Kingdom Partnership News Alerts

More of a project management article but some of the points relate: Read: The Key to Successful Collaboration.

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Business Pundit just published their Top 10 Best Collaborative Web Tools for Business. Which ones have you used? Which ones would you rank at number 1?

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Read this article about how two networks are collaborating to help bring a ship loaded with supplies to the Haitians following the 7.0 earthquake.

Life Church moves to the front lines in Haiti

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Partnership gives homeless women refuge at former Oklahoma City church

via Read the full story:  City church | NewsOK.com.

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Network of faith: Facebook, Twitter can be tools for ministry

via Network of faith: Facebook, Twitter can be tools for ministry by Evansville Courier & Press.

Have you found Facebook and Twitter to be successful tools for ministry?

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Charlotte, NC, church does hard work ‘worth doing’

by Erin Dunigan
Special to the Presbyterian News Service

Editor’s note: This is the sixth in a series of stories about congregations engaged in significant outreach and evangelism ministries, reflecting the General Assembly’s commitment to “Grow Christ’s Church Deep and Wide.” – Jerry L. Van Marter

LOUISVILLE – First Presbyterian Church of Charlotte, NC, has been a downtown church from the beginning. Since 1821, to be exact.

During that time it has seen its neighborhood change dramatically and has faced the decision of many historic downtown churches – stay downtown, or follow congregants to the suburbs? First Presbyterian is one of the churches that made the decision to stay.

Though its neighborhood is beginning to gentrify a bit with Charlotte’s program of ‘urban renewal,’ the primarily white, upper middle-class church members no longer ‘look like’ their more urban, economically struggling and racially diverse neighbors.

In the midst of change, First Presbyterian has taken to heart the General Assembly’s grassroots evangelism emphasis, Deep and Wide. This commitment to grow Christ’s church deep and wide focuses on evangelism, discipleship, servanthood and diversity. First Presbyterian Church, in the Presbytery of Charlotte, has been weaving those four strands together.

“The church has had a long history of reaching out to its neighbors,” said Jessica Patchett Anderson, child and family outreach coordinator.

So when the neighborhood began changing, the church began asking, “How do we meet people who are different from us? How can we be in partnership with different neighborhoods?”

That question led to two partnerships started about 15 years ago with two communities in the western part of Charlotte – Lakewood and Westerly Hills.

Lakewood was a community that had been tagged by the city itself as ‘at risk,’ going downhill and rife with transiency, drugs and violence. The church helped partner with the community to build a pre-school in the early ’90s. Since that time, the relationship between the church and the community has ebbed and flowed.

In Westerly Hills, the church established a partnership with local schools. When the school system decided to return to a program of neighborhood-based schools, the folks of First Church knew that the schools their children attended and the schools the children in West Charlotte attended would hardly be equal, so they looked for ways to address that, including providing tutors, money and field trips.

First Presbyterian, then, could hardly be described as uninvolved in its community. But a few years ago, people in the church began to reflect and wonder whether they were making a difference in a systemic way. They realized they were not making the relationships that they wanted to.

Anderson was hired as the child and family outreach coordinator as a result of these realizations.

“The church realized they wanted to help foster these long-term relationships by creating partnership with neighborhoods, schools and churches and to train our own people to think about our relative privilege, issues of systemic privilege, generational poverty and factors in our city that have caused divisions or inequities on race, class and neighborhood,” she said. “Part of my job is friendship and networking, and part of my job is to help dream up how to make our partnerships more authentic.”

Often that means working with the communities of Lakewood and Westerly Hills, rather than for them.

In Westerly Hills, First Presbyterian has joined with a community-organizing group called HELP (Helping Empower Local People) to partner with the elementary schools, parents, teachers, principals and other local churches.

“We are working together to try and empower parents in a school where folks think that parents don’t participate or want to participate,” Anderson said.

The group held a dinner in January to bring together parents and community and school leaders. Parents were able, and willing, to share their concerns for their children and their neighborhoods. Members of First Presbyterian provided childcare, served dinner, took notes and encouraged parents to voice their concerns.

“In a situation where lots of parents and children feel hopeless, the church was trying to provide a presence of hope that together, we can do something great,” said Anderson.

This ‘presence of hope’ is not just something the church says or believes – it is something that First Presbyterian is working to do.

For six weeks each summer, the church hosts an enrichment and educational program for 50 children. Last summer two of those children were living with their grandfather while attending the school. On the way home from an event at the church the grandfather had a heart attack and died. Anderson, hearing the news, went to the hospital to be with the mother of the two children, the daughter of the man who died. The hospital’s chaplain had called Anderson and asked her to come, explaining that the woman did not have anyone else.

