Share the knowledge

Webinars and such

2007-08-16T14:07:01Z

I gave my first webinar in a long time and things have really improved from a few years ago.

There are two components you need to provide: video and audio. Unfortunately, most of the services that combined video and audio also charge a premium over the individual services. So I ended up going with separate services.

There are many services available. Here are the best of the video services. Of course, I will always be glad to hear about other services that I may have missed.

Video conferencing

WebEx - the old standard. And old is right. I wouldn’t recommend this for anyone, it is just too complicated and ultimately too expensive. It reminds me of Norton Utilities - an application that was originally hot and cutting edge but now is a cash cow getting by on its reputation without upgrading.

Central Desktop Live - This looks promising. It has a nice calendar feature which is helpful and they provide a conference call number that you can use. Unfortunately, I had a lot of technical problems which were mostly my own fault for not understanding the software better. On the other hand, other packages were so easy that I assumed this one would be too. I will be giving this one another try. Support for the Mac is there but a little misleading. It definitely requires more set up time than the other apps I looked at.

Glance.net - This is what I ended up using and I would recommend it highly. It is simple to use as it just duplicates your monitor. There is a simple dotted line that shows you what is being sent out. It is simple for the incoming audience. All they need to know is the code to login and they are in. Glance uses Java and the client app is small and no one had any difficulties getting started, it was pretty much invisible. The pricing is $50/month for unlimited number of meetings for up to 15 attendees.

GoToMeeting - A spinoff of GoToMyPC, GoToMeeting lets you host an unlimited number of meetings for up to 10 attendees per meeting for $49/month. They have GoToWebinar which allows you to have an unlimited number of attendees for $99/month.

There are a number of different services that I chose not to mention for various reasons: no pricing freely available, excessive babble about “synergy” and “business strategies”, extremely high pricing or serious limitation (in my mind).

Recommendations

For the casual user, I would recommend Glance.net. It was extremely simple to set up and use and things went off without a hitch. I will be giving Glance.net another look.

Call me goofy…

2007-07-21T16:09:58Z

Okay, this has nothing to do with growth or anything else but I just found it humorous.

Your Score: the Ham

(42% dark, 61% spontaneous, 31% vulgar)

your humor style:
CLEAN | SPONTANEOUS | LIGHTYour style’s goofy, innocent and feel-good. Perfect for parties and for the dads who chaperone them. You can actually get away with corny jokes, and I bet your sense of humor is a guilty pleasure for your friends. People of your type are often the most approachable and popular people in their circle. Your simple & silly good-naturedness is immediately recognizable, and it sets you apart in this sarcastic world.

PEOPLE LIKE YOU: Will Ferrell - Will Smith

The 3-Variable Funny Test!
- it rules -

If you’re interested, try my best friend’s best test: The Genghis Khan Genetic Fitness Masterpiece

Link: The 3 Variable Funny Test written by jason_bateman on OkCupid Free Online Dating, home of the The Dating Persona Test

Essentials of Media Relations - Do Your Homework!

2007-07-15T21:35:52Z

When I was at GA, I participated in a workshop “Successful Public Witness: Planning Newsworthy Justice Events.” This was put together by Janet Hayes who is the Director of Information and Public Witness at the UUA. From this session and others, it was clear to me that there is an interest in public relations but people still feel overwhelmed by the basics. People seem to be looking for some magic bullet. Well, it’s not magic but it is work. It requires some effort on your part to study and learn how these papers operate.

If you have an Outreach, Communications or PR committee, go talk with them. They may have this information and already know all this information. If they don’t, ask them to find out. Hand them this list.

The Easy Stuff

So let’s start with the easy stuff. Compile all this information in a list.

What are the newspapers in your area? Write it down.
For each paper:
1. Get several editions of that paper and review them.
  1. What kinds of articles do they publish that could apply to your congregation? Cut them out and save them as examples and templates.
  2. Who are the reporters on those stories? Write their names down.
  3. Do they have a calendar of events?
2. How do you submit info for their public calendar? Write it down.
3. Call the newspaper and find out who covers religion. GET THEIR NAME AND NUMBER and, yes, write it down.
4. We’ll call that person a little later after you do some more homework.

