If you’ve ever been on a missions trip, you know how hard it can be at times to communicate with your loved ones or your staff at home. Here are a few great free and economical ways to stay-in-touch while roaming the earth.

Skype

• Phone  Calls – Skype-to-Skype calls are always free. If you need to call a cell phone, just purchase some credit and ring any phone in the world from your computer screen. This is also a great way for your family to reach you when you are connected to the Internet.
• Video Conferencing – This is a great way to call into your church services and give them a glimpse of what’s going on in your neck of the world. If you’re on a PC, Skype has just released a new version that supports 5-way video calls. This is a great way for you to have meetings with your staff while you’re out of the country.
• Internet Access – If you’re stuck in an airport with pay-to-play WiFi and you don’t want to use your credit card in a foreign country, most public WiFi hotspots accept Skype credit as payment for using their service. Just fire up Skype and type in your credentials, Skype does the rest. Skype Internet access saved the day for me when I was recently stuck in a Brazilian airport with no way to communicate.
• Skype Phone – This is a great way to make calls when you’re near WiFi without lugging your laptop everywhere.

• Download Skype For Free

Google Voice and Gmail Video

• Never come home to an overwhelming voice-mail box. Forward all of your calls to your Google Voice number and it will record your messages in MP3 form for you to check anywhere in the world.
• Google Voice also allows you to send text messages to any phone from anywhere in the world. This is a great way to get in touch with your leaders or your loved ones for free!
• Gmail video chat is another great video conferencing tool

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A few years ago I came up with an idea to help leaders stay connected with their congregations/leadership teams. This concept was birthed out of observation of many leaders only connecting with their congregation/leaders on a personal basis only during times of crisis or conflict.

We often view relationships as a time-consuming process that involves large chunks of our time. A leader who leads many people or leaders can feel overwhelmed with the burden of connecting. Many simply run from this burden and never make an effort to have any form of personal contact outside the functions of the church. Thus, the concept I call “2MPH” was birthed.

Two things about 2MPH

• The Premise – Two Miles Per Hour
  • Slow down from the busyness of life.
• The Application – Two Minutes Per Hour
  • Take two minutes out of every hour and connect with someone.

Get Your Calculator Out

I took this idea of two minutes per hour to the calculator and was amazed at the impact of these small time investments. Before I started my mad calculator skills, I factored in a 40-hour work week which equals 2,400 minutes of work time.

Here’s what I came up with:

• 2 minutes X 8 hours = 16 minutes / day
• 16 minutes X 5 work days = 80 minutes / week
• 80 minutes X 50 work weeks (minus Christmas and Thanksgiving) = 4,000 minutes / year (66 1/2 hours)
  

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If you’ve read my posts, you know I’m a huge WordPress fan.  For those who don’t know what WordPress is, check it out at WordPress.org. One of the latest themes that has caught my attention is the P2 theme that turns WordPress into a Twitter-like interface.  It’s a great way for your team to communicate and post items of interest in real-time on the web.   When a user posts, it automatically updates on the post list of everyone who’s viewing the site.   Users can reply up to five levels depending on your configuration.  Here’s how I got my own installed and working.

Install WordPress

• Install WordPress – I used a subdomain (http://team.mydomain.com)  Most hosting companies have a One-Click application installer so you don’t have to mess with setting up a database or ugly FTP interfaces.   All you have to do is fill out a simple form where you want WordPress installed, give it a few minutes, and viola, it’s up-and-running.

Install the P2 Theme

• Log in to the admin interface (http://team.mydomain.com/wp-admin/) and go to Appearance->Add New Themes
• Search for “P2″ in the search box and install the theme.
• Activate the theme under Appearance->Themes
• If you have problems, download the theme files to your computer and upload them to your WP directory using an FTP client.

Make your WordPress Private

• You probably don’t want the world reading your posts, so let’s make your WordPress private.  Go to Plugins->Add New
• Search for Private WordPress and install the plugin (Install button is to the right of the search results table)
• Make sure Private WordPress is activated under Plugins->Installed

Setup Your Preferences

• Go to Settings->General and give your portal a name and description.
• Go to Settings->Reading and enter the number of posts you want to appear on each page under: “Blog pages show at most”
• Go to Settings->Discussion and enable threaded nested comments (Choose how many levels you desire – this is basically how many levels down people can comment on other’s comments)
  • To keep non-users from commenting, check “Users must be registered and logged in to comment”
  • Un-check “An administrator must always approve the comment” and “Comment author must have a previously approved comment

Force Posted Links to Open In New Pages

• Go to Plugins->Add New and search for “Target Blank In Posts And Comments”
• Install and activate this plugin.  The functions will work automatically without any additional settings.

Add Your Team Members

• Go to Users->Add New  Create profiles for your team members.  Assign them the role of author so they can only edit their own posts.  To assign a moderator, give them a role of administrator, or editor.
• Team members can have their own personalized user icon by registering the same email address in their profile at: http://gravatar.com  This is a universally recognized avatar that will work on any site they use the registered email address on.

