lower, cause it’s expensive.  I think it has to be purchased directly from Adobe.  I just want to use the hosted version.  I’d like to use Connect for the Roundtable here next Wednesday, it would replace Talkshoe completely.  The piece that I like about Talkshoe is that it takes care of the MP3 and uploading to iTunes, I’m assuming there’s some sort of mechanism where it will also record all the audio, will it record the video?

Yes, it will record the screencast and the chat window and the audio, and there’s even a widget that will export an MP3.

Then we’d just upload that stuff to iTunes or something like that.

Jason, can you control the code on the wiki that includes that link to the meeting?

Yes, and you can too.

I found why it’s limiting the window side, it’s that…width and height. 

That’s the beauty of it being a wiki, everybody can join in and massage it.

When you give control, it crashes the meeting. 

This could be a VISTA issue.  Talkshoe changes their code every so often…

Dare we try the control thing again?  Did it kill it? 

It needs some work, this is not working. 

Anything else? 

I’m looking for how to kill the Saturday afternoon after Innovate in the Southbend area?

Fun stuff, it’s always fun to go see Touchdown Jesus over at Notre Dame, which is just a couple miles from the church. Whitewater rafting thing down on the river that runs through town.  I’ll get back to you on that.  You could come mow my grass. 

What’s the schedule Tuesday night?

I’m guessing people can come to church around 4:00 and we’ll plan to go eat or we’ll cater in. 

I’ll be sending notes to everyone registered for the Roundtable, try to generate ideas for that.

Do the Church IT survey! 

End recording