We are pleased to announce two new AM 3.0 templates entitled "We Believe" (view preview) and "Color and Shape" (view preview). As usual, all AM 3.0 templates are fully customizable.
(To change your template, login to your AdvancedMinistry account and select “Choose My Template”.)
One of our in-house brand-gurus, Brian Klassen, shares his experience in branding and applies it to ministries via a 5-part series called: The Four Pillars of Branding.
So, the four pillars of effective brand development are Honesty, Quality, Consistency and Frequency. If you leave one of these out of the mix, you run the risk of being ineffective as a communicator.
Christ was a great example of each one of these characteristics. He knew what He was sent to do and never pretended to be anything else. His whole life reflected quality (never sinning, created the best wine, total healing of the sick, communicating to people where they were at, …) Because He knew what He needed to accomplish, He was disciplined and focused on putting all His energy towards accomplishing that task. Last but not least, He repeated his message over and over again for maximum effect.
As ministries, entrusted with the message of eternal life, we need to make every effort to be effective communicators. I believe that when we do that, God is more than willing to come along side and bless it.
One of our in-house brand-gurus, Brian Klassen, shares his experience in branding and applies it to ministries via a 5-part series called: The Four Pillars of Branding.
Have you ever heard the saying, “My father used to tell me ……”? Do you ever wonder, "why do I remember that so clearly?" Well, I would venture to guess that frequency played a role in it.
In the business of communications, frequency (how often you tell someone the same/similar message) is an often overlooked component. I have also heard all the reasons and excuses for not executing on this idea, but at the end of the day, if you are not repeating your message/story, you are not being as effective as you could be.
Here are just a couple reasons.
We just don’t have the budget.
It’s such good creative that we only have to show people once.
We don’t want to bore our audience with the same thing over and over again.
Proper planning should allow for frequency. If it means cutting in another area so you can build frequency – do it. No matter how good your execution is, one time is usually not enough because we are being inundated with thousands of messages every day. And last but not least, you will become bored of it much faster than your audience. Fight what we call boardroom boredom and tell the message over and over again.
One of our in-house brand-gurus, Brian Klassen, shares his experience in branding and applies it to ministries via a 5-part series called: The Four Pillars of Branding.
As a ministry brand management company (sorry about the “B” word), you would expect us to say something profound and deep about how churches and ministries need to step it up in this area. Well, I’ll save that for another time (that is - the deep and profound part).
Consistency is one of the four pillars of a strong brand/image. This is not rocket science, yet so many creative providers and ministry directors want to create something “different” just for the sake of being different yet, there is so much room for creativity within the parameters of who you are.
Dig deep into the richness of your character and communicate that through creative consistency. It may be colours, it may be the tone of your words, it may be timing, it may be the medium you use, it may be a certain style of visual or it may be via a specific type face.
Don’t confuse those who want to listen to you. Don’t cloud the gates of credibility. Allow your audience to totally understand who you are through creative consistency.
One of our in-house brand-gurus, Brian Klassen, shares his experience in branding and applies it to ministries via a 5-part series called: The Four Pillars of Branding.
I love our clients. That may sound crazy...but I do. I think a big reason for this is their passion for quality.
Many years ago when Electricurrent was started, we realized the incredible lack of quality communications amongst churches and other ministries. Now, before you start writing in and telling me about the great things you are doing, I do realize that there are those doing some really great stuff as well. I’m just talking about the majority.
I realize that one’s definition of quality may also differ, but that’s no excuse for producing second-rate materials. A general rule of thumb is, those who are the judge of what is good and bad should have good taste and understanding, not an impressive name on the door.
So what am I really getting at here? Well, Electricurrent is not the only place you can go for quality communications and strategic advice. And while we would love to explore working with anyone reading this blog, at the end of the day, there are so many great groups out there including some individuals who are in your church or organization.
The bigger truth is that we want to see you all striving for a greater level of quality and realizing His blessings on your ministry. Not only will you realize the blessings, the people you engage to help you generate those quality communications will be blessed as they are using the gifts God has given them.
One of our in-house brand-gurus, Brian Klassen, shares his experience in branding and applies it to ministries via a 5-part series called: The Four Pillars of Branding.
It’s been said that the new currency today in communications is honesty...I say it should have been this all along within the ministry sector.
Now, I’m not talking about out-and-out lying. I’m talking about being true to your brand/who you are. Electricurrent’s belief is that God made each ministry unique and special. He created your church or ministry to accomplish a certain task(s) in order to more effectively reach those who need Him.
The problem is that many of the churches and ministries out there don’t have a clear understanding of their calling and therefore, the representation of that calling via communications is all over the board (a reflection of their understanding).
