Has anyone out there checked out Foldera? Does this technology address in any way Tony’s series of posts about document management? For this to be useful, would it have to be integrated with Google Docs and Gmail?

Earlier this week Matt Carlisle of Big Heart Design did a phone interview with Chuck Russell, Resurrection’s Director of Internet Communications, and edited it into a podcast. If you want to know more of the thinking behind our recent website redesign, you’ll find this 41-minute podcast fascinating.

Resurrection is in the middle of the annual campaign to get pledges for the next year’s operating fund. I’ve personally been involved in a lot of data analysis and list generation for the different segments in our target. Since I have fund raising on the brain right now, Katya Andresen’s post yesterday about convincing people to support your cause (church) caught my eye. She said:

Since nice is not enough, you’ve got to answer all of these for your supporters:

1. Why me? Why should people care about you, and how are you revelant [sic] to their lives, their values, their priorities?
2. What for? What do they personally get out of supporting you and what social good will result?
3. Why now? What’s so urgent about your appeal? Why should people act now?
4. Who says? How credible is the messenger? Who thinks this is worthwhile?

Her point #4 sparked a thought. I wonder if there is a way to get the lead donors of the congregation involved in encouraging others to give. Could we come up with some kind of viral campaign so that the message is coming from fellow congregants rather than the senior pastor and staff? Hmmm …

Monday through Wednesday this week the senior staff of Resurrection took a bus trip to visit Willow Creek and Granger. Andrew Conard, one of our pastors, blogged the trip well. He began with a post about the Willow Creek visit, then a post about the Granger visit, and finally a post explaining the purpose of the trip and some questions we considered after visiting Willow Creek and Granger. Adam Hamilton, our senior pastor, also talked about the trip in his weekly e-mail to the congregation.

It was great to see Jason Powell on Tuesday, even though we only had 90 minutes together. He seemed a bit stressed and was last seen mumbling to himself about budgets! At Resurrection our first draft budget for 2008 is due next Friday, November 2, so I can relate. Later we had a tour of Granger’s facilities. Jason and Ed were no where to be found, but I did meet Kyle Sagarsee, their new desktop guy. He was prepping a bunch of Optiplex 745 boxes loaded with Vista. I think it’s a bit brave to run Vista at this point, but Kyle seemed happy with it in spite of the fact that he has no way to image the drives so he has to build them one-by-one. Eeek!

The highlight of the whole trip for me was the Q&A with Bill Hybels. I’m always intrigued, challenged, and inspired by Bill’s ideas. This time was no exception even though he had nothing prepared and just responded to our questions.

I appreciated the extensive time on the bus to talk with fellow senior staff people in groups of 2-3. Normally on our retreats we have a lot of agenda to cover. This time we had a total of 23 hours on the bus and only 3-4 hours of it were scheduled activities. That was nice.

I have had more extensive and in-depth tours of Willow Creek and Granger in the past, so I didn’t learn much of anything new, but discussing a church site visit with all of the senior staff was a special experience that sparked a lot of strategic conversation. I hope we do it again and I would recommend it to other churches. It would be great to return the generous hospitality we received at Willow Creek and Granger to other churches on a similar trip.

Some time ago I stumbled across TechRepublic’s 13 questions to help you evaluate how you’re doing as an IT manager. It’s challenging and helpful for me to review every month or two. Here they are:

1. Technology changes everyday. Can you list three examples of things you’re doing to keep your technical knowledge current?
2. Your boss has a family emergency that’s going to keep him or her out of the office for a week. Your boss can call only one person to keep things running until he or she returns. Are you the one who gets that phone call? If so, why? If not, why not?
3. What specific steps have you taken over the past six months to either increase the performance of the bottom 20 percent of your staff or to move them to positions where they can be successful?
4. When was the last time you talked with the account reps for your three largest vendors?
5. What specific steps have you taken over the past six months to keep your star performers on board and motivated?
6. If your group services internal clients, what do they think of the work your department is doing? Are you guessing or have you actually asked them in the last 30 days?
7. If you suddenly get sick, do you have a subordinate you could trust to keep things moving until you get back?
8. When was the last time you checked on the financial stability of the outsourcing firms you use?
9. Do you know which of your department’s projects is furthest behind schedule? Do you know why?
10. Consider your direct reports. Does each of them know what your top three priorities are for them?
11. Consider your boss. When was the last time he or she asked you to take over a special project? If it’s been more than six months, why do you think that is?
12. Can you list three things you’re doing to help HR with recruitment or retention?
13. Personal networking is important for you and your organization. What professional associations do you belong to, and how active are you in them?

