by Patrick Bradley: Ever notice that your church management software asks for your people’s mobile number and their carrier? Here’s why they do that and how you can look up mobile carriers to get past the roadblock.

Has this happened to you? You build your guest followup system in your church management software. It includes emailing or texting people a welcome message or a invitation to come back the next Sunday. You’re all set. Then you get the stack of connection cards after the service and discover that some of your guests gave you a mobile number but no email address.

Now you can’t email them or text them. I suppose you could pull out your phone and start texting them one at a time. But you can’t otherwise send them a message. Why won’t the church management software work without knowing the carrier?

It’s a Simple Hack

That’s because the app isn’t actually texting your people – it’s using a free email-to-SMS hack. It’s actually pretty cool – I just tried it by sending an email to my kid’s mobile number and I got a quick reply.

Every US mobile carrier has a way to convert a brief email into an SMS message. For instance, if your guest’s mobile number is (123) 456-7890, then you just email your message to some version of 1234567890@mobilecarrierbrand[dot]com.

But there’s the rub. If you don’t have their carrier’s name and configuration, your message will never get delivered.

Now You Can Look Up Mobile Carriers

I’ve found various lookup sites, but my favorite so far is freecarrierlookup.com. Not only do they give you the carrier, but they give you the email configuration for that carrier so that you can use the email-to-sms hack right from your own inbox.

But what about the stalker factor? My bottom line is that if they offered their mobile number on a connection card, that’s at least implicit permission to text them. And knowing someone’s carrier doesn’t violate their privacy or put them at risk.

So if you’re using one of the many church software apps that require knowing the person’s carrier, now you can quickly look up mobile carriers to get through to them.

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Source: How to Look Up Mobile Carriers so Your Church Software Works

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by Patrick Bradley: Filing expense reports used to be a painful, manual process. Thanks to free mobile expense report app options, it’s now a lot faster and easier.

Ever lost a receipt before turning it in for reimbursement? Worse, ever had to tape original receipts three to a page on a blank sheet for submission? I have suffered both.

Now, of course, you can use your smart phone to snap a picture of your receipt before you even leave the checkout.

Better yet, these free mobile expense report app options can take the picture in-app and recognize the characters in the image. And some can even extract the information from the receipt and get it in the right boxes in the expense report automatically!

Submitting an expense report becomes a matter of assigning expense categories and pressing ‘send’. Easy!

There are now dozens of paid and free mobile expense report app options. Here are my 3 top freemium app recommendations:

Honorable Mention

smartreceipts.co
I’d not heard of this one before now. It’s a free, open-source app (like Firefox browser). It has basic functionality and keeps things simple.

Free Version

PRO: unlimited reports, unlimited receipt upload
CON: individual use only, ad-supported, 10¢ per automatic scan (OCR)

Premium Version

$5/user/year
PRO: no ads, automatic backups, very low-cost
CON: no teams, still have to pay for automatic scans

Runner Up

expensify.com
“Expense reports that don’t suck.” Gotta love that tag line. This was my go-to app for a long time, but you don’t get as much on the free version any more.

Free Version

PRO: unlimited reports, unlimited receipt upload, 10 free SmartScans per month, import transactions from your credit card account
CON: individual use only (everyone on your team would have an independent account)

Premium Version

$60/user/year
PRO: teams, approval pathway, next day ACH reimbursement, unlimited SmartScan, QuickBooks integration
CON: not free

Paid Apps

These competitors have what look like great apps. But they have no free version (that I could find):

Certify.com ($8/user/month)
Xpenditure.com ($50-$70/user/year)
Concur.com (no pricing available; if you have to ask, you probably can’t afford it)

And the Free Mobile Expense Report App Winner Is…

Zoho Expense

I continue to be impressed by Zoho’s freemium offerings – they have a whole suite of apps. There’s a lot you can get done with their free versions before having to pay. Their free expense app includes almost every feature that their competitors charge for.

Free Version:

PRO: unlimited reports, 5GB receipt storage, 100 Autoscan receipts per month, import transactions from your credit card account, 3 team users, QuickBooks integration, plus more..
CON: limited receipt storage (but it will take you quite some time to use it up)

Premium Version

$150/year for up to 10 users
PRO: approval pathway, ACH reimbursement
CON: not free

Your church plant has to have a reimbursement process to maintain its tax-exempt status. Make it easy for yourself and any staff you may have by using a free mobile expense report app.

