Provides one permanent feed address no matter where your blog may ever move to.  

This is my biggest reason for advocating Feedburner.  It’s a great safety net.  Most people will get the idea to start a blog, and even jump in, before they know what they want completely.  That is good but usually will lead to limitations in the future by being locked to the platform you started with.  If you decide to move, every single user is unsubscribed and must subscribe again.  This usually loses 30%-50% of the readers immediately just for upgrading.  

Feedburner solves this problem.  It allows you to have a public address that will never change, while giving the flexibility behind the scenes to change the location, host, or platform to anything you want, anytime you want.  When you use it, just make sure users subscribe to the feedburner address. (i.e. feeds.feedburner.com/MinistryTools)

Gives ability for your content to be delivered by email.  

Feed readers like Google Reader are great, but the majority of normal people still don’t use them.  But everyone knows and understands email great.  Feedburner converts a complicated updating blog to email and emails everyone with the new content.  Notice the entry form on the side of this blog.

Gives statistics about your readers.  

Ever wonder who is reading what you write?  Feedburner gives those detailed statistics as well.

Builds interaction into posts.  

Notice at the bottom of this post.  It places these links into the content whether it be on the site, in a feed reader, or in email.

Here are some types of “podcasts” and other “feeds” that you can use, for free, and the type of media distributed.

1. Regular podcast - the easiest way to do a plain audio podcast that I have found is with gcast.  I have written about this before, so you can check out the post on it.
2. Video podcasts, feeds, or live sreaming - If you want to make your media that you distribute a little more interesting you can do a video podcast.  You record it (that would be another post), but once you have it in a digital format you can upload it to a number of different sites that allow people to subscribe to be notified when you update it.
   1. YouTube - This is the best for trying to get highlights out.  Or anything else, really, because of its popularity, but the limitation is that it only allows for 10 minutes.
   2. Vimeo - Better quality and longer durations allowed, but basically like YouTube.  Gaining popularity.
   3. Google Video - Unlimited and simple to understand.  Like everything else that Google does.
   4. Ustream.tv - What our church uses.  Supports live video streaming of services and records/hosts them for posterity.  You can embed a player on your website like YouTube and have it play default programming that you set up when there is nothing live.  You may see the embedded version here, and the dedicated Ustream page here.
3. Blogs - never actually seen it done, but you could start a blog for sermon notes and embed the video into it.

Now, how do you do it?

There are 2 easy options I will tell you about: Paypal and Easy Tithe.

First, Paypal.  Paypal is pretty much the standard of online transactions and is a partner of Ebay to help with all the money that that site moves.  Being such, they are incredibly convenient and easy to set up.  

A few things you want to know about Paypal:

• There is no monthly fee - only fees come from transactions (about 2.9%, I believe)
• The money is held by Paypal like an bank account, it doesn’t go directly into your account though it is simple to set that up.
• A giver can give in a variety of methods and doesn’t even need to sign up with Paypal.

Now, Easy Tithe.  Easy Tithe is really optimized for churches and it shows.  It makes things very simple and has many options that might push you toward that.

One of my favorite tools.  A free one.  Are you ever somewhere, think of something, but don’t have a good place to write it down to remember it??  Do you use email and have a cell phone?  Then Jott is for you.

Here is how you use it.  

1. Call Jott. (after you set up your account)
2. It will ask, “Who do you want to Jott?”
3. Say, “Me.”
4. It will beep like an answering machine, and then you simply speak what you want to remember.  
5. It then transcribes what you say (quite accurately too), sends you an email of the transcription, and includes the recording of your voice for any confusion.

Any address that you have on your volatile computer is safe on Plaxo because it automatically syncs without you even noticing it.

Also, if anyone in your address book is also a member with Plaxo, if they ever update their information, it is automatically updated on Plaxo, and in your local address book.

It will send you Birthday reminders to give you a great excuse to contact people you want to stay up with and will link with other websites, blogs, and calendars to keep everything in one place.

Some nice features, for free.  Check it out here.

So, I thought I would give a few more tools to help with music for your church. It is always a hassle for me trying to gather cd’s, listen to tapes, and try to figure out sheet music.  I am a lot better at hearing a song and saying, “I like that.”  

That is why I use iTunes and Rhapsody, a lot. They both work off the same concept - finding a song or artist you like.  While that is hugely valuable, what makes it wonderful is the ability to find similar songs or artists.  Let me explain.