Have a good story idea

Reporters don’t report stories because you want to publicize some event. Period. Don’t even go there. Anything they do for you is free so be nice, professional, and courteous even when they say they’ll put your article in and don’t or edit it beyond recognition.

Be authentic. If your congregation really isn’t doing anything, you can’t create something out of whole cloth. But don’t give up! ”Newsworthy” is a subjective term.

A few ideas:

Anything involving children

Nothing gets published faster than anything involving children in the area that the newspaper covers. Here is an article that we saw and adapted for three different newspapers based on three different children who were participating in a concert we were promoting. Obviously you must get permission from the parents and they will usually help you write the article as well.

Children participating in social action events is also newsworthy.

Music events

These are certainly publishable in a newspaper’s calendar. But it may also be a good feature news article as in the case of singer-songwriter Randy Driscoll who performed at our congregation. Randy wrote a song called “What Matters” about Matthew Shepard, the young man who was killed in Wyoming for being gay.

Our choir was planning on performing ”What Matters” and through a coincidence, one of our staff members happened to know her and wondered if wanted to perform the song with her. Things went from there and the choir has performed the song with her several times now in a variety of venues. That made a good story. But they don’t have to be unusual to get press. Local angles also play well.

Social Action Events

If you have visiting speakers who are covering notable topics, let the papers know. But if it is the “sermon” at your service, don’t position it that way. We have had a number of speakers that have received good coverage and attracted many new visitors who initially came because of their topic.

Provide a writeup

We have a template that we use for informing reporters about events. This particular letter gave rise to a good article about the lecture which resulted in half the audience coming from the community outside of our congregation.

Provide a short write up of the event that is clear and factual.
Who, What, When, Where, Why and How come first.
Avoid hyperbole!!!! The greatest!!! Most brilliant!!!! It doesn’t fly. Be objective.
Provide access to the speaker or musician if possible. The reporter is not going to want your opinion on what the speaker is going to say.
Be accessible to the reporter. It’s ok to be persistant be remember that they are doing you a favor. Too pushy and you’ll lose a valuable connection.
Thank the reporter for their time, for a job well done, for everything. If there do happen to be factual errors, be professional and clear about the error. Don’t get emotional. The error should be factual not one of editing preferences.

Ok, Now you can call that reporter

Follow these simple rules and you will get more exposure for your congregation. It’s not magic. It’s just work. Now, after reading this, you can call the reporter to ask them about their interests, deadlines, etc. It’s also an opportunity to briefly float an idea if appropriate. Now make that call!

We’ll get into other aspects of medial relations in another article.

Members-Only: A Wiki in Sheep's Clothing - Part 2

2007-07-01T21:10:55Z

This is a continuation of a guest post that I did on Faith and the Web run by Anna Belle Leiserson, a great blog. We haven’t actually met but she was kind enough to ask me to write a guest blog.

In that blog, Member-Only: A Wiki in Sheep’s Clothing, I talked about the challenge of introducing any new technology to a congregation. We were successful with the Members-only site because we (finally) focussed on making it useful rather than the technology itself. This article gets into some of the tweaks that I had to do to smarten the system up for public consumption.

I covered content in the previous article. Here the issues are

the Main Page
Security
Categories
Things you need to know
Resources

Almost like Jeopardy!

Make the Main Page Special

The Main page is the landing point for everyone coming into the members-only site. It is important to make it as attractive, informative and easy to navigate as possible. This typically means making it very non-standard from a wiki standpoint but this was crucial to helping people get oriented.

“Look What I’m Missing!” The main page was set to be accessible without logging in. This meant people could browse part of the site before they asked for an account. They were intrigued by what they saw and were highly motivated to get an account and actually use it!

Security

Security is an absolute requirement.

You can set the site up so that only members can read and edit pages. Visitors can be allowed to see a small subset of pages but they can’t edit or create accounts.

Our policy is “No Pseudonyms Allowed.” We have a “Request an Account” form that requires the first and last name, email address, phone number and a reference from the congregation. Then I manually create the new account. The system emails them with a temporary password which they have to change the first time they log in. Believe me, this is a lot less work than dealing with spam.

