In his book, 'Where I Lived, and What I Lived For', Henry David Thoreau wrote that "Our life is frittered away by detail... Simplify, simplify, simplify! ... Simplicity of life and elevation of purpose."

The truth and power of simplification as an approach to any project is amazing. Often, we catch ourselves working on a new print design or web feature without considering if simplification is possible. As such, we are always working on drilling it into our minds that that consideration needs to be made in all the projects we manage.

This battle can rear its head in the development of a brochure, a website or even a logo. Check out Jon Acuff's take on this here and the resulting holiest logo ever here. And while we still laugh at those posts around here, the humor in those posts is based on the reality of this kind of thing happening all the time - especially in ministry circles.

The key to remember is that simplification of your message doesn't dumb it down, it makes it clearer.

Over the past few months, we’ve been working fervently on new features, components and templates for AdvancedMinistry. Recently, we launched a new photo-uploading tool (developed by the same company that worked on Facebook’s uploading tool), and today we’re happy to announce a long-awaited feature – an interactive Flash calendar.

For years, AdvancedMinistry users have used a “list view” to display their ministry events, but as of today, you now have the option to display an interactive Flash-based calendar instead. This new component will assist ministries in presenting their events in a more user-friendly format.

Enjoy!

To change your event view, login to your AdvancedMinistry account and click on “Edit My Events”. From there, you will see the option to change your view format.

To obtain the latest version of Adobe’s Flash Player, visit http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/

Yesterday, our AdvancedMinistry support team received the following email:

I was just looking at the [client name] website in [city name]... Is there a way to tactfully fix their blaring typos, misspellings and grammatical errors? It completely hinders their credibility as intelligent life. If you carefully read it, you'll see it's BAAAAD.

I’ve left the ministry name out of this for the obvious reason of not wanting to publicly call out any one organization. However, in spite of what can be taken as a somewhat sarcastic comment about the "credibility as intelligent life" of the ministry in question, the author of this email makes a good point.

Seeing employees and volunteers of ministries and non-profits, let alone leaders and executives of those organizations, writing copy at a grade 4 or lower level definitely does make you look like you aren’t all that intelligent. As a result, what you are trying to say doesn’t come across with any kind of authority. Sadly, it feels like this is becoming a bigger and bigger issue and I don’t doubt that a lot of this comes down to laziness in not running a spelling/grammar check in your word processor and then spending the time after to re-read your copy before sending or posting it - word processors are fallible!

My post yesterday, talked about giving our best in the design of our communications, but it doesn’t really stop there does it? Taking the time to ensure that you are doing the best job you possibly can on what you are writing will go a long way to clearer communication. Undoubtedly, the kinds of messages that you (our not-for-profit and ministry clients), bring to your audiences warrant that kind of attention.

About a month ago, I took up running. So, four times a week I bust out the running shoes and hit the pavement.

This past Saturday was a running day for me and shortly after leaving the house I got caught in a thunderstorm. As I ran alongside an open field (being the tallest thing in and around said field), I found myself running a bit faster than normal – in fact I shaved two minutes off my time that day :)

But as I was running, hearing all the thunder and watching all the lightening around me, I was struck by the beauty of it all and it made me think about how much of an artist our God is. I guess it makes sense then that we humans would have a capability and appreciation for art as well – whether it be in our music, painting, acting or any other artistic discipline. It makes sense because we are told that we are created in His image (Genesis 1:27).

But as I ran through the rain and admired the power, majesty and beauty of the storm, I was also reinforced in my belief that it should be our goal as Christians to create our expressions of beauty to the best of our ability. We will never create something as amazing as a thunderstorm with its awesome power and beautiful arcs of lightning splitting the sky, but we will create things that to the best of our ability will tell others of the beauty of God.

This art is even reflected in our day-to-day work: on our organizational brochures, our church bulletin shells, our websites, etc…

It’s not to say that every one of those pieces will rival the Sistine Chapel in its beauty. But our communications should reflect the very best that we can give our God and as a result, reflect our desire to honor Him in all that we do.

