Yesterday ZDNet quoted Bill Gates as saying, “As we bring AD and Passport together, Hotmail and Exchange together, and MSN Spaces and SharePoint together, we give you the richness but also the choice of having it as a server or a service.”
This tidbit offers some intriguing insight into Microsoft’s product plans. The availability of functions like these as either servers or services will change the in-house vs. outsource calculation in significant ways.
There has been a lot of trade press coverage today on the unveiling of the new look for Office 12 at Microsoft’s Professional Developer’s Conference. The best information I’ve seen is this blog on PC World by Harry McCracken. Office 12 is due out in the second half of 2006.
Those of us involved in church IT will need to start considering how the availability of Office 12 will affect next year’s budget and technology planning.
To me, the biggest issue is the total cost of upgrading. This total cost is more than just the cost of the license fees and any necessary consulting to achieve a network-wide upgrade, but will also include the training costs. Given that the user interface will be completely new, there will be significant training costs as well as the intangible cost of loss of productivity while users learn the new interface.
On the other hand, the arguments in favor of upgrading are obvious. This will be the first major improvement in Office in more than eight years. It seems probable that most or all of the innovations we see in this new version will ultimately be embraced by users and become the “new normal”. If I’m right on this, it isn’t really a question of whether, but only a question of when. The only thing that could change this would be a universal rejection of the new user interface. In that case, will we all move to Open Office? Who knows?
Will those of us who are decision-makers in church IT be early adopters, or will we wait to embrace this new version? At Resurrection we’re still running Office 2000. We had tentative plans to move to Office 2003 this year, but that plan didn’t survive the budgeting process. I can’t imagine that we will adopt Office 12 next year since there’s no way we can properly plan for it a year in advance of its release. Since we’re still on Office 2000, however, we don’t have the luxury of waiting indefinitely. With all of this in mind, I’d predict that 2007 will be the year for us.
Perhaps you saw Robert Scoble’s interview of Bill Gates on Microsoft’s Channel 9. I found the interview interesting, which isn’t surprising as I suspect I’d be interested in practically any interview of Bill Gates. But what struck me the most is the way Scoble and the team at Channel 9 are innovating the use of inexpensive video technology and blogging to get their message out in an anti-slick, human way.
What they’re doing on Channel 9 shows that all you need is a consumer digital camcorder and a streaming video server. The interview isn’t edited at all, just trimmed at the beginning and the end. They’ve succeeded in making Microsoft human and Bill Gates human (look closely and you’ll notice, he isn’t wearing socks!). Making the big, bad Microsoft human is an impressive feat.
So I’ve been thinking about how to apply this innovation in the church. In order to attract people who otherwise wouldn’t come into the church, it seems to me that we should be working to export outside the four walls of the church something of the experience that happens inside the four walls. Many of our churches are doing that now with video streams and podcasts of sermons or other portions of weekend worship.
But what if we had a video “reporter” like Scoble who would go around and capture some of the experience of our other programming? For example, we could send a reporter into our children’s area on Sunday morning to capture a sense of the excitement, get testimonials from parents and kids, show the production quality of the large group time, etc. And then produce it for web streaming with minimal editing and no titles, effects, etc. That kind of anti-slick communication could go a long way to make huge churches like Resurrection seem small, accessible, and human. And it could make small churches seem innovative, high-tech, and exciting.
Is anyone out there doing this now? If so, I haven’t seen it.
It’s hard to believe that Church of the Resurrection’s annual Leadership Institute is only three weeks away. This year we’re blessed to have Mark Stephenson of Ginghamsburg Church and Chuck Russell of United Methodist Communications (UMCOM) presenting a 4-hour workshop on web ministry. Mark is the director of the Web Empowered Church, a new initiative of the Methodist Foundation for Evangelism. Both are well known seminar presenters on how churches can make effective use of the web in ministry.
Also, Mark will be making an exciting announcement about Web Empowered Church at the conference. More on this later.
If you could possibly make time in your schedule to come to Kansas City for this event, September 29 through October 1, I know you’ll be blessed. If you’re interested to hear more about how the Web Empowered Church can help you, not to mention the opportunity to spend time with some of the country’s most knowledgeable practitioners of web ministry, Leadership Institute 2005 is for you. See Resurrection’s web site for full details. See you there!
In a comment to this post, Frank Johnson wonders how we’re going to measure the effectiveness of our Google AdWords campaign. So Frank, here’s your answer …
Yes, Church of the Resurrection is a large church with over 14,000 members including adults and children. And you’re quite right that this makes it difficult to measure ad campaign effectiveness.