Establish Categories

Categories are the life blood of the wiki and you need to use them to create some structure. Categories are tags on a page that allow you to find sets of articles in the site. You can easily create pages that collect all the articles in a specific category, Help for example.

The extension (plugin) Dynamic Page Lists (DPL) allows you to create dynamic content based on combinations of categories. With DPL you can easily create lists like: New Pages, Recent Edits, Most Popular, which all figure prominently on our main page.

Things that you need to know

but are hard to find out

MediaWiki:Sidebar - this page controls the navigation bar to the left.
MediaWiki:Common.css - CSS put on this page affects all the other pages.
Templates - Just be aware that almost anything in curly brackets {{…}} is a template or magic word. The contents of a template page are substituted into that space. These are used extensively on Wikipedia. Templates make it easier to create a consistent look and feel but it also makes it difficult to figure out what is going on. Magic words are system variables like {{PAGENAME}} would be replaced by the actual page name.

Resources

MediaWiki software
MediaWiki Users forum Great resource for figuring out how to do things.
Dynamic Page List Extension (careful, there are two other variants)
Preloader - for creating boilerplate. Users hate empty pages.
LinkedImage - optional for certain functionality in DPL
Word2MediaWiki - Word macro for converting word docs to wiki markup language. Not great but a start.

Video'ing your services

2007-06-27T03:25:19Z

After spending the week at GA in the Communications room, I saw a lot of video taping going on and figured it might be useful to talk about the setup at Chalice.

We started recording our services as part of a multisite program with Temecula Valley UU. Our biggest use has been by our pastoral care team showing the services to shut-ins. This has been a big draw and there has been a steady demand for the recordings by the committee.

The Sony Handycam DCR-SR100 turns out to be a nice piece of work. This is not a professional quality camera but I highly recommend it for starting to record video of your services.

The main benefit of this camera is that it has a 30-gigabyte hard drive that stores over 7 hours of high-quality video which you can download directly to your computer or burn from the camera directly to a DVD recorder. That’s pretty sweet for newbies.

The audio captures Dolby Digital 5.1-channel surround sound via its built-in microphone. It works well and the limitations are going to from the location at the camera rather than closer to the source. That means if someone is sitting next to the camera with a sniffle, you will HEAR it.

The camera comes with Sony Vega video processing software. I use Adobe Premiere Pro because that’s what I learned. You’ll learn that processing video can take a long time and use lots of disk space. Constructing DVDs is another issue altogether. Keep it simple and forget the fancy menus for now.

The rest of the features don’t really matter too much until you get a little more sophisticated. A few notes:

The camera stores video in 2Gb chunks which is about 30 minutes. That screwed me up the first few times until I realized what was going on.
The shoe at the top is propriety to Sony
There is no way to get any other audio feed into the camera.
The camera can take 3 megapixel stills but, frankly, it sucks at taking stills. Very grainy with lots of color noise. Any cheap digital camera can do better. Save yourself a lot of headache and stick to video unless you are really really desparate.
Don’t bother shooting in “wide-screen” mode. All it does is lop off the top and bottom of the video. And besides, it is a big pain as far as compatability.
You’ll definitely need a tripod despite the photo above.

Because I am anal-retentive, I extract the audio and do some noise reduction on it. There is a big air conditioner compressor and an equally big “voom voom voom” in the audio. But luckily it easily removed. Then I can’t help but adjust the lighting because we have ugly fluorescent lights.

Someone donated a miniDV camera recently that is a little older but I will be comparing the results.

Habits of Highly Effective Congregations

2007-06-24T17:59:12Z

Another of my articles was published :-). The talk was called “Why Liberal Churches are Growing” but I like my title better. The characteristics apply to any congregation whether liberal or conservative. To me, this was one of the most important talks at GA.

We can learn a great deal from conservative churches. Please abandon your stereotype that they are mindless automatons who just attend and throw money at their congregation. It’s insulting and ignorant on our part.

Like any organization, they are doing something right when that many people feel that they are being ministered to effectively. Read the article.

Transylvania Here I Come

2007-06-24T07:12:37Z

As I am a newbie here covering GA, I get a little slack cuz I don’t quite know the process. So I kinda screwed up getting my articles submitted but, finally, my first UUA GA 2007 article has hit the UUA website! This was about the Unitarian church in Transylvania. Okay, you can stop now, it’s not about vampires. Just read the article.

