If this site is having new life breathed into it, let’s get down to what’s important:

• What is it that you want to see here?
• What topics are relevant to you?
• What things need clarification?
• What are the things that you are wondering about the most?
• What’s going to make this site relevant again to you?
• What are the right questions that I should be asking?

Let’s get this thing going! Join me!

We began using Planning Center Online in April 2007 and haven’t looked back. We started with the free 30 day trial, then went with what was then the $9/month plan. Due mainly to the growth of the tech team, we moved up to the $14/month plan last year. Prior to Planning Center, the Music Minister and I emailed an excel file back and forth during the week. Google Docs’ spreadsheets could be used much easier today if no money is available, but the low cost of Planning Center makes it practically a necessity for  communicating and laying out a service plan.

I also use Planning Center to schedule the rotation of my Tech Team. Their ability to accept or decline and then later receive email reminders is great. And there’s a Facebook app too.

DropBox is another invaluable tool I use pretty much on a daily basis. It allows me to work at home (or any where else with internet access). Videos, sermon notes, announcements, etc. can all be saved on my home computer or laptop and within minutes or seconds, the files will also be on the media pc at church. The 2GB free version of DropBox is sufficient for me.

Once the planning a preparation for Sundays is complete, I can access the media pc from home with Logmein Free to actually set up EasyWorship and anything else that I want to do prior to Sunday. On the IT side of my responsibilities, Logmein is installed on all the church pcs to give me and that team remote access.

Other free programs I utilize on a regular basis for tech work are Audacity for sermon recording and editing, Google Docs, Box.net, and Evernote for saving and sharing files, notes, and training material.

There are also a host of free background images and loops for projection. Vimeo and YouTube are good places to start.

Being a volunteer tech leader in a small to medium sized church requires two things week after week: get as much done as possible in the short amount of available time and do it all as cheaply as possible. Each of these tools enable me to accomplish that. And the best part is I don’t have to be away from my home or family to do it.