The church ended up providing space and leadership for a memorial service, as well as assistance for the daughter, a mother of five. Members of the church have provided friendship and support and have tutored her kids, helped with childcare and provided an internship for the 16-year-old son.

“We are saying, ‘There is hope. You can get through this. We are going to be here – not just with words, but to demonstrate Christ’s love to you,” Anderson said.

Crossing boundaries such as race and class is not always easy, she said, but it is worth trying to navigate.

“We have to be honest about the fact that there are some people with more, some with less,” she said. “What are we going to do about that?”

She noted the importance of education and reflection on the part of the church members. Who are we, what power do we bring to the relationship and what stereotypes are attached are all questions that they seek to ask themselves.

Recently, a family from the Westerly Hills neighborhood joined the church.

“This changes the dynamics of how people think – our partnership is no longer an ‘us’ and ‘them’ thing,” Anderson said.

“What we are doing is about making relationships and about reconciliation,” she said. “We seek reconciliation with God and in who we are as people, so this ministry is about going out and seeking reconciliation in relationship with others in our community. It is challenging and hard work, but it is worth doing.”

Learn more

Presbyterian News Service

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The two hour minumum

via Techno//Marketer – Matt Dickman on Digital Marketing and Social Media: The two hour minumum.

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Interviews with Church Designers

via Interviews with Church Designers | Darren Hoyt Dot Com.

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As you’re designing a new web site, you’ll want to make sure that it appeals to the people who you are talking to. Market research is pretty straight forward when it comes to commercial ventures, but when dealing with non-profits it can get a little bit tricky. Here is some valuable information to help you as you are researching how to best reach your non-profit donor audience.

What do donors want to see:

I recently read an interview of a major ($50,000 annually) donor who goes into detail about what he looks for before giving.

Here are some take away points:

• The key is to build relationships, rather than expect a donor to stumble across your site and proceed to give you money.
• Tell a STORY! Stories are the most effective way to generate interest because they are relatable.
• Show pictures of who has been helped, preferably BEFORE and AFTER.
• When people do give, make sure to thank them multiple times:
  • 1st by auto response.
  • 2nd by personal thanks email
  • 3rd by hand-written notes
  • 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th: phone, blog, etc… get creative!

I suggest that you read the full interview to gain valuable insight into what major donor’s are wanting to see.

Facebook Causes

This blog post from Liv Large contains two accounts from experts who have successfully used the Causes app from Facebook.com to generate significant donations. Both charities (OxFam and Kiva) attributed frequent content updates as a key strategy resulting in steady growth.

Tim says that they (OxFam) are seeing a steady growth to their fan base which he believes is attributed to the fact that they update their content several times a week. His team generally spend an hour or two each week on updating Facebook. This includes posting all of their action alerts, interesting articles about their work, and opportunities for people to volunteer.

Kiva staff typically spend 5-15 hours per week updating their content.

Non-Profit Internet Strategies

Nonprofit Internet Strategies is a book which covers the five key ePhilanthropy strategies that have led many nonprofit organizations to succeed. Each chapter is a separate essay written by an expert in that subject. There are excerpts of this book on Google Book Search which are filled with valuable information. Here is a synopsis from the inside cover courtesy of Amazon.com

• The Relationship: Integrate All Supporter Messages
• Give Supporters a Reason to Visit You Online
• Interact with Supporters, Don’t Just Send Messages
• Communicate Using Multiple Methods
• Assess and Improve Performance

Featuring an impressive group of international contributors addressing global applications, this excellent how-to guide is based on real-life occurrences and case studies demonstrating proven, practical ways to use the advantages of the Internet in all areas of public awareness and mass communications. Readers will benefit from the successes and failures of other organizations that have sought to define and develop fully integrated approaches to online and offline applications for the Internet to:

• Advance their causes
• Inform their public
• Raise public confidence and trust in their mission and vision
• Engender gifts, grants, and contributions, as well as new advocates and volunteer supporters

Who are the donors?

There has been tremendous amount of data collected which profiles donors and many reports are available online containing charitable giving statistics. Most of the giving in the USA goes towards Religious organizations. Most donors are individuals (vs. companies).

