On February 13, the Houston chapter of the American Advertising Federation awarded Origin Design a Gold Medal Addy Award in Interactive Media for their design of Second.org. We are very excited about this recognition of our website.

As a gold medal winner, our website will now be submitted for a district award and hopefully then a national award. The Addy awards are a very prestigious honor in the advertising industry.

So join me in recognizing our in-house project team who worked tirelessly with me on our website. They share in the the reward of this great honor:

Chris Castle, Senior Applications Developer
Barbara Durand, Director of Marketing & Communications
Heather Halaska, Art Director
Brian Milinski, Volunteer Ministry Coordinator
Cindy Raymond, Communications Account Manager
Dave Riggle, Associate Pastor and Executive Sponsor
Cliff Young, Pastor and Director of Creative Media and SecondFilms

Great job gang! To see a list of all winners, go here.

• Video Overview
• Key Features: Online Prayer Room; Class/Group Websites; Streaming Media; Events Calendar; ShareThis; mySBC Life; e-Newsletters; Event and Media RSS Feeds, Completely integrated with Church Membership System
• Features of Group Websites: Events, Evites, File Sharing, Photo Albums, Class Roster, Small Groups, Email Personalization, Leadership Positions, Data Exports.
• Average Monthly Website Traffic/Usage:
  • 60,349 Average Visits per Month
  • 2,021,790 Average Page Views per Month
  • Over 50% of our website’s traffic is attributed to use of group websites
  • Average Monthly Emails Sent via Group Websites: 65,955
  • 144 of 162 (90%) of Adult Bible Study Classes are using group websites
• Monthly Average Media Consumption:
  • 19,684 Videos (Watched Online)
  • 12,699 MP3 Down loads
  • 4,164 MP4 Video Downloads
  • 3,039 Photos Viewed
  • 34,138 Podcasts Views

• 4,076 Registered Users

Project Partners: Origin Design (Design, CSS/HTML); RoundedCube (Sitecore CMS Implementation; Google Mini and Social Media Integrations)

A few months ago, I reported to our Executive team the impact of the recently redesigned second.org. Since its launch in late March, our number of page views have doubled…reaching as much as 2.2 million in a single month. Today, we have 3,261 registered users, 1,000+ of which registered within the first week of launch. Every month, our registered users send an average of 75,000+ emails to their respective community groups…coordinating group activities, announcements, prayer and care. We have been very pleased with the results.

Special thanks to our technology partners who help make this happen: Origin Design (for initial design, images, html, flash, and CSS) and RoundedCube for our CMS implementation, Google Mini search, and custom development. Last but not least….BIG thanks to our own in-house dev team. Great job gang!

Here is a short video produced by Origin that give a quick overview the new second.org:

Unfortunately, the video does not highlight the online community groups.

The following video still gives me chills. This video was produced in 2006 for the Second Baptist Church family to challenge them to give towards the expansions of three of our existing campuses and add two additional campuses (in theaters at that time). Today, all five campuses are thriving. It was an aggressive venture that has paid off in thousands of changed lives for Jesus Christ. We are all indeed blessed to be a blessing to others!

Not long ago, Reuters reported a Nielsen Online study about twitter users. Here is an excerpt…

Twitter’s audience retention rate, or the percentage of a given month’s users who come back the following month, is currently about 40 percent,” David Martin, Nielsen Online’s vice president of primary research, said in a statement….Martin said Facebook and MySpace, the more established social network sites, enjoyed retention rates that were twice as high and those rates only rose when they went through their explosive growth phases.

Hmmm. I am curious to see if this trends holds true in the days ahead? Any ideas how long twitter, myspace, and facebook will sustain the marketshare of social networking?

Every year our church Student Ministry sponsors two Beach Retreats for Junior High (South Padre, TX) and High School students (Gulf Shores, AL). This year we had record attendance at each Beach Retreat. At High School Beach Retreat we had 1,727 students and adult volunteers. At Junior High Beach retreat we had 1007 students and adult volunteers, a summer total of 2,734. The caravan of chartered busses alone was astounding.