Install Additional Features

• Try installing other plugins for added functionality.
• Allow users to be notified of additional comments with the plugin “Subscribe To Comments”
• There are dozens of YouTube plugins that allow users to embed videos right in their posts.

If you’re like me, I hate meetings.   Sometimes meetings are so inconvenient for your family because you have to leave the house and drive somewhere, exchange pleasantries, engage in small talk, and then get to the “agenda” if there is one.  All the while, you could be sitting at home relaxing in your house clothes.  Enter TokBox.  This is a free service that lets you invite your entire team to an online meeting.  The Box behind the name is part of this awesome function.  Everyone gets crammed into a box on your screen.  Those who have web cams can broadcast themselves like movie stars.   Those who are cheap and only have a microphone will be represented by a simple black box.
This is a great way to get your team together for a quick tag in.  The guys over at ChurchCrunch had over 60 people in their TokBox!  You can also hook up your AIM, Yahoo, Gmail chats up.  TB allows you to record video mail and send it to your friends.  I recorded a nice Mother’s Day video for my sweet Mama. (Tip: Use the heart overlay – Mom went nutz!) It’s loaded with great features.  Go try it out now!

Go To TokBox

If you’ve been around me long enough, you’ll know I’m a huge Google productivity suite fan.   Gmail is by far my favorite email interface.  It’s simple, and powerful.  I’ve got a ton of filters and a good set of labels to streamline my email workflow.  A relatively new feature in Gmail is the superstars that are attached to every email.  Basically, they twelve different styles you can choose from.  There are six stars and six orbs or circles with a variety of markings on them for different purposes.  Here are the superstars Gmail offers now.

Organizing Your Email

If you aren’t familiar with the native star tool, just click the little star in the upper right hand corner of each email.  If you have superstars enabled in the settings properly, you can click multiple times to iterate through the list of superstars.  You can tag an email with on of the above stars or orbs to identify that email later on.  I have four categories for my star usage:  Urgent, Important, Info, and Reply-To.   By simply adding star I can easily file that email, archive it and retrieve it later with all other emails that need the same action.

Creating Quick Links

Stars are great, but to get a list for a specific superstar you have to enter a cryptic code in the search bar.  Entering “has:green-check” will give you a list of all the starred items with a green check.  But, who wants to do that every time?  Gmail created a great little feature called Quick Links.  It’s basically a quick way to save frequent search results.  I use it for action folders to organize my email and access my action items quickly.

Gmail Superstars Cheatsheet

I created a handy dandy cheatsheet for you to use when searching for each superstar in Gmail.  Download it and make your Gmail experience more fun and productive!

Tranparent PNG’s

You can use these recreated images for your own projects.  Here are the transparent PNG images.

This past year, our church launched our own social networking site.  I had a few critics as to why we need our “own” social network from the tech community when I first started talking about it.  A lot of people said to simply create a Facebook group.  My response was, “How many people actually go look at Facebook groups?”  From my experience, not many.  They sign up for a Facebook group and forget about it.   Plus, we needed a network that would give us more proximity.  With Facebook, there are hundreds of people we know around the world.  With our own network, we are able to quickly connect on issues relevant to just our Church.

It’s been really great getting people to create profiles, share their testimonies and post photos of church events.   We also use it to mass communicate with our members.   Many members have created their own small groups and have organized some really cool things on the network.  Most churches try to identify small group needs and invent small groups.  This social network is a great place for them to happen organically.  It definitely has been a tool to help people come together and get to know one another.

The tool we used to create our network is Ning.  For premium features like a custom domain and no ads, you need to pay a small monthly fee.  Ning has some cool features for sure, but if you’re looking for a free service, you should try Grou.ps.  I just stumbled across this awesome platform that is totally free.  It’s completely ad-free, and you can even map a custom domain for easy access and ownership.   If you already have a website, you can create a subdomain like:  http://community.mychurch.com and map it for free to your Grou.ps network.  Here are some of the cool features from Grou.ps.

Use your own branding.  Grou.ps doesn’t bug you with their logo.

Unlimited media uploads.

Free domain masking – (Ning charges almost $10.00/month for this feature!)

Integrate popular social sites to bring your members back!

Forum and mailing lists.

Personal blogs.

Real-time chat.

User sub-groups: Members can organize their own small groups!

Crowd Sourcing Wikis: Share documents and collaborate.

Calendaring.

Share files.

Share links.

Map important locations.

Customizable member profiles.

For those more technically inclined, you can even host Grou.ps on your own server because it’s open source!  You can customize it and add your own functionality to it.  Also, Grou.ps comes in over 35 languages, so if your user base needs localization, it’s already built in.

Grou.ps is completely free for the taking.  Start a social network for your church or youth group today!

Here’s a quick look at the admin panel:

Go to Grou.ps

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