Some of the key areas of covered include:

• Developing content for online experiences
• Working with volunteers
• Spreading the word about your online ministry
• Equipment and resource recommendations

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Some of the features include:

Searchable Online Directory

Take the pain out of printed directories and office calls by letting members share contact details safely online.

Groups and Mailing Lists

Communicate and collaborate with email and group messaging. Share meeting place details, post pictures, track attendance, and more.

Social Networking

Provide a safe and productive social network where churchgoers can share news, pictures, bible verses, and more.

Membership Management

Use OneBody as a tool to suit your specific needs — either as a ChMS or a separately synchronized database.

The free version is open source, and is very feature rich.

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Register here to make sure you don’t miss out.

Social Media for Pastors and Ministry Leaders: Where Do I Start? Just what is “social media” anyway? Why has it taken the online world by storm? In this webinar you’ll learn why the social web is absolutely crucial to communicating with the next generation. You’ll learn how the up-and-coming generation communicates and why you need to be in those channels, contributing your story to the social media flow. We’ll focus on the “why” and the “how” of social media. If you’re confused by terms like “tweet”, “like” and “blogging”, this webinar is a great place to start in getting a social media education! Join blogger and social strategist Justin Wise to uncover the basic principles of social media and why you need to be integrating it into your ministry work flow.

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Vintage Church
main website

Vintage Church is a large (and growing) collection of media resources that are free for churches to use. This could be invaluable particularly for smaller churches who may not have anyone with design skills in their midst, or have the cash to pay for good designs.

There are a few videos included, but the vast majority of content is from designs for sermons, sermon series, outreach projects, youth events and other related areas. All of the designs come from a variety of churches, and as such the designs are variable both in quality and style.

Most of the items are provided in photoshop or illustrator format, and some jpgs. The downside of Photoshop files is you need Photoshop to use them. The plus side though is that you can then freely change them for your own needs. For instance if you look at the first example I give below this would be great to use as it is…unless you aren’t aren’t starting the series on the 10th/11th of April! With the photoshop files though within a couple of minutes you can change the words. If you don’t have photoshop, you could try to use Gimp to edit the files.

Here are a couple of examples:

I spotted this free resource at the Uth Gut Tech’s blog

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church_admin WordPress plugin
main website

Church Admin is a new WordPress Plugin that has been developed to allow any churches with a WordPress website to have a simple Church Management System installed.

• Directory List (addresses etc. of members)
• Rotas – any number of rotas can be set up
• Visitor Tracking – to help you follow up any new visitors
• Attendance – Follow and make graphs of your church’s attendance
• Bulk Email – send email to all your members
• Bulk sms – send text messages to all your members (this needs a www.bulksms.co.uk account and is not a free feature)
• Calendar – with some simple options for repeating items.

There are some nice features such as the date for inputting attendances defaults to the previous Sunday.

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MinBlogs
Main website

Kingdom Tools have started a new initiative this year to provide free websites and blogs to Churches, ministries, and Christians. This is a fantastic offer not just because it is free, but also because it is a high quality offering.

It takes less than 5 minutes to sign up, and once you do you can start playing around. Your blog will be hosted using wordpress which is a great thing in my opinion. Free Christian resources uses wordpress, as does the website I wrote for my Church.

The advantage of going with MinBlogs would be that you can take out all of the difficulties (well most of them!) of setting up and maintaining a website. The free version comes with 150mb of free space and 150 themes. For most needs this will be more than enough – unless you plan to host sermons or videos online. If this is the case you can still go with MinBlogs and either pay for un upgrade, or host the large files somewhere else.

WordPress is primarily a blogging tool, however you can make the homepage static if you like so that it is more like a ‘normal’ website. You can also use your own domain name if you have one, and they will not show any adverts on your website either (although you can show your own if you like).

If you have never used a website before there will be a learning curve, but the main wordpress site has lots of guidance. I also noticed that MinBlogs has lots of hints dotted around the place to make it as easy as possible to use.

I am really happy to recommend this service either for small ministries or churches that are just starting out. There can be enough to be doing without learning how to write a website when money is tight!

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DropBox
main website

Dropbox is not a Christian application, but it is free and it is one that will be useful for many people. DropBox in its simplest form lets you backup files (2GBs) from your computer online, and then share them with others if you like.

I go through a few of the ways you might use dropbox below – but one of the things I love about dropbox is that it is really easy to use. Just put it in your dropbox folder and they do the rest!

Back it up – don’t lose it!

Until you’ve lost all of your data when your computer crashes, we can tend to be a bit too relaxed about backing up our data. DropBox will not be the end to all of your backup needs – but it is good for critical files. By keeping copies of your key files in dropbox you know they will be available whatever happens. If my house burnt down and I lost my computer and other backups – any files held online will be safe.

Most people I know don’t even have a backup plan – so using dropbox would be a good start.

Access you information anywhere

Because of the DrobBox website (and iPhone application if you have an iPhone) you can access the files you have put in dropbox anywhere you are – as long as you have an internet connection. If you have two computers you can use dropbox to make sure certain files are always available to you.

Share it with others

You can share any folders you like with people either by making the whole folder public, or by sharing with specific people. This is a really handy feature, so you could for instance store important Church documents where a few people can access it. Or rather than email huge files to each other you can use dropbox to easily transfer them

I need more than 2GBs

With the free account you get 2GBs of free space. If you need a lot more you will probably need a paid account. But there are ways to get more free space by linking it to your facebook account, taking part in competitions or by recommending friends to join. You can add quite a lot this way – up to over 10GBs I think.

Disclaimer – the links on this page will benefit me!

If you sign up for DropBox with the links on this page I will receive some extra free space. If you don’t want me to, just google dropbox and sign up there.

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Amongst other things it includes:

• Easy, step by step guides for setting up Facebook and Twitter for your church.
• Practical advice from experienced creative and communications staff about social media best-practices.
• Sample posts to get you started.

You can get the free pdf on social media here.

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There is a great selection of eBooks from good usability, creating flagship content, SEO and much more. Even if you don’t want to monetize your website there are some powerful learnings to be made here that could push your website onto the next the level. That can only be good news for your readers! I’ll try to read them all for you guys ;)

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What sets ref.ly apart from the crowd is that it works on a wide variety of different abbreviations which means it should be easy to use. Also of course it is a very short URL which makes it great for services like twitter or facebook. They provide an example of the various ways you could link to Matthew 11:25–26
:

• http://ref.ly/Mt11.25–26
• http://ref.ly/Mt11.25f
• http://ref.ly/Mat11.25f
• http://ref.ly/Matt11.25f
• http://ref.ly/Matthew11.25f

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