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

TinyChat

• TinyChat is a great way for you to embed a chat room right into your website for loved ones to come and chat and keep up-to-date with what’s going on real-time.
• Yet another great way to hold a mass video conference.
• Private messaging allows all travelers to communicate privately away from the public room.
• Honorable mention to Tokbox as well who provides a similar service for free.

• Create your own room at TinyChat

Satellite or Cell Phone Rental

• Rent a satellite phone for a very reasonable price. $10-$15/day
• Free incoming calls and incoming SMS in most cases!
• Ability to be reached anywhere in the world
• Most countries also have local phone rentals for a nominal fee with free incoming calls.

• Visit Global Cellular Rental

If you have any other great ways to stay in touch, please add to the comment list! Enjoy your travels!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Go To Google Docs Blog

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)
  

How It Works

These numbers really got my attention.  By taking 80 minutes out of a 2,400 minute work week, I could connect with 40-80 people in one week.  I realize what most people are thinking right now that one or two minute interactions are not truly connections, but I disagree. As I mentioned before, we tend to look at relationships in the large chunks of time that we spend with someone and discount the value of small consistent interactions.

The 2MPH concept means every hour you take two minutes to  do one of the following:

• Send a short text message to someone
  • Word of appreciation
  • Birthday/Anniversary wishes
  • Encouragement for someone who is hurting

• Make a quick phone call (I realize this is the most time consuming)
  • A call to a patient in the hospital sometimes means as much to them as a visit.
  • Call your kids and tell them you love them and are proud of them.
  • Call a guest that attended last weekend and let them know how glad you were they came.

• Send a quick email to someone
  • A quick note in a businessman’s email box from the pastor or leader can make them feel a part of the family
  • Share a thought from the Word with your leaders or a small group of friends/family
  • Send a note to your mayor or city officials letting them know you’re praying for them

• Write a personal note
  • Prepare  your desk with a box of pre-stamped envelopes and simple stationary to jot a note to someone.
  • For someone struggling, find a few relevant verses, write a quick note of encouragement and include the references.
  • Write a romantic note for your spouse and leave it for them to find.

• Personal contact
  • When grabbing a takeout meal, order an extra meal for a coworker without them asking and bring it to them.
  • If you’re in public, take time to ask a stranger you come in contact how they are doing today. A quick caring conversation can be a great witness

Keep a tally of your time. Your daily 16 minutes may yield sixteen communications, or maybe only two. Just commit to spend 16 minutes during the course of your day caring about someone other than yourself.

If you are employed in the secular workforce, I am not condoning stealing time from your boss to use this concept. Take time during your breaks to connect with others so you can be an honorable employee.

The Power of Small Consistency

The previous suggestions might not seem very impacting to you right now, but concerted, consistent, communication can reap huge rewards in the people around you over the course of a year. The purpose of taking time out of every hour is not only to keep ourselves from becoming self-absorbed, but also to create an awareness of others around us, and to extend the love of Jesus to others in two minute investments.

Certainly this concept is not a replacement for time well spent with those you love, but I see each of these small time investments as reinforcement for the relationship and friendship. These small snippets of time may not be the building blocks, but they are certainly rebar to strengthen the relationship over time.  Thousands of small interactions per year bring people closer to your inner circle and give you easier access to deal with conflict when it arises.

You cannot be everyone’s best friend, but if you’ve showed a party in conflict that you cared about them multiple times throughout the year, there is a built-in trust that accompanies those precious two minute investments.

Consistent communication and caring will open doors with people in your church and in the community that otherwise would have been shut. By taking 3% of your ministry work week and connecting with someone, you can impact up to 4,000 people per year.

Leaders, you will spend a minimum of 2,400 minutes this week working. Are you willing to give up 80 of those minutes to care for others? If you’re so wrapped up in your task list that you forgot ministry was about serving others, try using this concept to get out of the rut.

Make a Connection Plan and Prepare

Take some time and write down the relationships you wish to strengthen over the course of the next year. Use this as a master list that you carry in your wallet or purse. Make a weekly or daily connection plan. This involves who you are going to contact and what form of communication you will use to contact them. Making a plan helps you stick to your guns on the process. No planning means you probably won’t follow through at all.

Don’t devalue the impact of minute things. It’s not hard to start connecting. It just takes a small consistent two minute investment. It’s time to put the brakes on at least one time per hour, and give to others.

Slow down and connect!

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.

Go To TokBox

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.

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

[invite]

What’s slick is that you can import from almost any well known communication software so grabbing your current digital information is painless.  You can also share contacts over multiple Keepm accounts.  The thing I like the most is that you can add dated notes that keep track of all of your communication with a contact.  This could help minus out some headaches!  For instance, a guest speaker will be arriving next month.  The point person who speaks to them can notate their flight information, their food preferences, etc.  Then, when other team members need this information, they simply log in and view his contact profile instead of tracking down the person who made the original contact.

Lastly, it’s FREE!

Go to Keepm

The beauty of it is that people outside of your organization are not able to join your private network. This keeps communication free from external distractions and allows tracking of important conversations. Another feature I really like about Yammer is the ability to create groups. For instance, during our leadership retreat, I created a group for ideas and the minutes of our meetings. I had several people with laptops join the group and begin documenting the meeting with short posts. All posts were saved in that group and are easy to find when I need them. You can create private groups for more sensitive conversations as well.

You also can use hash tags which help you search for posts later with keywords. For example, one of my posts looked similar to this: “#todo09 Increase the soda machine price to $.75 from $.50.” Yammer then gives you a link to all the hash tags you create and with one click of a button, you have a list of every post where you used that tag. By the way, I haven’t changed the price yet, so come by for a cheap soda.

Last, but not least is the portability of this app.  They have a desktop software that is simple to use as well as the basic web interface.  You can post just like using Twitter or an IM service.  They also have an iPhone and Blackberry app that allows you to submit posts on the go.  Receive SMS updates on your phone or right in your IM client.  This is a free service for companies and organizations. There are a few paid features that you might want to check out. If you need to centralize your team’s communication, sign up for an account and check it out. You have nothing to lose.

Here are a few ideas for using Yammer in churches:

• Creative meetings
• Event planning and coordination
• Weekly staff check-in with posts about what’s going on in their ministry this week
• Corporate to-do lists of things needing completed around the church
• Personal prayer requests group for staff members
• Microblog about missions trips
• Traveling pastors can update staff with minimal effort.

Yammer.com

Download EasySMS here

Features:

*   Owner Verification of cell phones with unsubscribe feature
*   AJAX sidebar widget form with custom title and terms of agreement.
*   Subscriber groups
*   Track how many SMS message have been sent to each subscriber.
*   Auto-notification of new posts to subscribers (optional)
*   Custom text messages from admins only
*   Message preview before sending SMS
*   80 default carriers
*   Delete/Add/Edit and Carriers
*   Edit/Delete Subscribers
*   WP Administration compatible interface.
*   Stats snapshot on dashboard.
*   New subscriber notification. (optional)

Screenshots

Sidebar Form

Send SMS

Carrier Table

Groups Table

Subscriber Groups

Settings