Your brand/who you are should drive all such efforts. My advice would be to find someone within your ministry who has a good grasp on your brand and its direction (and understands what your audiences think of you), make that person the brand champion and give them the power to make decisions in regards to communicating the brand.
I just read an excellent article by a gentleman who has been in the marketing world for 20 years now. The article was a list of 10 things he wishes he knew before he started in marketing. Following is a quote from that article:
"Push" marketing is broken, because the customer is in control. Thanks to the Internet and Google, with just a few clicks, the customer can find hundreds of choices. And with social media sites to engage them, consumers have broken away from the old media that once held them captive. Anything you do to get their attention must add value in terms of what matters to them. Which usually means their jobs or personal needs, and not directly your products. Prospects will consider you less intrusive when you show them how to solve their problems. Even before the Internet, push marketing was dying, but Internet search engines have shoved it into the grave.
For those of you that aren't familiar with it, Wikipedia offers a couple of definitions for Push Marketing:
A push strategy in marketing is used when there has been a development or improvement on a new product which is unknown to the consumer. As there is no consumer demand in the product launch, the product and the information are "pushed" to the consumer by distribution and promotion. An example of this is a perfume product. Women do not request to smell a fragrance they never smelled before; it is simply "pushed" to them, through the advertisement. Due to the information asymmetry the producer tries by signaling to reduce the information gap between the consumer and the product. This is reached by promotion or other services like personal dialog.
Another meaning of the push strategy in marketing can be found in the communication between seller and buyer. In dependence of the used medium, the communication can be either interactive or non-interactive. For example, if the seller makes his promotion by television or radio, it's not possible for the buyer to interact with. On the other hand, if the communication is made by phone or internet, the buyer has possibilities to interact with the seller. In the first case information is just "pushed" toward the buyer, while in the second case it is possible for the buyer to demand the needed information according to his requirements.
...camp out there and make sure you understand those definitions and maybe even go back and re-read the first quote before you carry on reading...
What I love about the author's point in the section I copied above, is that he really captures the concept of the shift in thinking that the new marketing requires and I'm pretty convinced that at base, the truths about communication that he raises with a business context in mind, also apply to ministries – especially in the area of evangelism.
Perhaps instead of us “pushing” the message of Jesus Christ to the world, we should be doing some more listening and thinking about what other perspectives are out there. Starting from that vantage point, we would have a much better chance of communicating clearly. Of course, at the end of the day, everyone's needs are the same and the Gospel message doesn't change. But if we don't understand how others are thinking, then we won't have a hope in communicating with them on a level that makes sense.
I'm reminded of one of my favorite songs called Belief by John Mayer. The lyrics go like this:
Is there anyone who ever remembers
changing their mind from the paint on a sign?,
Is there anyone who really recalls
ever breaking rank at all
for something someone yelled real loud one time?
Oh, everyone believes
in how they think it oughta be
Oh, everyone believes
and they're not going easily
Belief is a beautiful armor
but makes for the heaviest sword
like punching underwater
you never can hit who you're trying for
Some lead the exhibition
and some have to know they tried
it's the chemical weapon
for the war that's raging on inside
Oh, everyone believes
from emptiness to everything
Oh, everyone believes
and no one's going quietly
We're never gonna win the world
We're never gonna stop the war
We're never gonna beat this
If belief is what we're fighting for
What puts a hundred thousand children in the sand?
Belief can, belief can
What puts a folded flag inside his mother's hand?
Belief can, belief can
Are we thinking about how to engage people that are in this mindset? Are we ready to stop “pushing” the gospel and start learning about the people we're reaching out to? It's the first step to communicating clearly and getting over the barriers that exist with the brand of “The Church” today.
We're pleased to announce our partnership with Promise Keepers Canada in which we'll be working together towards the design and development of their new website!
Promise Keepers Canada's mission is to: "ignite and equip men to become fully devoted followers of Jesus Christ - resulting in familes, churches, workplaces, communities and nations impacted by the grace of God through the lives of men."
Thousands have been touched through Promise Keepers resources, seminars and special conferences. The goal of the new website is to help Promise Keepers reach even more men across the nation.
Last week Thursday we participated in Blog Action Day - a day where bloggers across the world set down their day-to-day topics and focused in on the issue of Climate Change.
In contributing to this event, we joined with bloggers from 155 countries across six continents in reaching an estimated audience of 17.9 million people.
In the words of Robin Beck, Lead Organizer of Blog Action Day:
[We] change[d] the conversation and showed the power of the web to connect people across the world who despite their varied backgrounds have one shared desire: to make a difference. According to blogpulse, we increased the number of posts about climate change on a given day by 500%, and CNN wrote a great article covering the excitement and diversity of today's event across the web and around the world.
