Technology Tuesday

Yesterday was one of those days that didn't exist for clergy 20 years ago--or even 10 years ago. I spent my day on the computer. Here are a few things I did:

E-newsletter and Survey Work
When our newsletter editor went to Rome on sabbatical a year ago, our parish transitioned to weekly e-mailed newsletters. This gives us the ability to get more information to more people, but it also means that I spend part of every week updating the blurbs. We use Constant Contact and it works very well for us. It even archives our e-mails.

Last week we handed out a survey in worship, but only got three responses back so I decided we should send the survey out by e-mail. I've know other people to use Survey Monkey which is free, so I started creating the survey there. It was a bit cumbersome, so went back to our Constant Contact account because they, too, have survey ability. I signed up for the 60-day free trial and got started. It took a surprisingly long time to create the survey, but once it was done I saved it and could copy it and make changes. Although it took over 2 hours to create the survey for parishioners, it only took 10 minutes to make a similar survey for students.

Website work
Our parish website also needs updated or possibly overhauled. A parishioner has taken on the role of webmaster, but I still need to work on writing and sharing pictures and help out in other ways. We use Joomla to create our website. It's not intuitive, but it's free so we put up with it. I edit our photos before uploading with the great free website Picnik. It's extremely easy to use and has lots of options.
I also spent some time looking at other church websites to get fresh ideas about what do to with ours. A few are here and here and here.

Sermon Sharing
Before my sabbatical, I was pretty faithful about posting audio sermons online. Currently, I use my iPhone to record the sermon on Sunday morning. Then wireless technology gets that file onto the computer where I use GarageBand to turn it into a podcast. The podcast is saved in iTunes and then gets uploaded to Podomatic. Podomatic doesn't seem very "churchy" so I was asking other clergy what they use and someone suggested SermonStudio which is also free. It seems like a better option, so I migrated a few samples from my archives over there and will begin using it soon.

At the end of the day, I rode my bike over to visit a parishioner and then took the long way home.