1. Decide the Purpose For and Design a Draft of Your Form – This is often overlooked. If you don’t have a good purpose or design for your form, you’re going to get poor results. Having worked in a position responsible for creating meaningful surveys and extracting useful information from those results, I can’t stress this point enough. Design your form. What do you want it to do? What information do you need? What information will you extract? A registration form should collect Names, Email, Phone, perhaps Ages, Allergies, Contact Information, and other information relating to the event.  A questionnaire may not need a name, but should include some rankings on items that you want to analyze. Perhaps you want to know if people enjoyed themselves or felt safe, how long did they stay, what did they enjoy the most. Where possible, use a predetermined set of criteria – numbers for rankings or a defined set of choices. It will make getting the information back much easier. Once you’ve done the first pass on paper, run it by other people. Often they’ll suggest things that you may not have considered. Edit your form requirements until you’re satisfied.
2. Create and Edit a Form – Log in to your Google Docs account or perhaps your Church’s Google Apps account.  (You do have a Google Apps account, right?)  Most people want to start with creating. While it may be helpful to see your form taking shape, this should still be considered as part of step 1.
   1. Create a New Form from their menu. Add a meaningful title and a description if appropriate.
   2. Add your questions or response items. Don’t forget to make them required or not required according to your design.
   3. Add Section Headers or Page Breaks to group items or to allow people to skip to certain pages of your form.
   4. Change the Theme of the form if you want a different look using the “Theme” button. Some themes may work better than others on your site.
   5. Preview the form with the link at the bottom of the page as you go. Make sure that your form seems to have the correct flow and behavior.
   6. Don’t forget about your response. If you want to give people a link to another web site or perhaps a different Thank You message, edit that response in the “More Actions” dropdown.
3. Have others review the draft form – Have other people you trust look over your form. Have them fill it out. Look at the results. Adjust ordering or required fields. Add values if some are missing. Check spelling. Give them the link to the published form so they can try it out themselves. If they can use different browsers, that can only help.
4. Edit Your Form – Now that you’ve got feedback, edit the form as needed with the recommendations. Repeat steps 2-4 until you have no more changes to make.
5. Email On Submission – If you want to be notified on new form submissions, you’ll need to view the Spreadsheet behind the form. On the Form Design page, choose to “See responses” and choose the “Spreadsheet” option. This will take you to the underlying spreadsheet. Choose the “Tools” menu, then choose the “Notification Rules” item. This will enable you to receive e-mails for any of the events that happen. Sadly, this does not allow you to select a group of people at this time. For that, you’ll need to set up a rule of some sort to forward those messages to others. However, it can be useful to know if you’re getting form submissions or if people are changing other parts of the spreadsheet. This is an optional step, but if you want to be notified when people use your form, this is an easy way to receive notifications.
6. Share the Spreadsheet Containing the Responses – Of course, you’re rarely the only one who wants to see what’s going on. To share the spreadsheet, look on the upper right corner of the spreadsheet for the “Share” button.  Click that and add people as viewers, editors, or whatever role is needed for those people. Giving people access to the data behind the form will let them see what’s going on and allow them to analyze the submissions as well.
7. Publish the Form – More than likely you won’t e-mail a link to your form to everyone you want to use it. You’ll want to put it on your website somewhere.  To get the code to put on your website, click the “More Actions” button and choose “Embed”.  You’ll be given a somewhat long string of HTML.  Put that in the HTML of the desired page on your website and you’ll have the form ready to go.  If the form is not the desired size, you can easily adjust the “width” and “height” values in the code you’re given.  You can’t adjust the size or position of any of the elements within that link through native code.  (You may be able to do it with some undocumented tricks but I wouldn’t rely on them long-term as they could stop working if Google changes something.)    Publishing may not be allowed in all scenarios, such as putting this directly into a Rich Text Editor, but a lot of CMS’ have some way to insert pure HTML. If you’re not sure how to accomplish inserting the HTML, ask your web people for some help.
8. Analyze the Results – Finally, you want to see the results.  I’ve found that Google’s forms do really well in this area. In your Docs you have the spreadsheet that drives the form. Open the spreadsheet.  You’ll probably see a bunch of data by default. However, since this was generated by a form, you can also choose the “Form” menu to “Show a Summary of Responses”. This is a great way to see trends, averages, highs, lows, combinations of selections, and other useful information.  If this was just used for recording registrations, you may not need this and can work with the data. However, if you collected feedback for events, Google’s forms solution shows you a lot of data about your forms without having to do much.  Incidentally, this menu also allows you to close the form to new responses, edit the form, or delete the form if it’s no longer in use.  You can always download this to your local spreadsheet if you want to do further analysis or more detailed analysis beyond what Google provides.

Well, maybe it was that easy after all. With a little time to become familiar with the process, you can create a form and publish it in minutes rather than days. No learning new programming languages. No fees. No limitations on the number of items on your form. Just add your items, save it, and embed the form on your site.

I’ve used Google’s Forms to register people for an event quickly and easily, collected feedback for some of our programs, and been able to use that feedback to drive decisions by seeing what people liked or didn’t like.  My church didn’t need a lot of programming experience. All of the people who needed to see the results could see them when they needed them without asking someone to run a report.  Was it a perfect solution? No. I couldn’t adjust the form internals very much when it came to look and feel. I’d love a better layout when some of the options don’t need to flow up and down or for things like collecting Name, Address, and Contact information in a more pleasing manner. I’d have appreciated a little more number crunching ability online.  However, I think those areas are not as important for our purposes.  The speed and ease to create a form, publish it, and collect/analyze the results are hard to beat when you need something that works, but may not have all of the bells and whistles found in some other products or services.

What do you use to gather information?

How could you use something like this for your church?

1. Network Logins – This is probably the easiest area to secure. At the very least, you should start by changing the account password. Ideally you can completely disable the account, but you may need to grant access to someone else to look through files and e-mails or to handle job duties that are tied specifically to the user’s login.