• Religious organizations: $102.32 billion (33.4 percent of total giving)
• Educational organizations: $43.32 billion (14.1 percent of total giving)
• Human service organizations: $29.64 billion (9.7 percent of total giving)
• Foundations: $27.73 billion (9.1 percent of total giving)
• Health organizations: $23.15 billion (7.6 percent of total giving)
• Public-society benefit organizations: $22.65 billion (7.4 percent of total giving)
• Arts, culture and humanities organizations: $13.67 billion (4.5 percent of total giving)
• International affairs $13.22 billion, 4.3 percent of total giving
• Environment and animal organizations: $6.96 billion, 2.3 percent of total giving

Here are some more interesting stats from nptrust.org

• 86 percent of wealthy donors said they are most motivated to give by the notion of “meeting critical needs” and 83 percent said “giving back to society” is motivational.
• 80 percent of wealthy donors surveyed said they are most likely to make contributions to educational organizations, with religious (72%) and health organizations (70%) following in popularity.
• Electronic gifts to the 187 organizations that provided figures for 2005 and 2006 grew by 37 percent, from $880.7 million to $1.2 billion, and eighty-five of those groups saw online gifts grow by more than 50 percent.
• In 2006, 83 percent of total contributions came from donations from individuals, including bequests.
• The number of U.S. non-profits has doubled in the past five years.

More stats:

• http://www.nptrust.org/philanthropy/philanthropy_stats.asp
• http://www.generousgiving.org/page.asp?sec=4&page=161
• http://www.afpnet.org/ka/ka-3.cfm?content_item_id=24556&folder_id=2345

General Non-Profit Marketing Ideas

from goodmarketingideas.com

1. Define your target market and what you want from them.
2. Discover where your target market can be connected with, what their concerns are and how you can connect with them.
3. Create marketing material that meets the desires of your target market and give them ways that they can really make a difference.
   • Show them how even a small donation can really make a difference.
   • Give them ways that they can get involved with the cause.
4. Keep a close relationship with those who become involved through newsletters and reports. Show them what their efforts are accomplishing.
5. Find the best non-profit business tools available. If once you find them, please post a link in the comments below!

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The Whatcom Council of Nonprofits offers the following 5 matrices for best practices concerning Collaboratives/Partnerships

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Facebook | 2009 ION Conference – Sept. 9-12, 2009
2009 ION Conference – Sept. 9-12, 2009

International Orality Network – Making Disciples of Oral Learners

Source: www.ion2008.ning.com

Organizations making God’s Word available to oral learners in culturally appropriate ways that enable church planting movements everywhere.

Plan now for the 2009 ION Conference in Minneapolis, MN – Sep. 9-12, 2009

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List of collaborative software – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
List of collaborative software
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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CircleBuilder: Your faith. Your Community.
About CircleBuilder
Circlebuilder

CircleBuilder is an online networking and management platform enabling faith-based organizations to increase their membership, improve fundraising, organize events and more efficiently serve their community.

Through our simple to use web-based interface we create numerous “touch points”—personalized emails, shared calendars, blogs, text messages, online donations and storefronts, streaming media and newsletters—by which members can communicate with their organizations and with each other.

CircleBuilder is a place where people can come together to nurture their personal relationships and put their faith into practice.

CircleBuilder is built on confidentiality. Only you decide who can see the information you share here. Whether it is your close friends, a faith-based organization, or the entire community, you select how much—or how little—is shared and under what context.

CircleBuilder advocates no particular viewpoint nor do we promote any specific faith. That is not to say that we are without beliefs. The truth is that we believe strongly in the values of honesty, humility, courtesy, service and privacy.

Honesty. Be honest with us and with each other by acting in good faith for it is faith that brings us together.

Humility. The world would be better if everyone were courteously respectful of others. Humility is the ingredient allowing us to go more than halfway in meeting the needs of others.

Courtesy. Never underestimate the power of your small acts of kindness. They are the pebbles which form the solid foundation of civil society.

Service. Service is our path to finding significance and meaning in our lives. “Each of us finds our meaning and function as a part of his body. But as a chopped-off finger or cut-off toe we wouldn’t amount to much, would we?” [Romans 12:5]

Privacy. Information designated as private remains private. Only you and those you allow will have access to the material you post on this website. We will not sell, rent or transfer personally identifiable data to anyone without your permission.

While you’re here we want to know how you think we are doing. We value your opinion and pledge to work with you to make CircleBuilder a place for all our people.

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Lausanne World Pulse – News Briefs
Youth For Christ Holds International Conference
Youth for Christ (YFC) recently held an international conference attended by 750 people from eighty countries. According to national director of YFC in the United States, Dan Wolgemuth, about half of the attendees were under the age of thirty. The conference included sessions of worship and prayer involving Christians from a variety of backgrounds. YFC sees its people reaching out to those whom other ministries have yet to reach. Wolgemuth called for prayer for the “continual movement toward young people who are on the fringes and are being discarded around the world.” (Mission Network News)

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This is the first time I’ve even heard of of Friend Connect, and I am about to go test it out. But first, I am writing a blog post to spread the word? Backwards, you say? Perhaps, but I just have a hunch that this is relevant to Partnerships, Networking, and Technology.