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Source: Use this Free Mobile Expense Report App to Save Time

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by Patrick Bradley: If you’re on a budget and find WordPress confusing, there are several other DIY church website options.

I’ve leaned into this a little harder recently because I continue to get calls for help from confused pastors who just can’t figure out their WordPress sites. I know all the arguments about its unparalleled power and customizabilitiness. But at the end of the day, if a pastor and volunteer team can’t make basic changes to the website, it’s a fail in my book.

And the best-but-disappearing argument for using WordPress is that it’s better for SEO (getting found by search engines). These other DIY church website options are now about 95% as good at SEO. So unless you have the time & resources to put into coding to squeeze out that last 5% (which most church plants don’t), then don’t use that as your sole criterion.

What They Have in Common

Each of the following DIY church website options work on the same basic process:

Sign up for their service
Pick your domain name through them (it’s included in the price of packages listed)
Pick a template that has the look & feel you’re after
Start creating pages and menus
Drag & drop elements onto pages and paste in your content
Publish your site

And they offer these same features:

no set-up fee
free domain registration
social media widgets & tools
video backgrounds
custom favicon
buttons for calls-to-action
google analytics integration
custom code (embed YouTube videos, etc.)
SEO tools

Top 3 DIY Church Website Options

Here are the 3 DIY church website options that keep rising to the top as inexpensive and easy to use (pricing as of Dec 2017):

SquareSpace

product: Personal Website ($144/yr)

I’ve supported several church planters that chose SquareSpace even before I floated it out there as an option. Besides the features above, here’s what I like about it:

Custom CSS: you can hire a designer to fully customize the color & layout of your site
They offer unconventional/creative instructions for an easy DIY sermon podcast

Wix

product: Unlimited Plan ($168/yr)

Things I like about it:

Offers a calendar app that pulls in events from a google calendar (and maybe your church database calendar, too?)
Has a 3rd-party app marketplace where other popular services are writing integrations

Weebly

product: Pro Website ($144/yr)

What I like about it in addition to the common features above:

Custom CSS (as above): you can hire a designer to fully customize the site
Also has a 3rd-party app marketplace with a growing number of integrations available

If you’re still not sure which might work best for you (including WordPress), check out this fun & free website builder suitability quiz.

These sites are easy to use, offer the majority of features the typical church needs, and provide more SEO tools than most churches will be able to use. So if you’re looking for something that will be easy to set up and easy for volunteers to help maintain, consider one of these DIY church website options.

full disclosure: this blog costs money to maintain – it’s safe to assume that links to products are affiliate links and I may earn a commission should you click through and make a purchase. That doesn’t affect your price, and you can rest assured that I’ll only recommend an app or service I’ve vetted, personally trust, and would recommend even if there weren’t an affiliate program.

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Source: Top DIY Church Website Options

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by Patrick Bradley: As you plan your church plant website, you’ll have to decide which software to build it with. Consider these pros and cons of a WordPress church website.

I’ve helped dozens of church planters get started on their websites. The most popular site building software has been WordPress.

A WordPress Church Website Has Advantages

…including:

Low cost: WordPress itself is free; to publish a site you just need to rent some hosting space on a server, which can be had for $40-$60 a year.
Unlimited potential: because it’s open source software, developers continue to write plugins (mods); there are over 50,000 available, so WordPress has an unlimited feature set
Flexible design: you can…

pay a developer to create a custom design ($$$)
pay a designer to modify a theme/template ($$)
or you can buy readily-available DIY themes ($)

My developer friends agree that WordPress is the ultimate and go-to software for building websites.

And Some Disadvantages

But I’ve seen too many WordPress church websites go unmaintained. Google and other search engines penalize your site ranking if you’re not publishing fresh content. If it’s too difficult, it’s not going to happen.

Here are some real world cons to a WordPress church website:

You Have to Be Tech Savvy

Even a DIY theme requires some customization. The process has a steep learning curve and overwhelmingly planters have reported that’s it’s not intuitive. So if you’re not tech savvy and you don’t have anyone on your team who is, you’ll need to hire a designer to help you set up the look and functionality of your site (which is probably a good idea either way).

