Where we’re at

Wow! The year went fast. I cannot belive 2009 is gone already and we are almost a month in to 2010!

The past few months have been super busy for us at NCBC. We are in the middle of many projects and are making great headway. As I look a head to 2010 I see the following projects that are a priority for our ministries.

1. Finish our new church website powered by the Arena ChMS system and designed by Voracity Solutions. We are excited to be able to offer our church online giving, event registrations, and an over all richer website experience. I cannot wait to be able to share more about our process with Voracity, and how it is working after we launch! If you an Arena customer and have not yet made a external website based on their system – you are missing out!

2. Work on our finalizing many different processes at NCBC. We have been working hard at documenting how we do things that make NCBC unique such as our First Time Guest Process & Following up, our Communications Work Flow for promoting and request events, as well as how we handle new Attenders in our database and members.

3. Work on our budget. We are about ready to start having meetings to discuss our budget proposals. This is one aspect of my job that really gets me going! I love planning and budgeting. This processes allows me to see what our different ministries are dreaming for the upcoming year and gives me the knowledge neccessary to think about how we can support them with IT & Communications initiatives.

4. Metrics – or better known as data mining. Drawing conclusions and tracking information in our database and giving our leadership monthly reports on some specific statistics such as the number of people serving, average contribution, number of contributors, etc – and working to automate this in the Arena system.

5. New Facility Planning- Back in October ( I think) our church voted to start construction of our new facility about 10 minutes a way from our current one. This is not just an addition of a building – we will be completely re-locating and selling our current facility. We have started to plan and research phone systems, infrastructure, and many other things as well as assembling bids from companies.

Overall I am excited about the challenges that lie a head for the next year and cannot wait to see what God will accomplish.

We have been able to send SMS / Text messages in Arena for a while now- but we thought it was missing one critical component. The ability to receive replies to SMS messages was a critical component for our team. We could not stand the thought of some one replying back to one of our messages and not receiving it.

We worked with Voracity Solutions to have them develop a Two-Way SMS provider that would integrate into our Arena system- and they did a great job!

The user interface is well designed and takes advantage of components already integrated into Arena. The agent also sends email notifications when a new SMS is received.

If your church might be interested in this module contact Voracity Solutions for more information.

We have been working at NCBC to clearly identify our Next Steps graphically – and to present the information within our Arena ChMS system. The inspiration for this came from the work Jon Edmiston and his team at CCV.

We worked with Voracity Solutions to create the integration into the Arena System.

Similar to the system at CCV each step is represented with a standard icon that is used throughout our processes at NCBC. If some one has completed the step, its in color, otherwise it is grayed out.

The next steps project has allowed our staff to have an immediate visualization of where some one is currently at in our ministry process here at NCBC.

Brief Explanation of our Next Steps:

Compass: Our Starting Point Class (http://newcovenantbible.org/stratingpoint)

Water: Baptism (http://newcovenantbible.org/baptism)

Toolbox: Serving (http://newcovenantbible.org/serve)

Group of people: Adult Bible Fellowship Classes and Small Groups (http://newcovenantbible.org/smallgroups & http://newcovenantbible.org/abf)

Puzzle Piece: Membership

Here at New Covenant we had the privilege of beta testing Voracity Solutions new Mobile Membership software for the ArenaChMS product.

Mobile Membership is an enhancement to the current Arena Mobile Modules and is a great add-on to Arena for any church that would like to take there database with them on there cell phone.

We worked with Voracity to make sure the modules would all work properly on Windows Mobile devices, as well as iPhone and Palm devices.

Voracity has made the system very easy to update – by using their Control Panel to perform the initial install, as well as all future updates. The Control Panel detects what version of Arena you are using and makes sure Mobile Membership is updated to work it.

You can learn more about Voracity Solutions as well as there Mobile Membership product by visiting there website- www.voracitysolutions.com

One of the tools I rely on often is Xmarks. Xmarks allows me to sync my favorites between Internet Explorer and Firefox as well as my Firefox passwords between computers.

It is great to be able to have a page open in the office at work when I leave the office for the day, and when I return home open the browser on my home computer and have it open in the same spot.

I never have to worry about not having a saved password to favorite as well.

If you currently do not have a tool to sync favorites between browsers and computers as well as passwords you might give Xmarks a shot.

Some people have asked for the code used to generate Birthdays, Anniversaries, and Employment Anniversaries in the Report Grid for Query Arena module on our intranet. Below is the SQL code for each module we have added to the page.