2. E-mail – If you’re running an internal e-mail service, this may be taken care of with the above step. If you are using something like Google Apps or a hosted Exchange service, you’ll need to use your administrator access to close down this account and perhaps add an auto-responder to indicate that this person no longer works for your organization or a forwarding rule to pass on e-mails to someone else who is taking over those duties.

3. Online Banking Accounts – if the person who left had any sort of access to your online financial information, you’ll want to change passwords, disable accounts, and notify your banking institutions. While the majority of people who are leaving have no desire to cause any harm, this is an area where no chances should be taken!

4. VPN, Remote Access, Blog, or Website accounts – This is most often handled by the person’s network login, but could very well be set up in some other way. Disable or modify any accounts that would give this user remote access or control over systems in your organization. This may include Routers, DNS Accounts, Web Hosting accounts, Blogging accounts, etc.  If you’ve been using Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, MyChurch, or similar sites, don’t forget to remove this person as a manager or administrator. For Twitter, consider changing the password of the account used to post updates.

5. Keys and Key cards – This is usually a given, but if you suspect that the person may have made copies, it could mean that you’ll be changing locks.

6. Security Codes and Combination Locks – Any alarm codes or access codes that could be manually entered should probably be changed. Don’t forget combination locks that may be in use or even the safe combination if things could be really bad.

7. ChMS Access Rights – This may not matter much if you’re using a local service only, but it could be a big deal if you’re using something that’s web-enabled such as FellowshipOne, Arena, CCB, Access ACS, or similar services.  At the very least, change their password.  In fact, I’d recommend changing their password first, then delegating whatever rights they had before disabling or deleting the account.  You’d be amazed at how much some of these people may have used that was only accessible to their particular login.  Sometimes they’re the only admin. Sometimes they’re the only person with access to pre-defined sets of people or reports.  Regardless, change the password and login as them to see what they used to do and what they could see.

8. Check Time-controlled Access points – We found that sometimes we had doors locking or unlocking when nobody was using the building.  Ideally you should check this periodically and definitely when you change service times, but you should double-check the schedules just in case the building is opening at times when nobody should be there.

9. Local Computer Accounts – If you have physical security, this should be a minimal problem, but perhaps some folders or files were locked down to their specific account. If so, you’ll want to transfer those access rights to someone else or perhaps a group of users.

10. Social Engineering – Social engineering (getting access through people still at the church) is the trickiest problem to handle. Often people leave unexpectedly for reasons that cannot be disclosed to the rest of the church or staff. People need to be aware when some of these cases need to be handled in an even more secure manner than normal. They still don’t necessarily need to know specifics, but should know that they are not to be allowed access to systems, information, etc that they would have had as a staff member. This can be a tricky area to handle, but should be considered if they’re likely to have influence with current staff or members.

11. Backups – You’re checking your backups, right? Are they secure?  Are they going off-site or to an online backup site?  Who can access those backups?  If this staff person was one of those people, they should be removed from that group of people handling backups. This is especially true if you’re backing up your files online.  Change the account and/or password so they can’t take information they shouldn’t have.

12. Scheduled Jobs – Scheduled jobs are easy to overlook, but if your person was a technical person, it wouldn’t be hard to write something that could cause problems if it finds that an expected account is disabled or missing. Jobs can even be set up to send regular reports to an external address. Malicious scheduled jobs are unlikely, but it’s worth checking for jobs that have no purpose or even a destructive purpose. If you come across a job that is unfamiliar, check it out or ask someone to take a look at it.

13. E-mail again – If you don’t want to completely delete this e-mail account or have e-mails set to forward to some catch-all address, don’t forget to unsubscribe the person from mailing lists. We had a lot of catch-all addresses or orphaned e-mail accounts from people who used to work for our church that were not set up when we moved our mail service. Those were forwarded to the administrator’s account and we spent a lot of time unsubscribing people from various mailing lists for a while. We still get the occasional message, but less frequently now.