But I’m in a quite unique position. While I’m the IT Director at Resurrection, I’m also the volunteer tech guy for my wife’s brand new church plant, Living Water Christian Church. Like your friend Scott’s church, it too is small enough that we can find out easily what’s working and what isn’t. This turns out to be a great advantage from a technical perspective because I can prototype things on a very small scale at Living Water, before moving them up to beta in the big church, and then finally rolling them out in the big church. So that is our plan in this case.
For this experiment, I’m working with Chuck Russell who is also a contributor to this blog. He has experience running Google AdWords campaigns at the national, denominational level for the United Methodist Church.
We’re presently wrestling with two questions: 1) What is the objective of the campaign? 2) How will we measure the results? Now clearly these questions relate strongly to each other and to the design of the campaign.
For example, if we define success as someone hearing about us first through AdWords and subsequently attending worship, that creates some significant measurement obstacles because the Communications folks at Resurrection are reluctant to put “How did you hear about us?” on the worship sign-in sheet. (Jokingly, our Communication Director has wondered out loud about some kind of coupon strategy, a marketer’s standard technique in a situation like this, but that’s good only for a laugh.) Another difficulty with worship attendance as an objective is that it is often difficult to separate multiple influences on why someone came to worship for the first time. Someone may well have heard about us first through AdWords, but then heard about us in a number of other places before deciding to attend. By then, they’ve forgotten that AdWords was the first exposure.
So we’re considering other objectives, with other measurement methods, which will give us a way to determine effectiveness with greater confidence. For example, what if the objective is to get people to subscribe to something such as an e-mail newsletter or a podcast or a blog? Or, maybe the objective is to get them to download a PDF or watch a sermon online. Perhaps the objective will be to get them to send us a prayer request. The key here is to get people to take an action online that we can directly measure. It must be something beyond simply clicking on the AdWord itself because we’ll never know if that click was relevant or effective. We’re also planning on having a separate landing page on our website for each AdWord so we’ll be able to measure any relative differences among the AdWords.
As you can see, right now we have more questions than answers. My previous post was just to let you know we were working on this and would have results to report by sometime in November.
A positive, mostly accurate story about Church of the Resurrection appeared today in a local newspaper. It’s great to get a full-length article that says nice things about the church, rather than reporting the latest scandal or controversy. I recommend the article if you would like to get a good overview of the church.
Frank Johnson posts today about how Pathway Church is using Google AdWords. Chuck Russell and I are preparing an experiment with AdWords at Resurrection in which we are designing a way to measure the campaign’s effectiveness — not just the number of click-throughs, but the actual number of people who take the desired action (come to worship, subscribe to a podcast, etc.) after clicking. We’ll post again in a couple of months when we have concrete results to report.
Here’s a simple and free way to podcast, using our Living Water podcast as the example. (Also see this earlier post when we were first learning how to do this.) If you’re new to the idea of podcasting, it’s simply a way to allow people to subscribe so they automatically get your new MP3 files after you upload them, without having to visit your site every time to see if a new file has been posted.
This recipe assumes you already have the audio in MP3 format. (If not … well, that’s an entirely different post.)
1. Get a free blog on Blogger (or MSN Spaces, or any similar service).
2. Create a blog post for each sermon, so that your blog looks like this: http://lwccpodcast.blogspot.com/. Note that the title of each post is linked to the MP3 file on your server.
3. Get a free account on Feedburner.
4. Run the Blogger feed (http://lwccpodcast.blogspot.com/atom.xml) through Feedburner. When you’re setting up the feed in Feedburner, enable the “SmartCast” option. This will tell Feedburner to modify the Blogger feed by inserting XML enclosure tags around the MP3 links. You’ll end up with a podcast feed that looks like this: http://feeds.feedburner.com/LWCC_Podcast. Podcatchers such as iPodder and iTunes will be able to subscribe to this feed.
5. Put the podcast link on your website. I do it by linking to the blog from the church web site, and then providing the XML feed link on the blog page. This is what it looks like on the Living Water site.
Presto! A simple procedure for creating a podcast using free tools.
If you’re not reading Richard McManus’ blog, “Read/Write Web“, you should be. In a recent post, he gives more illustrations of how web sites are becoming platforms upon which other developers can build applications.
I’m constantly thinking about how to reach people below the age of 35 (or thereabouts) who are outside the church. PC World published this story on a new study by comScore Networks on “Behaviors of the Blogosphere”.
Some significant findings:
For us, this is further evidence that blogging must be a significant part of our under 35 strategy.
Clif Guy sporadically 