Because WordPress and many of the plugins are free, nobody is going to offer you tech support. There are plenty of WordPress help forums, but there are so many that it’s almost unhelpful. This site you’re viewing is built on WordPress and on occasion I’ve spent hours digging through volumes of forum posts looking for an answer. And though I don’t write code, I’m reasonably tech savvy.

You Have to Do the Maintenance

Sites built with WordPress can also be confusing or difficult to maintain in a volunteer organization like a church. You’ll have the same steep learning curve with:

Adding new pages and getting them to appear in your menus (it’s a multi-step process)
Changing page layouts
Troubleshooting plugins that conflict with each other (the thousands of plugins don’t promise to play nice with each other)
Security updates and patches

A proprietary service does all the troubleshooting and security automatically.

Publishing New Content Isn’t Necessarily Straightforward

Even if your WordPress church website is set up well and you have all the pages you need, it’s not always child’s play to add new blog posts, sermon files, pictures, etc., especially for a volunteer. So once again, you’ll have to burn precious time to figure this out, recruit a qualified volunteer, or hire it out.

No Practical SEO Advantage

One of the classic strong arguments for choosing WordPress has been that it helps your site rank higher with search engines (the art of SEO). But DIY sitebuilders have come a long way, and a little research produced plenty of contrary opinions and evidence. The 3 proprietary site builders I reviewed don’t offer rich snippets for SEO yet, but their SEO tools were comparable in all other ways (and I don’t know any church that’s using rich snippets). The best way to improve your page rank is to publish great content anyway.

My Advice

Go with WordPress if (you should have all of these):

You can afford a developer/designer to set it up right,
Someone on your team is tech savvy enough to learn to do the maintenance, and
You want the industry standard option with an unlimited feature set

Consider a proprietary site builder if (any one of these might be reason enough):

You’re in an early website stage,
You have limited funds and need a DIY option,
No one on your team is tech savvy, or
Ease of setup and ongoing use is important to you

Stay tuned for another post where I review those 3 DIY solutions I mentioned.

Let me point out that so many of the articles I read in preparing for this post were written by people with a vested interest in promoting their viewpoint. My bias: after 10 years of working with planters, I think church planters need something that’s easy to use in the early days. A thriving, self-sustaining church may need a robust feature set, but that’s a couple years in for most planters.

There’s no perfect solution, so keep asking questions, getting recommendations, and trying different tools. Find the right fit for you and your team and go with that.

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Source: Pros and Cons of a WordPress Church Website

The post Pros and Cons of a WordPress Church Website appeared first on Passion for Planting.

by Patrick Bradley: Third in a series of posts about community mapping tools, here’s another free tool to help you learn your community: postal carrier route maps.

One of the challenges of getting the word out in your community is planning time & resources to let every household know about the grand opening of your worship gatherings. Knowing how many households there are is key to your outreach and marketing plans.

…

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Source: Free Community Mapping Tools, Part 3: Carrier Route Maps

The post Free Community Mapping Tools, Part 3: Carrier Route Maps appeared first on Passion for Planting.

by Patrick Bradley: Falling in love with your community can be easy; doing the hard work of really getting to know it can take more effort. Here’s another free tool to help you learn your community: school boundary maps.

One of the challenges of demographics research is cutting through the averages. Your report says that the average income is $x in your town, but we all know that each neighborhood is higher or lower than that. How do you start figuring out which is which so you can understand their needs better?

My simple supposition is this: each school’s population ultimately reflects the neighborhoods it serves. Learn about the school and you get at least a beginner’s insight into its surrounding community.

School Boundary Maps

Great!Schools.org provides you an interactive map where you can investigate where each school’s boundaries fall, like this one in Sheboygan:

You can refer back to these maps or even create a new layer on your custom target area map and rough in the boundaries to have them all in one place.

School Boundary Demographics

But the researchy goodness doesn’t stop there! You can click through on each school and get some vital stats, like:

test scores
student progress (are scores getting better over time?)
race/ethnicity
low-income students
contact information

Use the contact information and network with the principal or a counselor about what your’e learning and what opportunities they see. What a great way to speed through your learning curve and get to serving real needs!