14. Credit Cards, Merchant Accounts, Vendor Accounts – Anything that involves the person being able to spend money on behalf of the church. If they had a church credit card, that needs to be cancelled. If they could spend the church’s money, that account or relationship should also be terminated or transferred.

15. Voicemail – Change their voicemail password or delete/disable their account. Perhaps setting up forwarding to a different phone number or mailbox would also work. Make sure someone’s checking it if you do that.

16. Common or Shared Passwords – By far, the most common password for church workers seems to be John3:16 in one form or another.  First – stop using this as your password! Now! Change it if this is your password! Now that I’ve said that, if you have shared accounts that people use or perhaps passwords that are common knowledge, change them and let those who use the account know the new password. Make sure that they don’t pass it on or leave it lying around.

17. Collect the church’s equipment – Not all churches issue equipment for people to take off-site, but if your staff member had equipment that belongs to the church, make sure you collect it from the staff member.  If you’re not maintaining an inventory, this may be a good time to start one.

18. Cell Phones or other recurring expenses – Some staff members have cell phone bills regularly paid by the church. Maybe they liked to read certain magazines that nobody else uses. Look for any recurring expenses that are paid by the church and cancel or transfer them.

19. Remove printed or online references – Remove the staff member’s name and contact information from your website and any printed materials. Replace it with someone else as appropriate, but stop printing materials with their name.

20. Back up their personal files and/or e-mail – Finally, back up their personal files and their e-mail for future reference. If there’s a supervisor, you can give the files to that person. If you have a good relationship with the staff member who’s leaving, you may be able to give them the files that are definitely personal.  Regardless, keeping an archive of their files and e-mail may prove invaluable down the road if something comes up that only your departed staff member knew about.

If I’ve missed anything obvious, let me know in the comments or discuss further in the forums.

—

Church/Ministry IT staff and volunteers from across the country will descend upon Saddleback Church in warm sunny Lake Forest California to partake in 2 days of invaluable peer learning, networking and inspiration March 11-12.

If you can only attend one IT conf this year, this is the one I recommend without hesitation! Regardless of your church/org size, I guarantee you’ll leave with new knowledge, new friendships and loads of inspiration.  I’ve been to every National Church IT Roundtable since 2006 and I leave each one totally amazed at what I’ve gained.  Not to mention the incredible friendships I’ve built over the past few years are invaluable on both a person and professional level.  So in other words – make every effort possible to get to this event.  If you need me to write a note to your boss to help your plight let me know

We’re still firming up final costs, but it will be under $100…and that will include lunch and snacks both days…and if we get enough sponsors hopefully even dinner both nights.

Sponsors?  Yes, we’re asking vendors to help offset the costs.  Please encourage your favorite vendors to contribute.  Even a small amount will be helpful.  Vendors can contact info@citrt.org for more info on how to help.

Spouses?  Yes, a number of us have been informed by our spouses that they TOO will be coming to California   Spouses are encouraged to join us during the evening gathering times.  Perhaps during the day they can form their own IT spouse support group and hang out together at the beach

Final details are still being nailed down, but here’s the schedule gist …
March 10 – optional pre-event informal gathering in the evening (possible dinner)
March 11 – Day 1 – 9am until late … Saddleback “behind the scenes” tour in late afternoon, group dinner, then a special worship service
March 12 – Day 2 – 9am until 5pm … then optional dinner for those flying out Sat/Sun

More details can be found at http://citrt.org … hope to see you there!  Questions? Leave a comment or email info@citrt.org

For the latest up to the minute Church IT Roundtable news follow CITRT on twitter and/or facebook

Honoring copyright law, in both letter and spirit is simply the right thing to do.  I wrote more about that on TechnoPraxis again this morning.

There is no question that copyright in the US is complicated. The law is dense. Fair use is a limited, and confusing area that often does not apply to the activities of a church. Churches, other than when performing or exhibiting religious works during religious services, enjoy no blanket exemption from the law.