In previous years, our creative media team would post daily videos, but this year we stepped it up and decided to do a blog just for the two weeks of retreats. This was out first attempt at event based blogging. Here is a summary of our event based blog initiative:

GOAL:
1. Show parents the spiritual significance of Beach Retreat.
2. Promote and encourage student and volunteer involvement in subsequent Beach Retreats.

PLAN:
Here was our ‘plan of attack‘ to ensure we gathered the needed content for each day’s posts. The plan included assigned responsibilities, list of equipment, etc. After delegating assignments and getting the needed equipment, we setup our blog and integrated it with our church fan page and designated beach retreat twitter account. Daily updates to the blog would automatically publish updates to our fan page and twitter accordingly.

RESULTS:

The BR09 Blog

Viewership

Feedback

Download PDF of Blog Stats

Here is a list of technologies we used:

1. WordPress (self-hosted blog)
2. WordPress Theme: Typebased by WooThemes
3. WordPress Plugins: ShareThis, Scissors, Unfiltered MU, Countdown Timer, Flash Photo Gallery, My Category Order, NextGen Gallery, Twitter Tools, and WP-PageNavi.
4. Second Baptist Church Fan Page on Facebook
5. Simplaris Blogcast (WordPress/Facebook Integration)
6. CoverItLive.com – for live blogcasting during Worship services.
7. Google Analytics
8. FeedBurner – for subscribing to blog via email.
9. Twitter – SBCBR09 and SBCBR09# for hashtag.
10. Wufoo – Online Form for Parents to Send Notes from Home. These were show on the worship screens each night before worship.
11. Flip Ultra HD Video Cameras

Lessons Learned:

1. Make sure assignments are clear and daily deadlines are set for blog team to receive content from various content creators.
2. Take plenty of storage for digital media.
3. Test and Retest the WordPress plugins to ensure they function as intended for your particular blog theme and that they deliver the results you want.
4. Moderate comments on your blog and monitor and respond to any unwanted conversations that show up on your event hashtag on twitter.
5. Set and communicate specs for photos and videos to all content creators. You don’t want to be the one having to re-encode or reformat pics for the web, unless your content creators don’t have the needed skills.

All in all, it was a tremendous success and we will plan to do this again. Now we are wondering where and when does event based blogging work well….and when does it not. I believe it depends on your goals.

What do you think?

Every year, we have our annual profit sharing worship service where some of our newest members share how Jesus Christ has changed thier lives. This year our creative media team pre-recorded them instead of sharing them live. Here is the return on ministry shared by all of our church family:

Taken from comScore:

RESTON, VA, June 17, 2008 – comScore, a leader in measuring the digital world, today released April 2008 data from the comScore Video Metrix service, revealing that U.S. Internet users viewed 11 billion online videos during the month, with YouTube.com accounting for more than 4 billion of that total. Read More…

Can you believe this! This is simply amazing. Some possible implications for the church:

1. Reevaluate your approach to streaming your sermons/messages. Instead break the sermon apart in stand alone parts…creating 3 to 5 minute theological and practical truths and applications.

2. Post your sermons in multiple places like YouTube, Vimeo, and other video sharing sites.

3. Consider using solutions like MotionNotes to send personal greetings, announcements, words of encouragement to your leadership and members.

Where do I begin?? Perhaps I should begin with an overview. My first tasks as the IT Director was to replace our ChMS (Church Management System). We were on an old proprietary system that we developed in the mid 90s. It was our 2nd custom ChMS from scratch. It was a Powerbuilder/SQL 6.5 app. OUCH! We looked at several options and decided that the best choice for Second Baptist was a Buy/Build solution. Buy the basics and Build the specifics. In other words, let’s not invest money in recreating the wheel, but build those things that can’t be bought. So we bought a solution called iMIS (a very extendable product) and built. the gap. The project proceeded through 5 phases for more than 18 months:

Phase 1: Requirements Gathering
Phase 2: System Setup
Phase 3: Testing
Phase 4: Reports and Training
Phase 5: Go Live and Post Go Live Troubleshooting

So here is what we learned:

