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.

I posted a tweet recently and it triggered that thought process in me.

The one that said “weren’t you meant to write a blog post about this?” one. So here I am. And what I want to discuss is twofold; whether we should use stock photos in church material and if so, where can we source them for free. I always like free, especially when it comes to not spending money that could be better spent on God’s kingdom.

So, first things first. Should we be using stock photos in church material? As ever there are several factors to consider:

• How photogenic are your members?
• Are any of them on vulnerable lists and need to maintain privacy?
• If building pictures need to be used is yours suitable?
• Do you have the necessary equipment?
• Do you have the experience?
• Do you have the objects you want pictures of?

And I’m sure there are more I haven’t thought of.

The point here is that whilst you may have the necessary resources and members willing to be photographed i it right to use them? Morally I don’t have any problems and legally I don’t think, except maybe in the case of minors, we should have any issues either.

So should we use stock photos then? Personally it’s a wholehearted yes with a major caveat! That being only if the picture is appropriate. So no using cheesy pictures of Hollywood B-list stars with smiles brighter than the sun if you don’t have people like that in your church.

Once you’ve established you’re going to use stock photos the only remaining question comes down to paid, free or free with limitations. You need to be aware that with stock photos free isn’t always free. In this case free means you are free to use it within the limitations / guidelines set out by the publisher or photographer.

These ‘free’ restrictions could include:

• Usage – as in where it will be placed in your material.
• Duration – how long do you want to use the image for?
• Print Run – not relevant in web terms but when printing brochures, etc
• Territory – some images are restricted to use in limited locations
• Size – how large is your use going to be?

To be fair though, most free stock photo sites are just that – free and even though it isn’t requested it is polite to cite where you got the picture from.

So now we’ve determined acceptability and usage we can finally go find what we want. But where?

• stock.xchng is my all time favourite. Requires a free registration and most images are restriction free. They are definitely the largest out there that I know with >300,00o images. Part of this maybe because they are backed by iStockPhoto one of the larger fee based stock photo sites.
• morgueFile in contrast is probably one of the longer running free stock photo sites having been around since 1996 and certainly is my first stop for images. They’re not as large as stock.xchng with >200,000 images on the site.
• freerange is fairly new to me but still good. They differ in that they aim to provide free stock photos to commercial as well as non-commercial alike. Secondly, they have a small but dedicated team of photographers who take, edit and tag each picture. The emphasis here is definitely on quality not quantity. A free registration is required.
• flickr I couldn’t do a list without including the grand daddy of photo sharing sites. So you’re just as likely to find a nightmare as an ideal picture here but I find flickr is superb when looking for ideas that aren’t easy to pin down such as ‘love’ or ‘tension’. Again a free registration is required to download most pictures and they are typically offered in a range of sizes. I find it best when using images from flickr to drop the author a quick note saying how you plan to use it – so far I’ve not had any negative replies.
• everystockphoto is not a stock photo site per se but a search engine for stock photos. However, unlike it’s title it doesn’t search every site but a limited selection of sites … most of which are free. My advice, use the advanced search and un-check the options you don’t want.

Naturally there are many, many more sites I could list but with the above five I usually find what I want. If these don’t satisfy you then I have one more link that should meet your every need as a designer …

Blue Vertigo – as their entry banner says “more than resources”. I came across this site a few years ago and their links section (see my hotlink) is continually expanding and is constantly checked by their team. The site has an odd way of presenting itself with a static top half and the bottom half scrolls left to right through the links – you’ll also need good eyesight or a larger font as they are quite small.

What sites do you use?

Do you use stock photos? Why or why not?

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!

But I digress, the reason we’re here is to find out why someone would want to use a Mac in church rather than a PC. First of all, I believe that Macs are much better suited for multimedia. They come with many programs that out of the box are great for the average user when it comes to photo, video, and even sound. And if you’re someone who needs more than those programs offer, you can always try something from Adobe.

The second reason is ProPresenter. ProPresenter is the leading presentation software for the Mac. While programs such as MediaShout and EasyWorship are great for the PC, I believe ProPresenter does a much better job. Like everything else about a Mac, ProPresenter is very user friendly, and easy to pick up even for someone who has never even seen it before. It does a great job handling lyrics, backgrounds, videos, etc. Version 4 will be coming out soon, and it looks like it’s going to include many new and useful features. I can’t wait to check it out. One of the most interesting features I’ve seen is the apparent ease of importing PowerPoint presentations. Now, having not been able to test this firsthand, I can’t vouch for how easy it is, but they claim it’s pretty seamless. Stage Display is another very useful looking feature, which allows you to format a display specifically suited for those on stage.

Right now, the church I attend is using SongShow Plus, but I’m planning on upgrading to EasyWorship 2009 in the near future. SongShow is very outdated and hard to use, compared to all of the other products available. As much as I like EasyWorship, I would switch to ProPresenter in a heartbeat if we could afford the extra expense of purchasing a Mac. The main reason for that is I trust a Mac much more than a PC. I know this is going to stir up some debate, but that’s ok, I’m ready for it. I’ve had many more problems out of PC’s I’ve owned in the past than I’ve had from my MacBook Pro.