Blog Action Day is a wonderful example of the power of social media and a great way to get involved in issues we all grapple with in today's world. If you weren't involved this year, think about joining in on Oct 15, 2010 and be a part of this web-wide and world-wide voice!
We are pleased to announce the official launch of AMP, AdvancedMinistry’s new media player!
AMP presents your users with an intuitive visual interface and provides a central resource for all of your media files.
Additionally, with the launch of AMP, we have opened up Podcasting to all Orange, Red, Blue and Purple Suite users. Using AMP, you can take any one of your media categories and make it “Podcast-enabled”. So in theory, you could have a separate Podcast for every ministry in your church!
For complete instructions on how to use AMP in relation to your media files, click here. At this point, the visual player is only available to users using AM 3.0 templates, however, the new Podcasting features are accessible on all templates.
As time marches on, we are always looking for ways to assist our customers in any way possible. Today we’re pleased to announce some assistance in the form of cost-savings.
For those of you who use our Purple Suite (the highest package we offer), we are pleased to announce that we have dropped the monthly price from $149.50 to $99.50! We’re able to do this because we recently renegotiated our hosting agreement, meaning that we’re not getting charged as much for bandwidth.
So instead of putting the money in our wallets, we’d rather see you benefit from it. The new price will take effect on your next billing renewal. Enjoy!
This year’s Blog Action Day is dedicated to the topic of climate change. This topic has generated numerous debates, and also some conflicts, even among Christians. Scientists on one side say one thing, while scientists on the other side dispute in return.
So since we’re not scientists, which side do we choose? Let’s look at one variable alone: Trees.
What we can agree on is that trees provide oxygen through the process of photosynthesis.
The middle section of this link (scroll down on the page - you can ignore the rest of it if you want) outlines the rate of which we both lose and replant our forests. A positive difference represents an increase in CO2 absorption. A negative difference represents desertification (aka: Garden of Eden’s climate vs. present day Iraq).
Part of my motivation in looking at trees/forests alone is in the knowledge that the church which I attend is not judicious in its recycling and actually contributes to deforestation by wasting paper on bulletin inserts. Or to put it differently, how it could save the beauty of what we’ve been given. I wonder the impression that leaves with a non-believer.
What does your church or ministry do in the efforts of being stewards of creation?
Would a believer showing care for the environment impact a non-believer?
Could the principles in the stewardship of our finances carry over into our respect of what God has given us through our natural surroundings?
Blog Action Day is an annual event held every October 15 that unites the world’s bloggers in posting about the same issue on the same day with the aim of sparking discussion around an issue of global importance. Blog Action Day 2009 will be one of the largest-ever social change events on the web. As of the time that this post was submitted, there were 8,849 blogs publishing content on the subject of climate change to an audience of over twelve-and-a-half million readers. There is still time for you to sign up and take part in Blog Action Day - go to www.blogactionday.com to sign up and then write a post on this year's topic of Climate Change.
This video has me thinking about something that I've already been doing some thinking about in the past. People quote the famous line of Marshall McLuhan, "the medium is the message", with ease these days. But is McLuhan correct? If not, then I have to think that the conclusions that Shane Hipps arrives at aren't accurate.
There are bigger truths at play here as well, but I'd love to hear what any of you think.
As I sit here about to write a post that highlights the achievement of our in-house long-distance runner, I also realized that I have dropped the ball big time in not mentioning another big announcement that happened to one of our team members a few months back. So, today is a day of announcements.
First off, to get us all caught up, back on Aug 2 at around 1 PM, Derek Gyssels and his wife Steph were blessed to bring a 5-pound, 11-ounce healthy baby boy into the world. They named him Lawson. Mother and son did just fine and they have both been at home, not getting much sleep for a number of weeks now :) Congratulations Derek & Steph!
Secondly, congratulations to our Creative Director, Hugh Pindur, who once again tackled the Chicago Marathon as he did last year. However, this year, he did so in a significantly more rapid pace with a time of 3 hours, 19 minutes and 34 seconds. Congrats Hugh on the great run!
It's Thanksgiving weekend here in Canada so just a heads up that we're not going to be in the office today. To all of our Canadian friends, we hope you have a really excellent weekend and find many things to be thankful for!
One of the things that we’ve been hearing a lot from our users lately is, “Is there a way that I can limit the amount of spam that I get to my inbox?” The answer is of course, yes, however today we have implemented a new policy that should make the lives of our users a lot easier.
First, let me quickly review the old model: When a spam message is received, its Subject Line is prefixed with “[SPAM]”. If you wanted to filter out your spam, you would do one of two things:
Create a rule in your webmail that takes any messages with “[SPAM]” in the prefix and deletes them, or
Create a rule in your mail client (i.e. Outlook) that takes any items with “[SPAM]” in the prefix and moves them into your Trash Can.