Tonight I was at the Youth and Young Adult Coffee House. Wowser! That should have been covered by streaming video. As I write this, the ceiling over my head is a-shakin and a-rumblin’ with all the kids yelling and screaming! You’d think it was an earthquake! Man I have not heard or felt so much smokin’ hot passion, angst, emotion, energy since, well, since I was a teenager. I’d post some pictures but I figured I better not. I also can’t repeat some of the stuff. No matter how good or bad, the performances were all buoyed by a level of energy and hormones that was amazing.

What a buzz!

Ciao!

Public Witness & PR at GA

2007-06-24T00:21:27Z

Through the vagaries of chance, I got the opportunity to present at one of the workshops on organizing newsworthy justice events (Thank you, Janet!). One of the other speakers talked about social justice while I talked about PR. We each gave a short talk and then followed up with about 30 minutes of questions. The following is from my notes:

My name is Dean Goddette and I am chair of Outreach at Chalice Unitarian Universalist Congregation in Escondido, California. Just north of San Diego, Escondido is one of the most conservative cities in the state with a record of making it illegal for landlords to rent to illegal immigrants, to force the closure of emergency homeless shelters because they attact drug addicts, thieves and illegal immigrants. And besides, as one city councilor put it, “The bible says that the poor will always be with us. ”

In the midst of this, in fact, probably because of this, we have doubled in size from about 90 members to 193 members in about 5 years. We are one of the fastest growing congregations in California.

And it’s not by advertising. If you leave here with one message it is that it is what you do as individuals that drives inreach and outreach and congregational growth.

For you outreach and PR people, a few questions:

How many have a listing in your local paper’s church directory?
How many of you know who the religion editor or writer at your local paper?
How many have written up a news story with pictures and provided it to the religion writer?

Newspaper reporters are almost always starved for copy. They have careers and they want to move up the ladder. Several stories that we started with a local paper “graduated” to the larger regional paper. The local reporters become a resource for you as to what is newsworthy. As you develop a relationship, you don’t have to write everything up, you can pitch them a story on the phone and they will say yea or nay.

My Outreach co-chair has focussed on PR and has a list of all the papers and newspaper reporters. He contacts them on a regular basis. But be aware that reporters have a nose for BS. You need to actually be presenting them with news.

For those of you in social action or justice, you are the ones who can lead your congregation and provide newsworthy events for outreach. They can’t make stuff up. So the more authentic the event the better.

GA Friday evening

2007-06-23T16:13:30Z

I’ve bumped into everyone except Al so I don’t know if I believe that he is actually here ;-).

There are two things that I’d like to see happen differently next year. First, I would bring my guitar and encourage other musicians to do the same. I am shocked, SHOCKED! at the lack of random music. Second, I would encourage people to watch the streaming video. Your first choice should be to attend but, if you can’t, watch the video.

The last two days have been a bit crazy. As I mentioned, I was recruited to be on a panel and that went well as best I can tell.

The Most Excellent Under-used Resource from GA

2007-06-23T14:40:58Z

There are a number of events that are streamed live from the General Assembly but unless people actually start watching, it will be going away. Not that I have any inside knowledge. But like anything else, if it costs money (and I am sure that it is not cheap) and people aren’t using it, it will go away.

I have to admit that this is my first GA and I have not watched any of the streaming coverage of the last five or six GAs that were covered. But since I am here in the communications room at GA, I have watched a great deal of the streaming coverage.

There are some basic questions. Do people know that the streaming coverage exists? If they do, is the material covered of interest to them?

From my own experience, I had absolutely no idea about what went on at GA. Shame on me, I missed out on a great deal over the years. But also, like a lot of UUs, I was anti-authoritarian and had some real misconceptions about the UUA. So, for better or worse, the more I could ignore them the better. UU was all about my local congregation, not the UUA.

But that’s changed now. I attended an excellent session by Terasa Cooley about the characteristics of growing congregations. One of the points was that growing congregations establish a good balance between “I”, “We” and a “Larger Vision”. I have been stuck in “I” and “We” for a long time now. But the times they are a changin’…