Those are just a couple of the reasons I would choose a Mac over a PC in a worship environment. The church I volunteer in actually uses a PC, but again, if it were up to me we would have a Mac. Disagree? You can find me on Twitter, @chaselivingston, I’d love to discuss the topic further. Also, for further discussion, please check out the forum, here.

What is your name?

Chase Livingston, aka @chaselivingston

I realize you are a tech volunteer at your church, as many of us are, what do you do fulltime?

I’m a college student at Clemson University, studying Electrical Engineering. That basically means I study all the time, and tweet about how boring or hard my classes are.

What is the name of your church?

Mountain Creek Baptist Church

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

Part 3 is all about Content Creation. Parts 1 and 2 can be found here and here.

As project lead I was quite happy that this burden wasn’t on me. However it was down to me to drive the provision of it and to keep advising, suggesting, etc. Of course the type of site and target audience really drives the content. In our case the site I documented this process for was (another story for another time) our main church website.

The boss man wanted to effectively transplant our monthly newsletter; notices; calendar and his monthly message to the web. He also wanted it to be a place to publicly place our Church history along with items about why we believe what we believe and other associated, relevant to our Church information. The trouble with most of the documents produced is that they were full of what I’d call “Christianeese” and to a non-Church person they were dry and very boring.

So with some trepidation I set out, along with a contact, to de-mystify the documents. Along with this was a need to categorise the data so that it could be placed on the website. When first we started the project I spoke at some length with my pastor about the need to ‘categorise’ the data he wanted on the site and to have an idea of what headings it should come under. I pointed him at resources such as menu layout study and Layout Cookbook so that he could see what was normal and what was acceptable. Little did I realise my error at the time but it was fortunately easily fixed. Within a few weeks I had been provided with raw data and no less than 14 main menu headings, along with many more sub headings – a potential nightmare for any designer, let alone the visual impact.

Thankfully we whittled this down to 6 major headings that we now have. We did this by a process of categorising the data and identifying where it could be placed.

Along with creating the content, you have to consider at whom it is aimed. This was a lot easier to argue the case that any (and yes I believe this should hold true for all) church site should target three distinct demographics. These are:

• The church membership / attendees
• Other Christians visiting or moving into the area
• Seekers

How one does this is not easy but a lot of it has to be driven by talk. In our case it was easy to persuade the pastor that just doing a website for the church would make it a relatively static site and would defeat the main object of the web (as I see it) to be interactive. And here, interactivity doesn’t mean lots of buttons to press or things to do – simply that it draws in the attention of the reader and persuades them to return. Add to this the fact that we’ve had visitors over the years that told the pastor by email / chat / etc that they had found it really difficult to know when / where our services were and that our website was dreadful (I confess, this last was my fault) but I did it so that we had something and to show the pastor how bad a static content site can be.

Anyway, this talk from outsiders finally persuaded the pastor that we needed to do something about our online presence.

Now that this hurdle was over I hammered home the need to ensure the site was not static. Now you may have an easier time of this than I, but whilst my pastor is a happy user of the internet (surfing and emails) and despite being a few years younger than I; he has publically stated on more than one occasion that you’ll “never find him on facebook, myspace or similar locales”.

Thankfully a few web searches produced lots of articles and ideas that I was able to forward to him to get his thought processes running. Little things like telling him the stuffy (they’re not, but it  served a purpose) old CofE use twitter to run their annual ‘Love Life Live Lent‘ event and suddenly he’s thinking perhaps I should involve my self more.

For our part, interactive is going to come down to regular and changing content especially on the homepage. So transplanting his monthly magazine article to the web is one; persuading him to write more often is another; remembering to get any flyers designed for events into a web based graphic to go on our front page; to ensure that (as an example) the children’s page has regular updates and with content suitable to all ages; add pictures and graphics where appropriate and change them oin a regular basis. In fact anything that makes me, you or someone else keep returning.

I’m going to stop now as I could keep driving the nail home but want to leave you still breathing. In the final part of this series I intend to cover dealing with leadership issues; employing third parties and find some form of conclusion.

In the meantime – should you have any questions or wnat to continue discussing this then do pop over to the CTM Forum and have your say.

In part one of this series I laid out the basics of project mgmt as I see them and briefly mentioned my use of FreeMind to do some brain storming / mind mapping. There are of course many resources and utilities out there that can be used instead of FreeMind – but this is the first one I found years ago and it is what I am used too.

If you have any specific links then please leave a comment or better still, include them in the forum post.

Moving along then.

Site Design.

Unless you are a designer or have very clear ideas on the what you want and how it will look then this aspect of the process will likely be the toughest. One caveat I will throw in here is that you really need to have an idea of the content so that you can either picture it in place or else you will need to utilise place holder text and pictures.