Add to that the fact that we have three separate and unrelated performance rights organizations: ASCAP, SESAC and BMI. That makes licensing and staying legal more complicated.

Fortunately, there are some relatively simple solutions available to churches.  Here’s a quick rundown of some of them.  This is also the place that I should remind you that I’m not an attorney, and don’t play one on TV.  If you have specific questions about your situation, go find a lawyer that specializes in intellectual property law.

CCLI
Church Copyright Licensing International offers the most well known blanket license. It allows you to do the following for all songs in their library:

1. Print songs and lyrics in programs and bulletins.
2. Create songsheets or songbooks for your congregation.
3. Project lyrics for congregational singing.
4. Create your own arrangements of covered songs, if no published version is available.
5. Record your service and distribute those recordings, subject to restrictions on number of copies and price. NOTE: This does not cover creating a music CD of your worship band, whether it was done during a worship service or not.

CCLI does NOT allow you to copy music, to translate music, or rent or lend songbooks made under the license to other groups.

CVLI
Church Video Licensing International offers a blanket license that allows you to playback movies or other videos from covered producers in church or Sunday school gatherings. There are some restrictions, including one that says you MAY NOT promote a specific title.  In other words, you can promote a movie night, but you can’t invite your congregation to a showing of a specific title under this license.

Christian Copyright Solutions – AKA Copyright Solvers has several great products.

They offer WorshipCast, which is a blanket license that covers web streaming of the music in your worship service. Much less hassle than getting individual licenses and reporting to three agencies. You can acquire this license pretty easily online directly from the performance rights organizations.  You will, however, have to do reports for the music you use to all three.  The ability to file one report with the blanket is well worth the minimal extra cost.It only covers streaming, however.  It does NOT cover downloads of .mp3′s or other formats.

They also offer PerformMusic, which is a blanket performance license for playback of music outside of worship services.  Yes, it is required!   The Willow Creek Creek Association offers a similar blanket license, that I believe is simply a part of your association membership.  Great benefit for members. UPDATE:  WCA no longer offers this directly.  Instead, they have a relationship with Christian Copyright Solutions, and members of WCA get some significant discounts!

Copyright Solvers also has a great new service called VideoReady. If you are a video producer, looking to do music videos with contemporary tunes, or funeral tributes with music backgrounds, this is the service for you.  They offer sync licenses that are very affordable.

This list probably (almost certainly) isn’t exhaustive.  If you know of another cool copyright tool available online, pass it on in the comments!

The bottom line is this. It’s possible to be legal about things. More than ever, it’s pretty affordable thanks to these new services.  There’s really no reason not to stay copyright clean!

I’ve been using EasyWorship 2009 at our church for a few months now in its beta form, and it has been rock-solid. Our worship team really likes the Display Foldback capabilities, and has made it clear that this feature alone is worth the upgrade fee.

So, what is Display Foldback? Basically, it’s support for a third output from the computer that is intended specifically for the people on stage. It supports different settings for backgrounds and font size and style. In addition, you can display a clock for the worship team and preacher to use. Perhaps my favorite part of the system is that you can display the first line of the next slide in case your slide operator falls asleep at the wheel.

Display Foldback requires an additional level of hardware that you may not already have. You’ll need a third display output, which for many churches, means purchasing an extra video card. Our setup is unconventional, but it works all the same. We use the integrated video on the motherboard for our control screen. Then, a single PCI-E video card sends VGA to the congregation and Foldback to the stage via composite video. You could do any combination of video cards and monitors from something like what we use all the way to three independent cards.

Once your hardware is in place, setup is simple. First, configure Windows so that all three outputs are active. Hit the “Identify” button to be sure you’re not duplicating a certain output across two screens. You’ll want to see a “1” on the control screen, a “2” on the congregation screen, and a “3” on the foldback monitor. Then, start up EasyWorship. In the Live > Options pane, set the main (congregation) output to “Secondary Monitor”. Click Ok. Now, in the Live > Display Foldback Options pane and under the “Display Foldback” heading, change the dropdown menu selection to “Monitor 3” or whatever yours may be called.