Perhaps unbeknownst to many people who have gotten into the social media game in the past year or so, there has been a lot of debate as to how to communicate the value of social media to individuals entrenched in old-school business and management thinking. And while this remains a real challenge for social media advocates as we try to communicate its value to our audience(s), much has been done to answer many of those questions from a metrics and brand perspective. On that point, you can check out a blog like that of K.D. Paine.

But there’s much to be learned as we continue forward with the frantic pace of information assaulting the web and our minds on a minute-by-minute basis. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big advocate of the concept of social media and as I’ve indicated in past posts, I firmly believe it is right in line with the calling of ministry-based organizations and a tool with vast potential for both ministries and non-profits.

But I remain a cautious advocate. I frequently wrestle with the question of what the ramifications are of what’s going on right now in our society. Just a bit earlier this afternoon, as I was writing this post, I saw this article on CNN. Just read the first few paragraphs and you’ll get a sense of just how deep an impact social media sites can have on a person.

Interestingly, what I’m seeing recently, which I think is a direct result of the challenges we’re seeing with social media is a trend towards a new phenomenon called a “blogatical”.

Back on February 26 of this year, Carlos Whittaker, the author of the very popular Christian blog, Ragamuffin Soul, took a “blogatical” – a term that of course means to take a break from blogging. Since then, I’ve come across a number of other individuals who have taken a blogatical and one person I know just took a break from technology in general.

But in his final post before his break, Carlos said something that has stuck with me ever since:

“This whole Internet thingy we have here is new. We don’t know the damage these narcissistically beautiful tendencies will have on us.”

Admittedly, I’m still chewing on this issue and a big part of me thinks that this is all happening so fast that prognosticating what all the ramifications are just isn’t possible. But the idea that this is, or has the potential to be fed by narcissism is definitely an intriguing concept.

So I encourage you to join me in embracing all the potential and success of social media, but to do so with our eyes wide open to the yet unknown damage it also has the potential to inflict on us. I’d love to hear more thoughts on this idea to see if, and what, others are thinking about on this topic.

AdvancedMinistry would like to take this opportunity to wish you a Happy Earth Day. Take the time to marvel at God’s creation and give glory and honor to the Creator of all things, for He alone is worthy to be praised.

In conjunction with Earth Day, we have created a new web template entitled “God’s Marvelous Creation”.

(Note to AdvancedMinistry Users: You can change the look of your website at any time. To do so, log into your account and click on “Choose My Template”.)

To my mind, it's tough to separate the terms and disciplines of Marketing, Advertising and P.R. In a well-run business or organizational environment, all three should be woven into the fabric of your business plan. And so, similarly, while they share commonalities in thier importance to successfully running a business or organization, they also tend to share criticisms. One such criticism that I've written about on this blog before is the perception that many people have about how marketing, advertising and P.R. are evil activities and as such, have no place in a ministry context.

Enter this quote that I read last week from Richard Edelman, President and CEO of International PR firm, Edelman:

"P.R. is lumped somehow with hype and spin, with political PR, the Clinton spin room and wag-the-dog and stuff like that. [...] Most smart P.R. people realize that to be prevaricators or spinners is ultimately self-defeating. The truth well told - that's the way to do it and that's where we help companies. We're like coaches, not buffers, buriers and obfuscators, and I think that's an important distinction."

Often we see ministries and non-profits trying to sell themselves as something they are not rather than embracing and touting what they are. Understanding what it is that Richard is saying here about communicating truth will go a long way to help you and your organization as you engage your members and donors.

For those of you that are familiar with terms like “Java” or “MySQL”, you will be interested to know (if you don’t already) that Oracle officially purchased Sun Microsystems for about $9.50 per share today. Sun Microsystems are notoriously known in the Internet world as the makers of Java and MySQL (an open-source database platform that is typically used in conjunction with other open-source languages like PHP).

Now why this deal should particularly catch your attention if you are a ministry is because many ministries throughout the world use PHP and MySQL to drive their websites. They are both free alternatives to other popular database platforms and application servers. Oracle has been trying to by MySQL from Sun since 2007 when they reportedly offered as much as $850 million for it.

