1) The #1 Flashiest Website Around: Clover is Easy, Snazzy, Fast — Yesterday I asked my two sons what they thought about the new Team Expansion website, now staged at CloverSites:

http://www.teamexpansion.org

They *raved*. One son (the 20-year-old) said, “Dad, I’ll be a missionary with Team Expansion now that your website is this cool.” OK… maybe his comment was tongue-in-cheek (although he *is* actually leading a summer team for us this summer), but the truth is, they really did like it. What’s more, it’s really easy, really fast, and really has a lot of potential. If you’d like to see some of the available features, take a look at:

http://www.cloversites.com/features-for-all-our-church-websites and

http://www.cloversites.com/greenhouse-updates

Those are all included in the base rate of $20/month.

I don’t know of a single, solitary more effective web-authoring solution for the non-web-professional. Just browse to…

http://www.cloversites.com/f/friendsofbrigada

to get started. Remember, even though it’s flash, the folks at Clover have developed a method of showing text to search engines, so your site will be very search-engine-friendly. And there are even more upgrades to come… and you’ll get them all for the same low monthly price once they’re finished.

(What’s more, Clover gives a tithe of all the start-up feel to Brigada… so when you use the best website, you’re also helping power-up Brigada.)

Inquire or comment about this item at…

http://www.brigada.org/2010/04/25_4554

Here are some examples. Perhaps you are working with a team on a project or document or maybe you use a spreadsheet to keep track of registration on a trip or the contact information of students . How many times have you e-mailed these things around between the people working on it. Eventually, you get lost in who edited what, and which version is the most recent. Your solution is to have one person who does all the “official” edits but that person is busy and doesn’t have the time to field all the e-mails with changes and so the project moves along very slowly with outdated information.

Or perhaps you have a group calendar and you are the only one who could edit it and so everyone sends e-mail to you.  You wish that they all have the ability to input new events on their own using the web. Or perhaps you want to have a common repository of pictures and videos.

Perhaps, you have so many phones, you end up giving students 10 phones number just so they can reach you. Wouldn’t it be nice to have one number to give that rings to all your phones with one e-mail.

If any of you have struggled with any of these tasks, Google has many incredible new tools to help you. Below are some of them and how they can help.

Topics in this Document

• Google Docs and Collaboration
• Google Calendar
• Gmail
• Picasa
• Google or Yahoo groups to communicate with students
• Google Voice
• Google Wave…
• Google docs vs. Microsoft Office Live
• Appendix A: Top 3 Reasons That Google Docs Will Help Your Ministry
• Appendix B: Bottom 3 Reasons to Use Google Docs
• Appendix C: Sending Google Calendar Alerts to Yahoo Groups

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Here is the solution for you…To me, THE most useful tools (outside of Facebook and e-mail)  for ISM that I practically use on a weekly basis can be found on the website, http://www.eventbrite.com/ Eventbrite is a online event registration service. As it says on their website, “Eventbrite helps businesses & organizations of all sizes manage, promote and sell-out their events.” It is relatively easy to use and highly customizable. To the student, it has the general feel of a “ticketmaster” where they can easily sign up and pay for your event.

Another great way to use it is for forms. We have heard of those who have used it for Airport Pickup sign-up forms and friendship partners sign-up forms.

You can sign up for a free version which allows you to post as many free events as you like. You also are allowed to do one complimentary paid events (you need to have a paypal account for do this). If you want to host more paid events, you need to pay a fee to both eventbrite and the credit card processor (they only take paypal and google checkout). See below the fee structure:

In addition you will be charged a credit card processing percentage based on the service you use:

All said, this is a wonderful service for your students that makes it easier for them to sign up… especially last minute which, as we all know, if very normal.

Click here to get more detail on how to use Eventbrite.

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Hi all who were a part of the ISI Rocky Mountain and Plains Retreat. We had a wonderful time of rest and fun. I am thankful for the opportunity to help out with some technology stuff. I will be posting some of the documents the next couple of weeks from the time. One thing that many of ISM people ask me how to do is mail merge. Here is a great excerpt from an article online of the nuts and bolts of how to do this. What is shared here can be used for e-mails, snail mail, labels, etc. Click on the links below for the specific need that you have…

Mail Merge

From http://www.howto-outlook.com/howto/mailmerge.htm

A mail merge allows you to send personalized messages to a large group of people at once without them knowing who else you have sent it to. This is a great way to have bulk messages look more personal, send everybody their own information (like a logon name and password) or send out Christmas cards.