Staff Birthday’s

select DAY(birth_date) as 'Birth Date','<a href="default.aspx?page=7&person='+CONVERT(VARCHAR(20),cp.person_id)+'">'+cp.nick_name+' '+cp.last_name+'</a>' AS 'Staff Member'

from core_person as CP

where MONTH(birth_date) = MONTH (GETDATE()) and staff_member = 1

order by DAY(birth_date), last_name asc

Staff Anniversaries

select DAY(anniversary_date) as 'Anniversary Date','<a href="default.aspx?page=7&person='+CONVERT(VARCHAR(20),cp.person_id)+'">'+cp.nick_name+' '+cp.last_name+'</a>' AS 'Staff Member'

from core_person as CP

where MONTH(anniversary_date) = MONTH (GETDATE()) and staff_member = 1

order by DAY(anniversary_date), last_name asc

Staff Employment Anniversaries

(this code works in Shelby V5 and assumes you are using V5 payroll for Employment Information)

Use ShelbyDB

SELECT 

DateDiff(yy, HireDate, GetDate()) as "Years On Staff",

NA.Salutation + ' ' + NA.LastName AS Name

, HD.Descr AS Department

FROM Shelby.NaNames NA

 INNER JOIN Shelby.PREmp PR ON NA.NameCounter = PR.NameCounter

 LEFT OUTER JOIN Shelby.PRHomeDept HD ON HD.Counter = PR.HomeDeptCounter

 LEFT OUTER JOIN Shelby.NAAddresses Adr ON Adr.AddressCounter = NA.MainAddress

 LEFT OUTER JOIN Shelby.NAPhones PH ON PH.NameCounter = NA.NameCounter AND PH.PhoneCounter = 1

 LEFT OUTER JOIN Shelby.NAPhones MO ON MO.NameCounter = NA.NameCounter AND MO.PhoneCounter = 5

WHERE CoNu = 1

 AND Status = 'A'

 AND Month(HireDate) = CASE WHEN Month(GetDate()) = 12 THEN 1 ELSE Month(GetDate())  END

ORDER BY "Years On Staff" Desc, Name

You just need to make sure you add the Report Grid for Query Module to your page, then copy and paste the SQL code into the module.

Using the Arena “Dockable Modules” module we have been developing our intranet. One of our desires was to be able to push data Staff Anniversaries, Birthdays as well as Employment Anniversaries for the current month to our staff home page.

We were able to do the Birthdays and Anniversaries fairly simply by using the Report Grid from Query module-

The Employment Anniversaries were a bit tricky as we do not track HR information in Arena – it is stored with in Shelby’s Payroll module. Thankfully the Arena Report Grid module allows you to connect to another database to pull information- so we wrote a stored procedure to grab the information from Shelby.

Now our staff can go to our Arena Home Page, and add the additional modules they wish to access.

We plan to add some additional report grids in the future for upcoming events, etc – but this is working well for us so far.

Last week I saw some action on Twitter about ClearContext… our team has been using ClearContext for over a year now and it many ways it has transformed the way we manage our inbox box.

Many of our staff do a much better job keeping their inboxes at or around 0 and staying in control of their incoming items.

All of us manage our inbox a bit differently – and even have adopted ClearContext to work the way we want it to.

The software has many customizable settings to automate certain actions – and it even allows you to click on a folder in Outlook and it shows you all of the attachments for the folder.

If you are use Getting Things Done and have implemented a “tickler” file within Outlook – ClearContext automates this with an option to defer a message to a later date. The message them automatically pops up in to your inbox at the date you choose.

The new version has some project management features built in to it as well.

They also have a beta program you can participate in as well as a  community forum to post ideas. They are very actively making changes to the product and listen to the ideas on their forum.

If you have not yet given ClearContext a try – I would encourage it. (and they have special pricing for non-profits)

Just when I though I would never have to see / use a floppy disc again, we had to install a piece of older software that originally come on floppy discs purchased about ten years ago.

We were able to get a CD to replace the 8 floppy discs, but the license information was still stored on one of the floppy discs. The installer from the CD asked at the end of the installation to insert the disc into drive “A:” and hit okay. The only problem is the computer did not have a floppy disc drive.

My first thought was “this will be easy” – we will just make make an ISO file with the software on it and mount it as an image.

It ended up being a bit harder than that- as you cannot mount to drive letter A since it is reserved.

I then had to go into the registry to HKLM\System\Mounted Devices and look for “\DOSDevices\A:” and rename the “A:” to a different drive letter to free up a letter “A:” to me mounted.

I then realized that a floppy cannot be an ISO – and I would need to find some sort of floppy emulator as well as piece of software to turn the floppy into a floppy image file.

We ended up finding WinImage to create the floppy image – and used Virtual Floppy Drive to mount the image. We were then able to run through the install CD from start to finish with out actually having a physical floppy drive with the license information on it.

Earlier this week I was listening to a podcast from Andy Stanley’s leadership series. This specific episode stated:

“If we got kicked out by our board, and they hired a new guy, what would the new guy change or do different? Let’s walk out the door and walk back in, and make those changes.”

It was a good reminder than we always need to be doing the best we can to accomplish the mission and vision of our church- and need to realize what is not working.

Andy Stanley also mentioned to acknowledge what’s not working, and own up to it.

It got me thinking about what changes we need to make in IT that will allow us to go further, and progress faster than we currently are. Specifically at some of our systems we have in place, and our processes within our membership system that need some improvement.