1. Planning is the most important! Our planning included 99 hours of meetings in 30 days with 150+ staff representing 98 departments. We met with every department with representatives from every campus. We had 3 note takers, one of which compiled the final requirements doc (725+ pages) that detailed (1) our processes, (2) how iMIS would handle these processes, and (3) the gap items…processes that iMIS could not handle. This gave us a clear picture of what we were  buying and what we needed to build. In the end, we learned ALOT!! We identified many places where the same department was doing different things on each campus to accomplish the same goal. So right away we made a list of processes that needed to be reengineered and standardized across all campuses. We also learned a lot of what our staff was doing outside of our existing ChMS in Excel or Access. Most importantly, we had them bring copies of every report, letter, etc. that they were currently using along with screen shots of what was good and what wasn’t from the current system. By the end of the first phase, we had the following running lists: (1) List of Decisions Needed by our Executive Staff, (2) List of Gap Items, (3) List of Processes that Needed Reengineering, (4) List of Changes and New Processes to Communicate in Training, (5) List of Reports Needed. We had more lists than we could count…but it proved invaluable. Our goal was to let nothing fall through the cracks.

2. Training is 2nd Most Important and it Never Ends! Our pastor taught me a very important lesson 3/4 through our training initiatives….communicating and teaching are two different things. Our training program must teach our staff how to use the technology….not just communicate changes. It was imperative that our staff learned it and could in turn explain it to someone else. By the end of this phase, we employed the following tools to help accomplish this goal: (1) hands on training classes with live instructor (with quizzes), (2) laminated ‘smart cards’ or quick reference guides for each user, (3) 1 page how to guides published on our Intranet, (4) 2 minute video tutorials on common tasks published on our Intranet (used Camtasia for this), (5) one on one training sessions with the more computer challenged staff, and (6) onsite departmental based training. To encourage accountability, we provided our executive staff with regular reports on number of classes, number trained, and name and date of last login for our user base. This told us right away who wasn’t applying what they learned and we could then assist them.

3. Plan Before You Sign! Most software companies want you to start the planning phase after you have signed the contracts. Don’t do it!!! Negotiate the planning phase apart from the software license agreement. If at the end of the first phase you determine that there are too many gaps, then you are not contractually obligated to move forward (much less have already committed the money). If you don’t think the software is a good fit, then you already have the deliverables of a requirements doc to take to the next vendor….or for engaging in your own development if needed.

4.  Document! Document, Document, Document. Did I say document? Make sure you write down the decisions you make along the way and WHY! I can’t tell you how many times we said "what did we decide about that? Why did we decide that?" Rehashing decisions sometimes can be good, but they are counterproductive if you don’t remember what you decided and why. Make a list of all decisions you face, who made the decision, and why. Save all your documentation and use DT Search of Desktop Search to index your documentation….makes things easy to find later down the road. On a side note, create an offline pst folder in Outlook and keep every email you send and receive from your vendors. Make sure you save the pst file on the network for backup. Be careful though, my pst file has now exceeded 1.5 GB.

5. Don’t Publicly Commit to a Deadline! until you are mid way through the 4th phase (especially if you are doing any of your own development). Software implementation projects change like I change my underwear….daily (if not more often)! Managing expectations is a challenge and if you overcommit and underdeliver, you lose integrity and project risk goes up….because perceptions and expectations go down.

6. MOST IMPORTANTLY, don’t sacrifice your time with God and your family. You must keep this first and foremost. I failed on this many times during our project and it caught up with me. In fact, the final stretch of the project exhausted me and my whole team. I was actually laying on the floor ill on the day of go-live with chills and a fever. I left early, missed the go-live party, and didn’t return for 5 days. I had never felt that bad in years (had flu complicated with a sinus infection).

So there you have it….just a few lessons from the school of hard knocks. Hope this helps you in your next ChMS implementation. I certainly don’t want to do this again…for a llllooooonnnggg time, but the rewards have been plentiful to say the least. Nothing feels better than giving 300 users the tools they need to do the ministry that God has called them to do.

Serving those who serve…