What makes this deal particularly interesting (and scary if you are a ministry that uses MySQL) is that many analysts speculate that one of two scenarios is possible.

Scenario 1: Matt Asay from CNET notes “This time, Oracle effectively got MySQL for free, as the valuation for Sun almost certainly wasn't raised much by its MySQL asset, acquired in 2008 by Sun for $1 billion. What Oracle will not want, however, is for its customers to get MySQL for free. Importantly, Oracle's new ‘systems’ approach gives it the ability to digest a host of open-source projects like MySQL that might otherwise struggle to make money, and monetize them heavily by burying them in hardware ‘systems.’ It's a smart move driven by a company that knows that open source as a religion faded, and that open source as a key driver of innovative IT is just beginning.” Many analysts join Matt in his thought patterns – that the “free” MySQL we’ve come to know will soon become thing of the past. It will now cost you.

Scenario 2: If Scenario 1 scares you then Scenario 2 is going to mortify you. There are a growing number of analysts that believe that MySQL will soon become MyToast. In other words, Oracle will kill MySQL for fear that it will mess with Oracles profit margins. And although you may not like that scenario, the fact of the matter remains, MySQL could get squashed in an ever-changing economy.

If you are a ministry that uses MySQL as its database in any of your website(s), applications, registration systems, event systems, church directories, etc., you will want to keep a very close eye on what Oracle does in the near future.

If you are an AdvancedMinistry or Electricurrent customer, please note that we do not use MySQL in any of our websites or applications.

Stay tuned. It will be interesting to see what Oracle does in the next six months.

On the day that Oprah made the huge announcement on her show that she is now Twittering, it just felt right to feature this video as our Casual Friday offering.

Most often, the posts on this blog speak to you, our readers, as brand builders – people who are involved in marketing for your organization in one way or another. That’s not likely to change either because one of the primary goals of this blog is to resource and facilitate our readers/clients in fulfilling your ministry and non-profit work.

But today, I’m going to take a bit of a different angle on this and speak to you all as brand holders as well (a.k.a. consumers, markets, audiences, clients, etc… of hundreds of thousands of brands). I do this because it’s always a good exercise for us to step back and think about how we, as consumers, respond to the brands that we interact with and then take those revelations and apply them to our work.

Last year, I tried to call my bank to discuss a question I had about my mortgage. The bank in question shall remain nameless, but needless to say, it was one of the major Canadian banks that had been reporting record profits in consecutive quarters.

In the process of trying to get to a person at the bank to discuss my question, I was hung up on 4 times. When I finally got a person, I explained my whole issue (which was admittedly a bit convoluted) and was routed to someone else who would have the information that I needed – except that they didn’t. So, I was routed to my local branch where I was, yet again, hung up on before getting a chance to talk to a person. I ended up having to physically go into the bank to get my question answered.

I’m not typically a big complainer with this kind of thing. In fact, I imagine that I could use to be a bit more assertive in these types of situations. But, this situation was so bad that my back got up and I got frustrated with the big, faceless corporation that was happy to take my money while simultaneously electing not to put any effort into serving me. So I took it upon myself to write the bank and complain about the fact that a company that is making money hand-over-fist wasn’t taking the time to make sure that it serviced the people whose backs their profits were being made off of. I never received a response.

Then this week, when I needed to address another issue relating to my mortgage, I ended up once again in a branch office to meet with a bank employee to discuss my question. Having chatted over my questions, the woman that was helping me indicated that my situation was a fairly unique one and as such she would need to call their credit center to get some clarification. Having picked up the phone and dialed into their credit center, she was promptly hung up on…twice.

As I sat there, I was reminded of the situation outlined above and it struck me at how easily I forget that the big, faceless corporation that caused me great frustration the year previous was filled with individual people that are just living their lives, trying to get their jobs done and getting hung up on in the same way that I am.