With appreciation of site design being such an individual thing I approach this aspect by crowd sourcing it. I take a cross section of the Church membership (youth, OAP’s, singles, leadership, etc) and ask them to note down web sites they like and equally sites they don’t like. Once you have these you need to spend a bit of time drawing up a tick (or hit) list of what is / isn’t popular.

The list needs to include items such as:

• Entry page
• Overall layout – is it centralised?
• Screen resolution required
• Full screen yes / no?
• Style, type and depth of navigation
• Colour usage – how many / consistency
• Logo / banner / tag line usage
• Content of menu structure
• etc …

The exact list will vary according to the end project / client but the ultimate goal here is to narrow down the type of site you want. For example do you want the site to sit central on the screen with a horizontal fly out menu structure? Or do you prefer it to be left aligned and have a vertical menu structure using strong clashing colours.

Certain things like the colour choice is made easier if the Church already has a strong sense of brand. Just have this replicated through to the website. My Church did this with their business arm when they setup an eCommerce site (GatesofPraise.co.uk) and the overall design and colours used mirror the hard print versions they’ve used for years.

Beyond the crowd sourcing process I also utilise sites like Church Beauty, or Great Church Websites (good search engine for narrowing down design needs) or even Dean Peters Heal Your Church Website is an excellent read. Don’t forget to pay a visit to Jacob Nielsen’s Usability and Web Design site – usetit.com – lots of good useful information to help you in planning your layout, etc.

One thing I can’t stress enough though – keep feeding back to the leadership team before going ahead with anything. This is something I’ve learnt the hard way (not with the current design process but in other aspects) as you don’t want to have to back track due to the bosses not liking what’s come up.

But let me also add a further caveat … if you believe in the idea / design strongly enough then take your best arguments with you – especially if you know that the ideas coming from the other side won’t work or will look bad. Just remember to keep a cool head and be prepared to walk away graciously.

Looking back at this post I’m going to leave content creation to the next post …

• This will not be from a coders viewpoint but that of a tech head that knows the terminology
• I know this won’t be all encompassing but I trust it proves informative
• I am not a trained project manager so your mileage may vary
• I have to use outside resources

With that said, let’s dive straight in with the first part:As I said above, I’m not a project manager but I am an organised and logical person and have had plenty of experience in organising many different projects, events, plays, etc. For me the hardest part of any project is where to start but typically I start with a brain storming (some call it mind mapping) session and for this I use pen and paper and FreeMind. FreeMind is so much more flexible than pen and paper but I still prefer the tactileness (Ed: is that a word?) of the old school approach.

When running a project there are always several steps and I’m sure there are as many variations of this as there are people running projects, but my approach could be defined as this – although I admit that this mostly just happens without my thinking about the steps:

• Define and agree the objective of the project
• Brainstorm ideas
• Assess / analyse ideas
• Categorise, refine and combine ideas
• Agree way forward
• Assign, analyse, prioritise & monitor tasks
• Agree timescales
• Feedback at agreed intervals
• Above all, keep God central in the plans

So that’s my nine step approach. Some will slot easily into other areas and I can already think of more that could be added – however I firmly believe that project managing should be about facilitating and not getting mired in the process.

In future posts I intend to cover the above steps in more detail – at present I don’t know how many pots this will take up but I foresee at least three or four…

• site design and content creation
• hosting
• dealing with leadership / employing third parties
• wrap up

If there is anything I don’t cover then please give me a shout and I’ll either include it or try to find a solution.

Lately, Matt and I have been talking and Twittering about a variety of things and last Saturday, I made the trip to Schweitzer United Methodist Church. I love visiting churches, especially when I can get a behind the scenes tour, which I definitely did at Schweitzer.

They have 4 services: 2 modern, 1 traditional and 1 blended. On Saturday night is one of the modern services and I arrived in time to watch the band practice and look over Matt’s shoulder as he cleaned up the songs in ProPresenter.

One thing I love about ProPresenter is the countdown that ran all during practice to let everyone know how much time there was until the pre-service meeting. At 5, all of us, the band, the sound and media guys, the associate pastor and Matt and I went and discussed the details of the upcoming service. (I actually just sat there and listened.) Every element was previously mapped out and the details of who does what and when they do it was nailed down in this meeting.

During the service, I hung out in the media room with Matt’s uber volunteer, Will and watched as he ran ProPresenter. ProPresenter has a sweet interface and it would be fun for us to get to where we can transition over to that. It was a good service.

Afterwards, Matt and I went to Galloway Station and had a great dinner on the patio.

It was fun to compare notes and learn a thing or two. Matt is a busy guy, he is the Media Director at Schweitzer and now transitioning into the role of College Pastor. (not sure of exact title).  They have some cool toys there for video and audio editing and mostly a Mac shop, in that regard.

We talked a little bit about our future goals and desires and it will be interesting to see how things shake out.  God is moving among things that we are each doing and it’s fun to see how we cross paths and intermingle among each other in the church tech world.

If you are ever in Springfield, stop by and say hi to Matt, he is very accomodating and he’s doing some cool stuff!

Thanks Matt, for your time and just letting me experience Schweitzer!  I’ll drop by again someday.