Gerrymandered School Boundaries

In my research for this post, I quickly stumbled upon debate about inequities in school boundaries (AKA catchment areas). Whether or not this is on your radar, it should be. It’s a system in need of reform. School boundaries can both reflect racial segregation that already exists in a community as well as feed that segregation.

Some catchment areas are gerrymandered as bad as any congressional district. I found articles that argued gerrymandering has been a tool of segregation. Another article showed research that the most gerrymandered catchment areas were actually the most diverse, which suggests that it has been used as a tool of desegregation. It’s complicated, to be sure, but this map of school district poverty is telling.

We parents can be a little crazy about our kids. If you’re in a community that is drawing or redrawing school boundary maps, that may spark conflict that reveals ancient strongholds, rivalries, or deeply-held values that no one will say out loud. What a great opportunity to learn and to share the love of Christ.

As a missionary to your community, understanding the various neighborhoods can be an important tool toward making a difference where you live. Use these school boundary maps to help.

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Source: Free Community Mapping Tools Part 2: School Boundary Maps

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by Patrick Bradley: Use these free community mapping tools to help you do the hard missionary work of learning your community. Taking notes and marking things down on a saved online map will become invaluable as your network, serve and get the word out in your community.

Radius Around an Address

I am at the Exponential West conference this week, hosted by Mariners Church. This map shows a 5-mile radius around their facility here in Irvine, CA.

Use a radius map for figuring out which of these are within a given distance of your target:

other nonprofits
area churches
major employers
potential worship gathering facilities
colleges, universities and local schools

Draw your own radius map at FreeMapTools.com

How to Import a KLM File

Once you’ve played around and drawn a radius that is meaningful and worth saving, FreeMapTools allows you to export a KLM file. You can use that file to create a layer on your saved My Map by Google.

Here are the quick steps:

Click on the Generate KLM button to save your radius
Create a new layer on your Google My Map
On that layer (left-hand side), click Import
Find the KLM file that was saved to your computer and upload it

That’s it! Now you can turn that layer on and off in your map when you need to use it or hide it.

Drive Time Radius

But we all know that a 5-mile drive could mean 10 to 45 minutes of drive time depending on conditions. This map approximates how far you could get in 20 minutes averaging 30mph from Mariners Church.

This is a great tool to figure out the drive time to your potential worship facility. Use this in conjunction with the average commute data you can find at DataUSA to know what people are used to. Put in your zip code or major metro area and scroll all the way to the bottom of the page for commute drive times.

Create your own drive time map at FreeMapTools.com  And you can export a KLM file of this one, too.

All Zip Codes in a Radius

Another great tool from FreeMapTools is their Zip Code Radius Search Map. It’s basically the same as the radius tool above, but instead of a KLM file, you get a list of zip codes that fall within the radius you draw.

Use that list to pull more specific demographics and find lists of organizations (above) to network with in your community.

Zip Code Overlay Map

Sometimes you need to know what the zip code boundaries are in your region. So use US Naviguide’s Zip Code Map to see them overlayed on a Google map. They’re labeled and color-coded.

Use all of these free community mapping tools to get started on your research and record your findings. I’d love to see the maps you create – give me a shout on social media!

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Source: Use these 4 Free Community Mapping Tools

The post Use these 4 Free Community Mapping Tools appeared first on Passion for Planting.

by Patrick Bradley: You’ve probably run into this: you want to send out a newsletter or important announcement but some people prefer email, some text and some social media. Who has time to manage multiple communication channels?

One of the ironies of our age of communication is that communicating as a organization can be harder. It’s easier and faster in some respects, but the proliferation of channels means that your audience is going to be split by personal preference.

The Obvious Choices

There is no perfect solution or channel. The common or obvious ways to get the word out are:

Email (including from your church management software)
Text
Website
Social Media
Mobile App

As a church planter, you’re going to run into this early as your raise financial support, build a prayer team and gather a launch team.

Every church runs into this on an ongoing basis with newsletters, events and other important announcements.

Your Options

There have been two basic approaches for churches to manage communication channels until recently:

Force everyone to conform to your preferred channel
Copy & paste to each platform every time you want to send something out

Fortunately, a new option is emerging and even becoming more and more reliable.

Automation!

There is a growing category of software that creates bridges between other popular apps. It’s a pretty simple idea: you set up a trigger that then fires an action. For example, whenever you create a new post on your church Facebook page, the service will automatically send a group text.