To be clear, this truth doesn’t excuse the bank from constantly striving to service its clients better (or at all). But it does bring some perspective to how we respond to these issues when we have them happen to us. As brand holders, are we forgiving and understanding enough? Do our responses to the companies and organizations that offend us, help them fix the problem or cause them to get their backs up?

And as brand-builders, let’s be ready to receive the feedback that our clients, donors and constituents submit. If they are angry, let’s keep in mind our own tendency to do the same thing and if they are helpful, then thank them for their submission and honor it by doing everything you can to implement a solution.

He sent from on high, he took me;
he drew me out of many waters.

He rescued me from my strong enemy
and from those who hated me,
for they were too mighty for me.

They confronted me in the day of my calamity,
but the LORD was my support.

He brought me out into a broad place;
he rescued me, because he delighted in me.

(Psalm 18:16-19, ESV)

Check out “Deep Waters”, our latest AdvancedMinistry web template.

(Note to AdvancedMinistry Users: You can change the look of your website at any time. To do so, log into your account and click on “Choose My Template”.)

Well, we’re back after 4-days off and what was an excellent time of reflection on Jesus’ sacrifice and saving work. We hope it was as much of a blessing for you as it was for us.

As we gear back up to continue on with our ongoing projects and support work, we have a happy announcement to make.

A few weeks ago, we were honored to have been chosen by The Meeting House as their partner in the design and development of their new church website.

For those of you that aren’t familiar, The Meeting House is a multi-site church (8 to be specific) based in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). It has the distinction of being one of the largest churches in Canada and is pastored by Bruxy Cavey, author of the book, The End of Religion.

We are very excited to have this opportunity to work with The Meeting House as it holds a special place in the hearts of many of our current and past employees here.

For a few of us The Meeting House represents what was our church for a season. Others of us have visited the Oakville location; myself included (I always try to attend there when I’m in the GTA visiting friends). The Meeting House has also been a great resource for many of us on a personal basis as a number of us subscribe to their sermon podcast. Additionally, Brian and I have run a small group using The End of Religion and the related podcast as our study material.

So, needless to say, we have many personal reasons to be excited about being involved in this project. But our excitement goes beyond our personal feelings as well. Professionally, we are so pleased to work with another organization that clearly understands how the web can, and therefore should, be a powerful element of their communications strategy for both their members and people outside of their church in Canada and across the world who benefit from the teachings and resources they provide.

In the Spring Update that goes out to the membership, Joel Percy, Communications Pastor at The Meeting House writes:

“One of the reasons we are most excited about developing a stronger website is the potential it gives us to create community all over the world. Through downloadable sermons and online Home Church resources, literally anyone on the planet with internet access can get plugged in to our basic model of listening to shared teaching, then exploring and applying it in a Home Church context.”

He goes on to say that their “plan for the new site is to provide more resources for groups around the world, and also to make it easier for people who are listening via the internet to connect with each other.”

This speaks to the heart of the Great Commission and clearly conveys that Joel and the team there understand just how powerful a tool their website can be in fulfilling that calling.

So thanks to The Meeting House for this opportunity!

We’ll be sure to let you all know when the new site goes live!

Today is Maundy Thursday - the day in which the Christian church commemorates four events that occurred on the day and night before Jesus was crucified:

1. The washing of the Disciples' Feet by Jesus Christ
2. The Last Supper and as such the institution of the Communion sacrament
3. The agony of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane
4. The betrayal of Christ by Judas Iscariot

And it is the custom of many Christian churches to gather tonight to observe these events. Many other churches will gather tomorrow in observance of Good Friday – the day Jesus was crucified. In either case, today and tomorrow we commemorate the two darkest days in the Christian calendar.

But we have the happy circumstance of being able to observe these dark events in anticipation of the joy celebrated on Easter Sunday and Monday as we then take an opportunity to remember Jesus’ victory over death when he was resurrected to life.

And so, beyond the fact that Good Friday is a statutory holiday, tomorrow and Easter Monday are days that we close our offices to focus not only on Jesus’ death and resurrection, but in so doing, to also be reminded of the reason that we do the work that we do. It is our deepest and most sincere desire to use our gifts for His glory in our families, with our friends and in the work that we do on a daily basis. It really is the least we can offer in thanks for what God did in sending His Son to die on a cross to save us from our sins.