We’re pleased to share that Google Friend Connect is now available in beta to any webmaster looking to add a “dash of social” to his or her site. This service lets webmasters add social features to their sites by simply copying and pasting a few snippets of code — no advanced coding or technical background required.

We know that people want to be social on the web, and Friend Connect makes it easy for anyone to sign in to a website, share a little bit about themselves through a personal profile, discover other people with similar interests, invite their contacts, and interact with friends. Even better, you don’t have to deal with the hassle of creating yet another username and password — Friend Connect lets you log in using an existing account from Google, Yahoo, AOL, or OpenID. Similarly, you can choose to either establish a new profile or use profiles and friend sources from other social networks that have opened up their services, like Plaxo and orkut. To learn more, watch the video tour below:

Popout

We launched Friend Connect as a preview release in May, and since then we have been working closely with a handful of website owners, social networks, and application developers to improve its speed and scalability, ease of use, and customization capabilities. We’ve also expanded the features available to users with richer, more integrated profiles and new ways to discuss and share content, like including YouTube videos in your comments.

Friend Connect’s goal is to facilitate an open social web. Using open standards like OpenID and OAuth, Friend Connect makes it simple for people to instantly interact with one another on the sites that they already love to visit. Additionally, websites that use Friend Connect become OpenSocial containers, capable of running applications created by the OpenSocial developer community.

In the coming months, we’re excited to see more webmasters add Friend Connect to their sites, helping their visitors engage with each other across the web.

To learn more, please visit www.google.com/friendconnect.

Posted by Mussie Shore, Product Manager

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Posted by Justin Long ⋅ November 18, 2008 ⋅ Email This Post ⋅ Print This Post ⋅ View comments

Lausanne is deep in preparations for its huge Cape Town 2010 Congress to be held in collaboration with the World Evangelical Alliance. They are expecting some 4,000 people from over 200 countries (now that’s an event to be part of, if only for the social networking). They also expect “thousands” of virtual participants, and they’re exploring online meeting spaces, chat rooms, streaming audio/video, etc. (although no word about twittering or wikis or other collaborative software). Invitations to participants will be done through some kind of national and/or regional recommendation system, probably similar to the one they used for the 2004 conference in Pattaya. There will be six major themes to the conference, most of which seem to me to be pretty similar to themes of the past (e.g. supremacy of Christ, etc). This is only the third Congress in Lausanne’s history, following up from the Lausanne congress in the 70s and the Manila congress in the 80s. Due to the economic downturn in the US, Lausanne is among many groups experiencing a financial challenge and is looking for donors.

The World Evangelical Alliance just finished one of its General Assemblies, at which about 500 people attended (representatives of the 128 or so national alliances that make up the WEA). They came away with a number of resolutions as well as the launch of a leadership training institute to train evangelicals in countries for service.

The Ethne unreached peoples movement is hammering its website into good shape (sorry I couldn’t be of more help, guys!). A recent report for the WEA Mission Commission meeting outlines the progress being made in the network as a whole. They are preparing for the second Ethne convention, Ethne’09, to be held in Bogota, Colombia.

The International Orality Network has blogged about an interesting situation in Juiz de Fora, where thousands of poor people spend each day pushing carts through the city streets looking for garbage they can sell to recycling stations. Stephen Young wants to start a church “on the street” among them and is looking for anyone else who’s had experience doing something similar.

The International Day of Prayer for the Persecuted Church (IDOP) held its annual event this month. The prayer requests page of their website has a great quick overview of the persecution situation in most of the restricted nations on Earth.

Other Related Posts

• Orality resources
• Storytelling: some frequently asked questions
• My journey into the world of narrative
• Storytelling among the Kao Bu
• How stories change nations.

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Friday, December 12, 2008

Launch of Calvary Radio Network
Now has 50 stations across the United States

By Dan Wooding
Founder of ASSIST Ministries

COSTA MESA, CA (ANS) – Richard MacIntosh, the general Manager of the Calvary Radio Network (CRN) has announced the launch of this network with some 50 stations operating across the United States.

CRN has grown out of what was called the Calvary Satellite Network (CNS), now called the Christian Satellite Network, which has since separated from Calvary Chapel of Costa Mesa, California.

“The catalyst for the Calvary Radio Network began in the 1990′s as an associated ministry of Calvary Chapel Costa Mesa that was begun by Pastor Chuck Smith and his son Jeff along with Mike Kestler,” said Richard MacIntosh.