That’s it! Change the Display Foldback settings as you see fit. Most of the foldback pane is similar to what you’ll see in the main Display Options pane, so you should be familiar with what you’re looking at. A plain background with the clock and next line preview turned on seems to work well for us.

There are two more features related to Display Foldback I’d like to mention. First is the “Foldback Alert”, found at Live > Alerts > Foldback Alert, or the Alerts button just to the left of the Logo, Black and Clear buttons. There, you can send a message only to the stage. Operation is identical to the “Message Alert”.

The other feature is enhanced PowerPoint slide operation. In the Live > Display Foldback Options pane and in the PowerPoint Options tab, there are some options to add thumbnails of the next few upcoming slides. You can change the size of the previews as a percentage of screen height. However, if your foldback monitor is not very large or it is positioned far away, sharing that screen with thumbnails makes the primary slide small and hard to read very quickly.

All in all, EasyWorship 2009 is a good upgrade, and there are many more features besides Display Foldback. Another feature that I like is webpage integration, especially for YouTube.

Prices are $399 for a new license, $99 for an upgrade and free if you have purchased since the beginning of 2009. More information can be found at http://www.easyworship.com

Even you can help out… just turn off your computers and monitors, printers, fax machines whatever.  When you leave for the day, turn off the whole system,the monitor, printers, everything that is not essential.  Imagine how much energy we’d save if  we  all powered off every non essential  electronic devise for 8 hours in every church or at home every night.. how about just starting off small with one night!!

HP, Intel,  Citrix and Microsoft, Challenging Government and Industry to Turn Off Computers, Printers and Peripherals on August 27 so why should churches be excluded.  The Power IT Down Day’s goal is to reduce carbon emissions by promoting responsible energy and raise awareness about what you can to do to help reduce our dependence on fossil fuels.

“Last year, over 2,800 government and industry employees pledged to power down their computers, printers and monitors when they left their offices for the evening, which resulted in over 37,000 kilowatt-hours saved,” said Tom Simmons, area vice president for Citrix Federal. ” If just one percent of government’s 1.8 million civilian employees turned off their processors, monitors and peripherals for only one night, the U.S. government would save approximately $23,40″ talk about a stimulus package!

Did you know that a personal computer at 10 hours a week uses 150 kilowatt hours. While a small laser printer uses 90-100 watts while printing and 5 watts when electricity connected, but not printing.

The sponsors will be making a donation of at least $20,000 to Wounded Warrior Project (WWP). WWP provides support for the nation’s severely wounded military personnel, helping them on the road to healing, both physically and mentally.

Over 3300 people have signed up on HP’s website to track how many KW we can save with over 43,000 KW and rising!

Be GREEN and help save some energy. Register now to receive an email reminder.

UPDATE As of 8:00am EST Friday Aug, 28 5,592 people have signed up to Power IT down saving over 72,000 kilowatt hours!!!

By the way, I’m writing about this special cause because I believe that we are all called to be good stewards of all God’s resources; there is no benefit to myself or CTM.

As a church IT volunteer,  our time is limited and we need tools that can help us be more efficient with the time we do have. When I took over as the tech team leader, I knew that the biggest challenge was going to be maintaining the network. I needed a tool that could be my eyes and ears in the environment and let me know when things are not right. For example, some of the canned alerts will tell me when someone has installed new software on their system or if they added the infamous weather-bug.. without having to install expensive 3rd party applications on every workstation in the network.  That is where SpiceWorks comes in.

This is the 1^st in a series of post on SpiceWorks; a network monitoring tool that that lets you perform a wide variety of tasks within your infrastructure. From inventory control, alerts and monitors, a wide range of canned reports as well as custom reports, there is also an extensive Help Desk that you can have up and running within 5 minutes.

All for FREE

see what it has to offer

http://www.viddler.com/simple/d27eb5d/

After watching the video I hope you have a better understanding what SpiceWorks has to offer, so Download SpiceWorks and test it out and see what over 700,000 IT pros are saying.