The advantage of this model is that you can filter through your Trash Can in the case that you feel you missed a message because of a false-positive spam catch (which is about 0.01% of the time). The obvious disadvantages to this model are:
Unless you choose to delete your spam at the server level, there is the possibility of a) having to download a ridiculous amount of messages, and b) viruses hitting your computer because spam is not “totally blocked”.
In the case that you haven’t setup any rules on the server or in your mail client, you have to filter through all of your spam mail, just to find your regular email.
If you forward mail to another account (i.e. gmail.com, bell.ca, hotmail.com, etc.), the spam gets forwarded as well, which frankly ticks them off (the ISP that you’re forwarding it to).
Recently, because of this practice we were blacklisted from a few servers and are now left trying to convince them that we are not a spam house! :)
So let me introduce you to the new model: From now on when we receive a message with an extremely high probability of spam, we will delete it. It will never make it to your inbox! Any mail that our system classifies as Bulk Mail will be prefixed with “[BULK]” and relayed to you. Additionally, any mail that “could” be spam (but probably isn’t) will still be forwarded to you as usual.
If all of our protocols approve the message, we let the mail through.
In the case that you do not receive an email from a person that you were expecting it from, here are the steps to take:
Have them contact the company (ISP) that they send email through to verify that they are not on any blacklists, particularly SpamCop and SpamHaus. If you’re not convinced, you can check out their SMTP server for yourself at the SpamCop/SpamHaus websites.
As a last resort, submit a ticket to our Support Desk and we will check our network logs to find out where/why the message was blocked.
If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us. We believe that this is the right solution going forward and is in the best interest of all our users.
We are pleased to announce two new AdvancedMinistry 3.0 web templates. The first one entitled, “All Things New” (view preview) has been designed with women’s ministry in mind. The second template entitled "Youth Movement" (view preview) is pretty self-explanatory. :)
As usual, all AdvancedMinistry 3.0 templates are built so that you can easily customize your colors, layout, fonts, etc. to suit your ministry.
It's one thing to communicate something powerful, but it's another altogether to communicate it powerfully.
I love this video because it's such an excellent example of what good communications look like. They don't have to be flashy...they can just be a guy, standing in a room.
And to be honest, I don't really agree with all elements of the poem, but that actually makes this an even better example of quality communications. The manner in which he communicates the message is so powerful that even though I don't agree with some of the message, I am riveted throughout and left thinking about it after.
That is successful communication.
You ministries and non-profits already have a powerful message. So do it justice and go communicate it powerfully!
This is an awesome article about measuring the value of your social media endeavors.
If you don't know her and don't really understand the value of social media, K.D. Paine is a great person to follow on her blog. She provides amazing insights into the measurement of social media campaigns.
"Much more important than working hard is knowing how to find the right thing to work on. Paying attention to what is going on in the world. Seeing patterns. Seeing things as they are rather than how you want them to be."
We are pleased to announce that AM 3.0 templates are finally here! Now, on top of creating and customizing your own AM template, you can now choose one of our predesigned AM 3.0 templates and tailor it to suit your needs.
Two new templates were launched today – Our Great God (which integrates a number of Xpiritmental backgrounds through Flash) (view preview) and Jesus is the Reason (view preview). Stay tuned for more template options, which will be plentiful in the coming days, weeks and months!
(To change your template, login to your AdvancedMinistry account and select “Choose My Template”.)
I wanted to take the opportunity to announce a few AdvancedMinistry updates that took place this week, particularly to the AM 3.0 Custom Template Manager:
You can now specify a different height for secondary page banners.
You can now choose a different background image for secondary pages.
The ability to preview ANY one of your beta templates (not just your active one) has now been added.
When saving options in the 3.0 Custom Template Manager, the page no longer needs to reload. All data is seamlessly stored to the server in about 1/10 of the time that it used to take.
Xpiritmental is a resource. It's a place to learn and to share thoughts on marketing, ministry, design, service, the Web, culture and more. We'll start the conversation, but we're looking forward to hearing what you've got to say.
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I just read an excellent article by a gentleman who has been in the marketing world for 20 years now. The article was a list of 10 things he wishes he knew before he started in marketing. Following is a quote from that article:.JPG)
We're pleased to announce our partnership with Promise Keepers Canada in which we'll be working together towards the design and development of their new website!
Last week Thursday we participated in 
As I sit here about to write a post that highlights the achievement of our in-house long-distance runner, I also realized that I have dropped the ball big time in not mentioning another big announcement that happened to one of our team members a few months back. So, today is a day of announcements.
It's Thanksgiving weekend here in Canada so just a heads up that we're not going to be in the office today. To all of our Canadian friends, we hope you have a really excellent weekend and find many things to be thankful for!
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