Most churches and ministry organisations have two core technology tools - email and word processing (I’d add calendars to this list too, but most ministries and people in ministry probably aren’t using online calendars - yet!)
Most churches and ministry organisations would use a desktop email client (e.g. Microsoft Outlook or Apple Mail), and Microsoft Office for word processing. These tools be expensive, in need of regular upgrading and specific to particular operating systems. So there are some real benefits to using online tools for these tasks.
Last week, technology blogs Mashable and Cnet that the Los Angeles’ city council is about to start using Google Apps. For those unfamiliar, Google Apps is a set of tools provided by Google to assist organisations with communication, collaboration and publishing.
How does it work?
Most churches and ministry organisations will already have their own domain (e.g. [url=http://www.stanglican.com]http://www.stanglican.com[/url]). You can keep this domain and use Google to manage these common tasks:
- Email: use Google’s email tool (Gmail) to manage your email. Your email address will remain the same (e.g. steve@stanglican.com), but there are added benefits such as awesome spam filtering, access to email wherever you have internet access, and a dedicated team working behind the scenes, 24/7/365 to make sure your email is always available. Here’s some more tips and benefits to using Gmail.
- Calendars: use Google’s calendar tool (Google Calendar) to manage your schedule and collaborate with the schedules of others in your team/ministry/church. There are many benefits to not using a paper diary, but one of the most compelling for ministry is collaboration. Google Calendar will allow you to create multiple calendars, see who has what on when, allocate resources, find common meeting times, and publish (where appropriate, of course) particular calendars online for anyone to access. That’s a very brief sell - check out a tour with more of the features.
- Documents: use Google’s document creation/management tool (Google Docs) to create documents, spreadsheets and presentations. You can import (eg. from Word/Excel/PowerPoint) and export to the same formats (and others) - i.e. you can maintain most of the benefits to using Microsoft Office and open documents others send you. Again, one of the key features is collaboration - Google Docs is a great platform for sharing documents and allowing others to work with you on particular documents, without the issues associated with emailing these around and hoping you’re working on the most current version. And importantly, you don’t need to be connected to the internet to access your documents.
There are other tools and benefits provided by the Google Apps service - all available free for non-profits (i.e. churches and most ministry organisations!) Discover more of the features of Google Apps, or sign-up.
Will your church or ministry organisation join LA city council?