Stay tuned for the next in the series where I’ll begin to unravel SpiceWorks piece by piece and show you just how you can use it in your network. While you’re at it jump on over to the CTM Forumwhere we can further the discussion.

By the way, I’m writing about SpiceWorks because it’s a truly great tool for churches, there is no benefit to myself or CTM.

In a nutshell, GVoice is a true one-number service.  Calls made to the GVoice number can be automatically forwarded to one or several other telephone numbers, or be forwarded directly to voicemail.  Voicemails are run through the transcription engine and dropped into the Gvoice inbox. At this point, you as the user have the option to read the transcript or listen to the message.  While the transcription is far from perfect at this point, Google states that improvements will continue based on user feedback.  Users may also choose to have a copy of the voicemail and transcript emailed to their Gmail account.

When answering calls forwarded to a designated number, options exist to screen the calls somewhat.  When I answer my Google Voice calls, I have the option of pressing one (1) to take the call, two (2) to send the call to voicemail or three (3) to listen in on the voicemail as it is being left and pick up on the call if necessary (remember screening calls with your answering machine?).

Are you worried about having a call come to your GVoice number in the middle of the night? Don’t be.  GVoice also supports advanced scheduling for when calls are delivered and to what number.  Want to override your schedule for a brief “Do Not Disturb”? Yep, GVoice supports that function too.  During these “quiet times”, GVoice still takes a voicemail, transcribes it if possible and then forwards a copy of the voicemail and transcript to whatever email(s) you choose.

Some of the key features include:

1. Local telephone number availability – may depend on telephone provider and locale. I had to get an AT&T number for a neighboring town.
2. Unlimited 48 continental state calling with no Long Distance
3. Tight integration to Google Contacts
4. Low International Long Distance – For example, $0.01 per minute to Canada from the US (a/o today)
5. Built in voicemail with transcription
6. Unlimited SMS to and from your GVoice number
7. Unified messaging with voicemail and SMS dropping into the same interface
8. Custom call routing – Determine how specific calling numbers are handled (which number they are forwarded to, which voicemail message they receive, etc)
9. Multiple destination telephone numbers
10. Ability to record calls

Google Voice has a familiar email-type interface making it easy to do all GVoice functions from one place.

Potential Ministry Uses

Personally, I work with both Junior and Senior High Youth at our church.  I will be using Google Voice for this ministry specifically for these features:

1. Unlimited inbound and outbound SMS – While these plans are available for my cell, the inbox interface allows our ministry to send announcements, updates, handle multiple  messages quickly and archive communications.
2. Unlimited calling to any number allows us to use this tool to make free Long Distance calls from anywhere to anywhere in the continental US.
3. I also have a widget on my blog where anyone can click, enter their number and call me at no cost to them or me (in the continental US).

https://clients4.google.com/voice/embed/webCallButton
During my early usage, I have also identified the following other potential uses for other ministries:

1. Church Plants / Small Churches – Use GVoice as the published # for the church thus saving the cost of telephone/voicemail service/systems each month. Call routing can be set up in the background to route to one or many numbers.  If staff changes, the church simply changes the call routing and continues to use the Gvoice number.  Therefore, no need to change numbers.
2. Long Distance savings – while many church staff may use cell service to call Long Distance numbers, thus saving Long Distance charges for the church, this still uses package minutes. GVoice calls are free within the continental US.
3. Voicemail distribution – As church members leave voicemails on the GVoice #, notifications can be immediately emailed to the appropriate address.
4. SMS notifications – churches may use the unlimited Inbound and Outbound SMS feature to send notifications and updates to church members without having to have an unlimited package on a cell phone.  Plus the web interface makes message management easier.

As I use GVoice this fall, I will post significant updates as the service changes.

Does your church/ministry use GVoice?  Do you plan to?  Or, do you NOT see GVoice as a possible tool?  Join the discussion in our forums.