We are now using a new system developed by Voracity Solutions that is integrated into our Arena ChMS system.

The Benevolence module in a brief summary allows the following:

At New Covenant there are certain sentences I never like to hear such as:

• “Don’t store that file on the network- it will not be available if the network goes down.”
• “We want to host that file on another service just in case the church website goes down”.

We can invest endless amounts of capital into a system but your staff may still not trust it. Its important that the systems we put in place are trusted to be up.

I think there are three specific things we can do to increase the trust of our systems.

1. Communicate scheduled down time for upgrades.
1. This allows for staff to know that the system will be down, its scheduled well in advance, and they know it will come back up shortly.
2. Communicate openly and honestly about unexpected down time.
1. Make sure the users know what is down (but also what still works) and give them some alternatives if possible for what is down.
3. Backup files regularly
1. If a request comes in to restore a deleted file do it promptly- before the user gives up and attempts to recreate the file. This shows them your backup strategy works.

We try to always follow those three tips above- but its easy to be tempted to not communicate clearly in times of high anxiety and stressful situations- but I think you will find if you communicate and implemented systems your staff trust they will be used more effectively.

New Covenants church website is powered by the Arena ChMS product.

Arena comes with a system for Pod casting and displaying your weekly church messages online

Many Arena churches and potential clients do not realize the full potential and power of the system.

In a nutshell the system is topic / series oriented, allows you to track the views of each message and allows each message to have a speaker attached to it.

Our media team absolutely loves this system. This is the first time they have ever been able to handle the entire process of uploading media them selves. IT & Communications no longer need to be involved in the process.

I would encourage you if you have Arena to look into using this system with your media / production teams.

Here is a link to our site – with the page setup. All of this content is driven by the Arena system.

**New information on 8/8/2010**

The media files for the podcasts can be stored locally as well on on Amazon S3 and other hosting platforms. We are currently using Amazon S3 and Vimeo,

Our requirements were:

1. The camera had to be powered by Solar Energy or Batteries. Preferably a combination of the two. (our construction site currently does not have electricity)

2. The system needed the ability to either (a) upload a photo every minute to an ftp site or (b) automatically generate a time lapse video of the progress.

3. The system should use a cellular network to upload the photos- the construction site does not have internet access yet.

We quickly realized this was not a project we could tackle our selves, so we partnered with Ox Blue – a construction site camera provider. Their system fulfilled all of the above requirements- including generating a time lapse video of the project.

The camera has worked great for us – and has never been down / out of service since we put it up over three months ago. If you would like to see the camera here is a link to ours. If you are building a new facility, I would highly recommend you take a look at the service offered by Ox Blue.

This system worked great for the last three years- but our data has continued to grow with an increase in our staff and multimedia needs.

In June we started looking for a new solution. We evaluated using Direct Attached Storage, SANs, etc. All were above what we wanted to spend on a solution.

We then looked at the Drobo systems – and the price was right as well as the amount of storage. You can get about 4 TB for under $2000.00 (if you buy from a Drobo reseller not the drobo website).

At this time we also decided to switch to Microsoft Data Protection Manger 2007 software. It is by far the easiest backup software to configure I have ever used.

In less than one day we had our Drobo installed, Microsoft DPM configured, and our Disc to Disc to Tape configuration rules all in place.

Our top three reasons to switch from ComVault to DPM were:

1. DPM syncs data on specified servers (like file and SQL) as often as you want. We are syncing every 15 minutes with no performance hit.

2. The rules to archive off to tape were very simple. It even tells you when a tape is ready to be taken off site based on your retention rules.

3. The alerts (informational and failures) are easy to understand and fix – and the system generally self corrects in self.

If you are looking for a new backup solution I would highly recommend you look at a Drobo storage system and using Microsoft DPM as your backup client.

A few weeks ago one of our volunteers decided to take the lead on the project and begin the process of implementing it. It did not take him long to set it up- really just a few hours after building a new virtual machine for it.

Currently we are only using it as an internal instant messaging application – but plan to integrate it into our phone system, federate it with other instant messaging providers such as AIM, MSN and Yahoo, as well as use it as a "free/busy" board to know which staff are available in the office, etc.

Overall being a 501c3 the implementation price of this application (the CALs, software, and maintenance agreements) was rather low- and the potential benefits far outweigh the costs.

If you are running Active Directory, with any version of Exchange and are looking for a Communications platform – I would encourage you to look into OCS.

1. Defining what we do well as a church.
2. Defining who we are.
   “ We are a grace-oriented, Bible church that seeks to lead people into a growing relationship with Jesus Christ”
3. Narrowing down our target audience / who we serve. (warning this is very generalized for the sake of simplicity”.

   ”We serve middle-aged families. The husband works at Rockwell and the wife is a stay-at-home mom with three children. They shop at Kohl’s, Target, and Hy-Vee. They live in Hiawatha or Cedar Rapids and their children are in the Linn-Mar or Cedar Rapids school district.:

4. Defining where we want to go. What’s the win?
   ”We want to have a web site that is accurate, up-to-date and is able to scale to serve the needs of our growing church family. It needs to accommodate the needs of multiple worship venues, our capital campaign and our building/relocation project. We want all event sign-up and payments to be done online.”

We then defined what the objectives would be for our team. These needed to be defined very clearly to enable us to stay on target.

i) We want to position ourselves for relocation and growth

ii) We want to provide self-service features that connect people to ministry and groups

iii) We want to provide accurate, up-to-date information that is easy to locate

iv) We want to minimize site maintenance

v) We want to reduce the clutter in order to maximize our impact – less is more

vi) We want our web site to be an extension of our brand/ministry

vii) We want the web site to be the primary place of communication and promotion

viii) We want the user of our web site to be in control of their online interaction/experience with the ability to push content to those who request it

We then looked at what was currently working for us on our current site. This included things like:

1. Streaming Media
2. Iconic home page promotions
3. Calendar
4. Unique design

We then defined what was not working on our current website, our current hurdles that were keeping us from completing the project – and how we would over come them – as well as our current assets we have to make the project a reality.

Up next: Creating a content map.

At New Covenant Bible Church we released our new website today.

Our old site was about eight years old – and served us well, but we felt passionate about adding features such as

• Online Giving
• Adult Bible Fellowship Locator
• Streaming Media / PodCasts
• Up to date staff directory

We started the design work in late August – and have been working hard on it ever since. The site was created and designed by Voracity Solutions.

The content and configuration done in house by our Communications Team. As well as an animated promo video to communicate the website to our church family.

Some quick facts about the website:

1. The website is 100% powered by Arena ChMS.
2. We only used around four custom modules – the remaining is all a standard. Arena is really just a box of legos – you can make many different things.

One post cannot really justify all the work that went into the site – so over the next couple weeks I will be posting about the process we went through from the beginning to finish including-

1. Developing site requirements
2. Creating a content map
3. Designing a wireframe
4. Usability testing on the wire frame
5. Selecting a build / design company
6. Selecting final design from comps
7. Writing all new content
8. Placing content
9. Training our staff
10. Promoting the website to staff
11. Communicating change and casting vision to various ministries and their leaders.

Overall I am more than thrilled with our team at New Covenant as well as the guys with Voracity. I could not ask for a better group of people to work with.

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.