There are various ways to do a mail merge and there are various tools available to further simply the process or add even more options. This guide gives an overview of these methods and walks you through a couple of examples to do your own mail merge. Although you can also do a mail merge to a document or directly to a printer, in our examples we will use an email as the output. The process for the other output options is very similar and this guide can also be used for that.

• Mail Merge from Outlook
• Mail Merge from Word with Outlook as source
• Mail Merge from Word with another source
• Mail Merge with 3rd party tools

As they put it,

Dial2Do lets you do common tasks by just calling a number and speaking. Use it to send EMAIL or TEXT messages, record REMINDERS to help you remember things, post updates to your TWITTER or JAIKU stream and LISTEN to your favorite internet content. It’s easy and handsfree..

First, you have to register on their website at http://www.dial2do.com/ (IT IS FREE). They will give you a phone number to call. You then register your mobile phone number so they recognize who is calling. Next you should enter some key phone numbers and e-mail addresses in your address book. The “nickname” field is the name they will be listening for when you are asked who you want to send a message to. You can also set up other services like twitter, evernote, etc. to send messages to. Once that is done, you are ready to go!

Basically how it works is you call the number that they gave you (put it high on your speed dial, you will use it a lot) You don’t need a special phone to use this (e.g. iPhone or Blackberry). Any mobile phone can be registered. Once you call they will ask you two or three questions like “Do what?”, “To who?”. You say what you want and then they look after the rest. They recognize what you say, and look after getting your action carried out. It is able to convert your voice to text to be sent to whatever service you like. When I tested it, it did a fairly good job. It was much better than previous free services like Jott or even the more recent Reqall. You can even send e-mails to yourself as reminders.

This is a great service you use to keep you safe on the road while still getting your work done. Kudos to this service!

It sounds like the major issue back in October 2008 (when all this broke out) is in text messaging or Skype chat when you or the person you are communicating with is using china’s TOM software in contrast to the official Skype softare from Skype in the U.S.  (see message from the President of Skype,  http://share.skype.com/sites/en/2008/10/skype_president_addresses_chin.html).

According to the original white paper “Breaching Trust” on the topic by Nart Villenveuve of the University of Toronto Citizen Lab as reported on by http://www.fiercevoip.com, there are two ways that privacy was breached. First in text chatting, the Chinese software TOM (licenced by Skype in China to act as a official Skype software connector) was monitoring for specific words (mostly political) and if they found any of these words they censored the words and then logged the message and the user information of people. Once tagged, the text chat activities of these people into China were logged. For voice, there is no evidence of direct spying but there was a privacy breach in that TOM did log all user information of callers. So, they log who is calling who but not what they are saying to each other. So… Don’t use TomSkype software. It is not secure. According to Skype, if you use just pure Skype software from Skype itself it is okay.

Skype is one of the more secure ways of communicating with students and friends in other countries and yet as we see here even they can have some security weaknesses. I guess it goes to show we always have to be careful when we are using any communication system (even phones) as all these systems use common open wires or airwaves which can be hacked at any time.

One tip for this sort of thing is whenever communicating to people in places where there are security concerns (e.g. where, a spybot might be looking for words to look for good spam victims) use a code for speaking to each other.  If you have to use “dangerous, politically charged words” when on text chat you should disguise it using agreed upon substitute words or at least using weird letters in the words (e.g. Using “Ti~bet” for “Tibet” or something like that).

It sounds like in the above scenario direct Skype to Skype voice communication was fine and encrypted end to end using SSL technologies. Still, no encryption is perfect and if a large well resourced entity really wanted to get something from the internet they could. So I would be a little careful but for now I would trust Skype for most communication.

As I said before, this is one man’s opinion. I would love to hear your comments about this important topic.

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Affordable solutions for planning, creating, and maintaining your organization’s online presence

Editor’s note: We recommend reading this article in conjunction with Tips for Designing (or Redesigning) a Nonprofit Website to get a more complete picture of options to create a well-designed, affordable, website and the process you should expect when moving through different parts of the process of developing a beautiful new site.

A well-designed, user-friendly website can help you engage new members, raise money, and communicate with decision-makers. But creating this site affordably, and finding the right tools to build and host it, can be a challenge — especially when you are relying on in-house talent with little or no web-development expertise.

Nowadays, however, you don’t need to be a programmer to create a strong, quality web presence — nor do you need a hefty grant to fund one. Below, we’ll offer guidance on how to plan a new website (or redesign an existing one) and how to maintain an online presence using tools that you don’t have to be a web developer to master. We’ll also offer some tips for finding volunteers with web expertise who can help you along the way…

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