Our prayer for you this Easter is that if you are a believer, that you would be blessed in your own personal commemoration of the greatest sacrifice of all time. And if a relationship with Jesus Christ isn’t yet something that you claim to have, I want to encourage you to consider this video. I hope it’s of use to you.

Have a Blessed Easter!

In these times of economic uncertainty, AdvancedMinistry would like to help make sure that your book and music budget don’t feel the brunt of cutbacks. So for the next 15 days, we will give your organization a $5 gift card for every church or ministry that signs up to AdvancedMinistry because of you… even if they sign up to use the Free Suite!

Now that doesn’t mean that you can go nuts and sign up your youth group, your pet “Spot” and your high school music band (and expect $5 per referral), but it does mean that for every legitimate signup that you send our way, we’ll compensate you with gift cards for music and books.

For all of the rules and details of this promotion, click here. Please note that you have to have an AdvancedMinistry account to participate. If you don’t already have an AdvancedMinistry website, click here.

Well let me just start of by saying that Weeks 3 and 4 of my new Apple MacBook Pro were a lot better than Weeks 1 and 2. Since coming back from holidays, my confidence level in the new computer has drastically increased. I’m learning to navigate the system a lot better and am only taking 1 Tylenol every 8 hours instead of 2-3. There’s still a long way to go in this learning curve, but I’m up for the challenge. The following is an account of my experiences from March 21 through April 4. I have broken them down this week in categories so that you quickly reference information that may pertain to you.

Font Conversion

One of the scariest things about moving from Windows to Mac (or vice-versa) is fonts. Back in the day when much of our company was on Mac, we used a program called CrossFont to convert all of our fonts. I downloaded the latest version and it is GOLD. By installing CrossFont on Windows (through Parallels), I was able to convert all of my Windows fonts to Mac. Seeing that OS X does a really good job supporting Open Typefaces and TrueType Fonts, the conversion was a breeze.

Spaces Continued…

In my last diary entry I told you how excited I was about Spaces. I am still excited about it, but there are some quirks when it comes to opening different programs and windows. I have found that Spaces is not always consistent when it comes to where things are supposed to go and how to handle certain programs. One of my biggest pet-peeves is that I like to have a separate space for all of my Instant Messengers (Skype, MSN, Jabber), which in itself is fine. However, if I am working in a different space and someone IM’s me, many times the IM window pops up in the space that I am currently working in instead of the one that I assigned for it. Then when I try and go back to my IM program, it thinks that it’s located in the space that I’m in until I tell it otherwise. It’s a minor annoyance, but it is still an annoyance.

Photoshop (and the CS Suite)

So far all of my Adobe Creative Suite Programs have worked the same as they have in Windows. One unbelievable frustration with Photoshop on the new Mac OS was that sometimes I would accidentally rotate my canvas (because Apple has a feature that if you move your fingers a certain way on the touchpad, it will rotate an image). Turns out that many other Adobe users shared the same frustration and Adobe developed a plugin to disable it in Photoshop. Now everything is working great.

Working Simultaneously with Windows (through Parallels)

For those of you that have ever used VirtualPC on a Mac (back in the day) and were irritated by it, let me tell you that Parallels has completely changed the landscape of running Windows and Mac OS simultaneously. Since there are some programs that I use that only work on Windows, it is essential for me that these programs operate seamlessly on my Mac in the Windows environment. So far, so good; everything has been very smooth and I haven’t run into any issues. The programs that I am still running on Windows include: Microsoft Outlook (including Office 2007 so that I can get real-time spell checking), Internet Explorer 7 (for testing out websites and accessing sites that require IE for security reasons), SQL Server Management Studio, and CrossFont.