Lets say you know about a particular song that you like.  I dont know why, but I am thinking of “Step Into the Water”.  Once you search for “step into the water” it will bring up a big list of people who sing that.  If they sing that song, they will likely sing another you like.  So, you can start to look into that new group, find songs that they sing and discover songs very quickly.  It is an intermingled web — which is good for finding stuff.

iTunes gives you 30sec previews of unlimited number of songs and cost $.99 to buy each one.  

Rhapsody is membership based, but gives you 25 free plays.  After that it is $12.99/month for unlimited songs.  You can only listen to them on their site though.

Skype is great because it is free, can be on any platform (Mac or Windows), and can do audio, video, or instant messaging.

Here is an idea to use it to stay in contact with your missionaries and keep them before your people:

1. Download Skype, and talk your missionary into doing the same.  (Good chance he already has it, it’s great for communication with home.)
2. Put Skype on the computer that you use for media in the services.
3. Contact the missionary during a service and throw a video of him up on the screen.  Have him tell you what is going on on the field.  Ask him questions.  Have him show you around.  Whatever - it is all live! (of course he will need a camera hooked up to his computer.  If he is smart he will already have a mac that has it built in:)

If you are a pastor, or anyone really, use this free tool to be a friend to your missionaries, even outside of services!  You will have a much better idea of what their life is like over their presentation in your church every 4 years.

And, to be honest, if you find a way of hosting bigger files offsite and just showing them on your site, the rest of the website takes a very minimal amount of hosting requirements.

So, Gcast makes this a breeze.  

• It is completely free 
• Provides unlimited hosting, 
• Automatically creates a “podcast feed” that people can subscribe to to get future updates
• Gives you code for a player that you can post on your website, blog, or anywhere else.

1. Everyone sees the email, but all replies are directed to the original sender of the email

2. The whole group sees all emails and responses. 

An email ring can be utilized for many ministry-specific advantages.

SS Class

Put everyone on the email ring to be able to tell about activities, discuss comments about the lesson, give prayer requests, etc.

Leaders of the Church

Discuss, challenge, and announce things that you dont have time to talk about in the pulpit or teachers meeting.  A great way to get volunteers and build a team.  Let everyone see what others are saying.

Church Staff

Have a separate ring for the internal church staff.  This is how the majority of communication happens at Vision.  Email becomes a task manager and everyone is aware of what everyone is doing.  Like a perpetual staff meeting.

Any other grouping you want

Men of the church,  ladies, singles, ministry friends, couples, SS teachers, music people.  Any email address is valid.

WAYS TO START AN EMAIL RING

cPanel - ask your web host if they are capable of accommodating email mailing lists.  This is the way I have experience with email rings, but if you dont have a website or hosting company, here are other ways of accomplishing it.

http://www.innercircle.cc/

http://groups.google.com/

It has some great features that make church organization a breeze.

Group Tools

Allows you to organize and separate different areas of the church into their own groups.  Each class could have their own calendar, address book, files, etc.  all hosted on the internet accessible to everyone.  Each member of the group can have differing administrative privileges too to control edits.

File Hosting

Need to make a document, picture or song accessible to the group?  Airset allows you to upload up to 1gig of files.

Messaging Capabilities

Send emails and text messages to cell phones via the Airset interface.  Message the whole group at once or individually

Calendar

Calendar can be edited via a web interface from any computer.  Color coding helps keep events clear.  Can be embedded into your churches website very nicely.  And you can see each groups calendar seperately or see all of them combined into one.

Address Book

Works very well for SS rolls.  An editable spreadsheet style Address Book.

Lists

Makes it possible to organize to-do’s, goals, or ideas for everyone to see.

Blog

Provide you with blogging capabilities.  Not very customizable, but can be utilized for a text editor if you just need a place to write down, or keep information.  In my case I use it to keep a record of Music we have sung.

I utilize airset here at church mainly for the music ministry.  I can have all special music on the calendar and have it embedded into the church website so that everyone can have access to the schedule.  

I work with an assistant and we are both able, even at the same time, to schedule groups, the songs that will be sung, and the congregational music for the instrumentalists.

All elements of the calendar are color coordinated.  Each song on the calendar I can add “attendees” to where they will get notified 2 weeks in advance of them singing.

Goals and tasks for music are organized in the “lists” function.

The “blog” function I keep private, but is a record of every song, in list format, that we have sung divided out by the person or group that sung it.  Very helpful for when people cancel at the last moment.

The youth pastor has all events organized in a separate tab, and the main church calendar can mix-in events from any of the other ministries to display as the main calendar.

Comes highly recommended from many that I know personally that use it daily.