I waited a few weeks to see if anyone else would post more about the RoundTable. Just two more have appeared. I’m linking them here so I have all of them in one place. (I still have a huge smile on my face from the event. Thanks everyone, it was really, really cool!)

Tony Dye:
http://tonydye.typepad.com/main/2007/10/fall-citrt-pers.html
http://tonydye.typepad.com/main/2007/10/roundtable-phot.html

I’m with the senior staff of Resurrection on a bus trip to visit Willow Creek and Granger. My phone has EVDO and will work as a modem. But being the geek that I am, I just had to give my fellow staff way for them to also have Internet access during the 9-hour bus rides there and back. Fortunately, I have an EVDO-WiFi router I bought for my wife’s church a few months ago.

The only thing I needed was a source of AC power. I called the bus company to inquire. No, they didn’t have any outlets on the bus. Fortunately again, a few years ago I bought a 600 watt inverter that would do the trick. But then I worried about whether the driver would want to use the cigarette lighter outlet for his cell phone, GPS, or whatnot. Just to be safe, I bought a cigarette lighter Y adapter providing one socket for me and one for him!

Guess what? It worked! Here’s my laptop browsing your favorite blog!

Here’s my boss, Brent (right) being goofy while Andrew Conard blogs using his Mac.

Molly enjoying the WiFi:

I should also mention that Ian helped troubleshoot a problem this morning by connecting to Dave’s RDP session. It was Ian’s first help desk call to a moving bus!

One problem, though. I found out that a WiFi router uses quite a bit of power. When I added one laptop to the 600 watt inverter it was okay. When I plugged in a second laptop, the inverter screamed at me and shut down the router. So we have enough power for the router and one laptop. Everyone else needs to run off of battery!

Tonight I’m thinking a lot about Kansas State University’s “Digital Ethnography” program and the light it sheds on our Internet Campus strategy. If you haven’t see them, check out these videos:

• Information R/evolution
• The Machine is Us/ing Us
• A Vision of Students Today

Chris Fowler, president of Church Community Builder, responded to my concerns this evening as follows:

I wanted to let you know that after speaking with multiple people yesterday and today about this issue, I heard lots of differing opinions – some saying we were doing smart optimizations, other saying some of what we intended to be optimization for search engines could be considered “borderline”. After praying about it and getting that counsel, what I decided to do was to be “above reproach”. I appreciate the fact that you were willing to communicate with me through these channels one on one. Thank you for being “iron sharpening iron”. Changes have already been made at this point for the home page, but we will also be making changes to the footer over the next 24 hours or so on the non-home pages.

My wife’s church is in the market for a web-based ChMS, so I thought I’d check out Church Community Builder. Imagine my surprise to discover questionable search engine optimization (SEO) on their home page.

First, notice the obvious keyword stuffing on the right side of the page. Then, look in the barely-readable footer and notice more keyword stuffing.

Second, turn off CSS and notice that the keywords are enclosed in h1 tags. Those aren’t titles at all and they’re being obscured by clever use of CSS. In my view, it’s a form of cloaking to put h1 tags around things that aren’t titles, making them appear huge and important to search engine crawlers, while using CSS to make those things appear small and unimportant to humans. This is the most concerning thing I see on the page.

Finally, while it’s not a bad SEO technique per se, I have a negative impression of any company or organization that tries to optimize for competitors’ company names and product names. This is certainly something we wouldn’t engage in ourselves. That is, we wouldn’t try to optimize our site to capture people searching for another church down the street by name. Similarly, we wouldn’t buy search engine advertising related to another church or its programs. Instead, we’d focus on trying to help people find us who are looking for us. If they’re looking for another church by name, we’d want them to find that church, not us.

Two days ago I sent an e-mail to Chris Fowler, the president of the company about this. He vigorously defended his company and their SEO practices while saying that he would be open to my point of view. I explained my concern and how to fix it. So far he hasn’t responded further or changed the home page.

What do you think? Does it give you a negative impression of the company? How would you advise Chris in this situation?