Using Windows-Based Hard Drives

One of the things that threw me into a little bit of frenzy was trying to access (and edit) my data (through my Mac) on a 500GB external hard drive that I own. The problem was that my external hard drive was formatted through the NTFS (Windows) file system. Apple will allow you to read from the hard drive (through a utility called MacFuse), but it won’t allow you to write back to it. I did some Googling and found an amazing program called Paragon NTFS for Mac that lets you read and write to NTFS-based hard drives. This was a life saver!

Odds and Ends…

Here are a few other programs/hardware that I’ve been able to transition over to the Mac without any problems: SlingPlayer (for accessing my Slingbox at home), Bell MobileConnect (for accessing high-speed internet on the road), Remote Desktop Connection (for accessing Windows-based servers), iTunes (that was a gimme), MindJet Manager and TweetDeck (for watching Twitter).

I’ll conclude Part 2 here. My next update will come a few weeks from now when I’ve got a little more experience under my belt. So far the transition has been fairly smooth. The next time I speak with you, I’m hoping to be completely off of the Tylenol. Stay tuned!

I personally am not a fan of the comic strip Dilbert, but there are definitely people out there who love it.

Undoubtedly they appreciate it because it lampoons so many of the real life work situations that we find ourselves encountering on a day-to-day basis at work and as a result, it resonates with us.

Recently, someone sent me this comic strip which is essentially a Dilbert for graphic designers. It’s a great poke at one of the challenges that we frequently face in our design consulting.

The face of the designer in this cartoon is what really strikes me because it’s a great example of the phases we go through in presenting a design.

Scene 1 - Presentation. The anticipation and hopefulness of a positive response from the client is etched on the presenters face.

Scene 2 - Customer Reaction. Eureka! The client engages the design and likes what they see!

Scene 3 - But... The wind is stolen from the presenter’s sails as the high-quality design that meets the project goals is chopped and hacked apart on the basis of the subjective preferences of not only the client, but also people who have been completely uninvolved with the project to date.

The disappointment and frustration that resonates with us in scene three stem from the fact that we always strive to ensure that there is a reason for every aspect of the designs we come up with. Beautiful design is a wonderful thing to look at, but if it doesn’t function to meet the real world goals of the project, then it’s a failure. And admittedly, we don’t always hit the mark and adjustments have to be made, but we do our best to mitigate against the risk of missing the mark by having processes and documentation around the project that maximize our chances for a “win”.

But for any project to be a win, both parties have to work together to develop and buy into the project goals and then apply them to the design. Pink might be a nice color and a turtle and a fish might communicate more about who you are, but pink might also limit who this logo impacts and four animals instead of two could complicate the messaging.

So, establish what a “win” is at the outset of the project and then work towards that goal. It’s the only way to ensure success.

And now...from the files of "Just because you can, doesn't mean you should":

"'Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.' is a grammatically correct sentence used as an example of how homonyms and homophones can be used to create complicated constructs. It has been discussed in literature since 1972 when the sentence was used by William J. Rapaport, an associate professor at the University at Buffalo."

Check out the full wiki here.
 

There are moments in my life where I just want to sing because something great has just happened – and this is one of those times.

We had the privilege of partnering with an organization that is very near to my heart. YFC (Youth for Christ) is an organization that loves kids. These guys and girls have been called to love them like Christ loves them – and they do.

The London chapter of YFC runs an amazing ministry called Streetlight. It’s a mobile bus ministry focused on the street kids of London. Recently, YFC London decided it was time to replace the old bus with something much more reliable. They partnered with the Rotary Club of London, Stevens Signs, 3M, Triple E RV’s and us (Electricurrent) to make it happen and on March 30, 2009 it was launched with great fanfare.

Congratulations London YFC! We wish you continued success and God’s many blessings as you care for, and touch the lives of the youth in London, Ontario.

Well, it’s a little ambitious, but we figured we’d inspire your desire for summer with a new AdvancedMinistry web template called “Beach Day”. As cold temperatures and snow are haunting many people in the northern states and Canada, hopefully this template will get you thinking ahead to July and August.

Enjoy (and Happy April Fool's Day)! :)

(Note to AdvancedMinistry Users: You can change the look of your website at any time. To do so, log into your account and click on “Choose My Template”.)