The ones I’ve tested out are:

Zapier
IFTTT (If This, Then That)

And I was pleasantly surprised to find almost a dozen other options that do the same thing.

This will take a few minutes to set up, but will save you hours over the course of a year.

First, decide on which communication channel will be your master. One inherent challenge will be the length of your message:

Short to Long – Twitter & text give you limited real estate, which is fine for their own platforms, but 140 characters is unimpressive as a blog post or email newsletter
Long to Short – You can say more but you’ll have to figure out how to automatically shorten it for Twitter & text

Then build your automations and set them in motion.

An Example

One way you could do this is to set up Mailchimp as your master, then set up the following automations:

post the message to your Facebook page using their native integration
post to your Facebook group using Zapier (group vs. page)
post to Twitter using their native integration (creates a hyperlink to full message)
send the shortened tweet as a group text using Zapier and Twilio (a paid app)
create a post on your WordPress website (perhaps on a news or announcements page?)
posting to your Mobile App will depend on your app developer

With this set up, every time you send a new Mailchimp, it automatically gets broadcast across all the different channels.

Another inherent challenge will be managing your contact lists. All of this sounds simple enough on the sending end, but there’s the whole matter of getting people to sign up for their preferred channel(s) and keeping their contact info and preferences up to date. But that’s a post for another day.

Don’t discouraged when faced with having to manage multiple communication channels. Make automation do the redundant stuff for you so that you can use your time for more important ministry!

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Source: How to Manage Multiple Communication Channels

The post How to Manage Multiple Communication Channels appeared first on Passion for Planting.

Church sub-calendars are a great way to keep everything organized at your church. Setting them up is relatively easy and it solves the following 3 problems.

Whether or not you’re a program-driven church, there are things that happen in the life of your church each year. Keeping them all straight is important.

If you use your church management software for the master church calendar, you’ll probably accomplish creating church sub-calendars by using different admin groups.

If you use a Google calendar, simply click the dropdown arrow next to My calendars in the left-hand column and choose create new calendar for each one of the church sub-calendars below.

Other calendar systems typically have similar functionality.

Consider Your Audience

The main reason for creating church sub-calendars is to ‘control’ who sees what. A church admin or senior leader needs to see everything, but that can be totally overwhelming for someone checking out the website.

Or seeing everything could be totally inappropriate – the date & time of the next staff performance review for your worship leader isn’t really everybody’s business.

Create these 12 church sub-calendars so that every church event rolls up into one master church calendar:

Prayer Team: prayer events; reminders to send updates
Fundraising: appointments; desserts or other events; reminders to send thank yous, etc
Finances & Governance: annual budget preparation season; quarterly and annual Board meetings; annual report filing deadlines
Discipleship/Small Groups: dates & times of small group meetings; leader training events
Networking: appointments with civic leaders; reminders to follow up
Community Service: events; planning meetings
Marketing & Outreach: events/festivals; design & publication deadlines; online campaign run dates; etc
Staffing: performance reviews; job interview dates
Leadership & Training: retreats; leadership meetings; conferences
Communications (Internal): newsletters; social media posts;  serving schedule publication dates
Preaching & Creative Team: sermon calendar; production deadlines; planning meetings
Assimilation & Membership: discovery classes; membership classes; etc

As your people create each calendar event, they just have to decide which church sub-calendar it belongs to.

You as the leader should be able to turn the sub-calendars on or off in your master calendar view so that you can see one, some or all of the sub-calendars at once. That way you can focus on just one, or see them all so you can…

Prevent Double-Booking

Once your church is up and running, it’s crazy how many times different teams will book events at the exact same time. It’s tough for a guitar-playing dad to be at band practice and the youth group parent meeting at the same time.

This becomes even more important for churches that have a 24/7 facility and have to manage who’s using which room which night.

Having sub-calendars roll up to one master calendar also helps you…

Prevent Over-Booking

Maybe you think you haven’t created an event-driven church. But once you overlay all the church sub-calendars above, what does that tell you about how busy you’re asking people to be? Setting a reasonable pace for your leaders and your congregation is easier if you have the raw data in front of you.

Use church sub-calendars as a handy tool to keep the goings-on at your church well-organized and available to the right audience.

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Source: 12 Church Sub-Calendars You Need Today

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