“The network grew to over 200 full power radio stations and translators (low power stations) all across the United States from Bangor, Maine, to Lihue, Hawaii.

“Disputes between the directors of the non-profit ministry led to a division of the stations with a group of stations being run out of Twin Falls, Idaho, and a further group of stations under the ministry of Jeff Smith and the Calvary Radio Network operated by Calvary Chapel Costa Mesa.”

More information on the the network can be found on the web at www.calvaryradionetwork.com.

Richard MacIntosh went on to say, “The network is important because we play quality Bible Teaching programs. We feature Chuck Smith, Greg Laurie Skip Heitzig, Raul Reis and David Jeremiah. Music is secondary, but still has a high priority. The focus is the teaching of the Word of God.

“The Calvary Radio Network is a non-profit, listener supported radio ministry serving many locations throughout the United States, and is accessible anywhere in the world via the Internet by just clicking on ‘Listen Live’ on the www.calvaryradionework.com web site.”

He added, “The desire of the Calvary Radio Network is to broadcast programming that faithfully follows sound Biblical teaching and passionate praise & worship music 24 hours a day to communities throughout the United States and the world. Since our inception, it continues to be our desire that through our programming, our listeners come to know and understand Jesus Christ and His amazing love for us.”

Note: Dan Wooding’s weekly Sunday interview program “Front Page Radio” on KWVE 107.9 FM, the Calvary Chapel of Costa Mesa flagship station, will also be offered to the Calvary Radio Network affiliate stations.

Dan Wooding, 67, is an award winning British journalist now living in Southern California with his wife Norma of 45 years. He is the founder and international director of ASSIST (Aid to Special Saints in Strategic Times) and the ASSIST News Service (ANS); and US Bureau Chief for the Missionaries News Service (www.missionariesnews.tv) and Safe Worlds IPTV’s Christian News Services. He was, for ten years, a commentator, on the UPI Radio Network in Washington, DC. Wooding He is also the author of some 42 books, the latest of which is his autobiography, “From Tabloid to Truth”, which is published by Theatron Books. To order a copy, go to www.fromtabloidtotruth.com. E-mail: danjuma1@aol.com.

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Is Your Church or Ministry Connected to GodTube?

GodTube just made a stunning leap forward by adding new groupware features. Check out their announcement here, or click on the link at the top of this post.

Thanks to you, GodTube is growing! We have been hard at work creating new and innovative tools to unite the Christian body. Click below to explore these new features and learn how to create a new Ministry, Church or Group page that helps you connect with others and impact the world. Get your Ministry, Church or Group Page on GodTube today!
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Google IO 2008 – Opensocial, a Standard for the Social Web

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VideoTeaching.com
Why video teaching?

Video teaching in the Church isn’t an experiment anymore – it’s working around the globe every weekend, and fueling some of the fastest-growing churches around. But what about churches who run into obstacles along the way? Equipment, expense, and technical hurdles could be permanent roadblocks… until now.

VideoTeaching.com is here to bring high-quality video sermons to any church, anywhere.

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Digital @ Leadership Network
December 05, 2008
Series on Facebook Connect

Facebook Connect will be a beautiful and revolutionary technology. It will finally make interoperability between social sites a reality. And it won’t just be Facebook monopolizing or pioneering the effort. Google Friend Connect, OpenID, and Myspace Data Availability will all compete with it, forcing everyone to be open and interoperable.

I don’t think I can properly verbalize the value and features of Facebook Connect. This NY Times article is probably the best overview. What I’ll do instead is a series of posts over the next few weeks that highlights actual implementations of Facebook Connect that I’m personally developing.

The first will be for a client of mine in the non-profit space (not a ministry). The next will be the implementation of FB Connect for MyChurch. And finally I’ll try to gather some conclusions for the local church.

A year ago, churches on facebook were starting to figure out how to create apps on the platform. A year from now, church websites will have Facebook Connect to allow their members to log in, interact as a community, and then spread their church’s message through newsfeeds.

Looking forward to sharing ideas and hearing feedback

– Joe from MyChurch

Posted by Joe Suh

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Loving Our Communities to Christ

Collaboration among Youth Ministries
in Cedar Rapids has Impact Potential
Student ministry pastors have embarked upon an ambitious collaboration.

SOS – Save Our Schools – eliminates the distinctions of various church youth groups and identifies every Christian student in a positive and constructive way. Check out this prayer-care-share. initiative thta just might impact the student population of Cedar Rapids.

Check it out – click here …

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