Guiding the Way

What's the plan for all this information?

FTEducationSvcs — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 22:01:00 GMT

As a person becomes more and more involved with your church, what is the best way to capture the information you will be storing in Fellowship One? One of the things you can do to help your staff is to document where you want this information stored. This is not meant to be a complicated or daunting process; in fact, it should be simple and perhaps one page in length. Don't think it's possible? Let's break it down a little bit by using a case study of Bob Stick.

Rather watch instead of read? Click here to check out Bill's video blog

We have lots of information about Bob that we've collected as he attends events and activities at the church. For example, we know his father is a missionary, he speaks Spanish fluently, he is CPR certified, and many other information points. We can track all of these things in a logical way that will help us locate them easily later. Suppose I am starting a new program targeted at our Spanish speaking community. Wouldn't it be nice to quickly find all people who speak Spanish so that we can invite them to volunteer? Sure it would!

To make sure we are able to find people quickly using a repeatable process, we need to make sure information like this is stored in a logical place. This is where documenting processes is critical. Let's look at a chart of all the places where we can store things in Fellowship One.

Click here to see full sized view

All this information on Bob needs a place to live. Using logic and some strategy, we have placed a check mark beside each possible location for this information.

Note: This is an example only. Use your judgment based on your knowledge of your staff on where these data items would be stored for your church. Also notice that some of the items could result in more than one piece of information. For example, In Celebrate Recovery could be both a relationship with a mentor/accountability partner and an assignment to a confidential activity Celebrate Recovery.

Breaking it down

Let's make it even simpler. Instead of the actual data for Bob, let's categorize data into main categories. As shown in the image below, we've taken these informational tidbits and separated them in one of following categories:

Nice to know information
Item that requires action
Completed volunteer requirement
Special hobbies/skills
Activity that requires mentoring
Activity attendance
Life event

You will probably be able to think of others as well. Again, you will notice in the image below that we have multiple check marks in some of the rows. Some information can be stored in more than one place. For example, an activity that requires mentoring would probably require both an assignment to a confidential activity and assignment to a relationship.

Click here to see full sized view

We have created a simple table for you to use to generate your own information plan. Click here to download our template. Look for more of these documentation templates soon!

Let's Write!

FTEducationSvcs — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 18:02:00 GMT

Enough about videos already! I think we have covered the video library in most of our recent blog posts and I’m certain you’re tired of the subject. Let’s move on to the other side of Education Services: Documentation!

A documentation overhaul is the next priority in our group (never fear, we are still updating and adding to the video library as well). There are several documents that need our attention in a serious way. Currently underway are brand new guides for Fellowship One WebLink and Fellowship One Data Exchange. We just completed the new guide for Fellowship One Check-in v. 2.5. You can find it in Answer ID 9 in the Support link in Fellowship One. These new guides are chock full of useful information and step-by-step procedures. We’ll keep you updated as the outstanding items are completed.

Let’s talk about our documentation process for a minute. You may be interested to know that our mission statement focuses around helping you use Fellowship One effectively. To that end, we have always provided you with just-in-time online help for each page in Fellowship One. You can access this by clicking the little blue question mark in the upper right corner of each page. The Online Help will launch in a new window and this is where you will always find the most up-to-date information. In addition, we have been and will continue to provide you with several documents to help you along in your usage of Fellowship One. That is our job – to provide you with a tool set that will help you learn how to use Fellowship One.

What we cannot do is provide you with the documented processes that are correct for your church. These are the specific ways you will be using the system at your church. In your initial implementation of Fellowship One you covered some of this with your delivery manager. We love our delivery managers! They always discover creative and effective ways for using Fellowship One.

It’s a huge understatement to say that there are many moving parts to Fellowship One. If your staff and key volunteers are not on the same page and informed about how to use these parts, you lose some of your data integrity. Data integrity is an important aspect of any enterprise software application but most especially for Fellowship One. The spiritual life of people is at stake and we need to ensure that we keep data as clean and accurate as possible. This is where documentation comes in!

You must create your own Fellowship One documentation. Don’t panic! I’m not talking about step-by-step documentation like we have already provided for you. I’m talking about documenting your processes and procedures from how you want people to enter addresses to what status to apply when someone begins attending regularly. We want to help you document these critical functions.

In the next few weeks we will be providing a series of blogs and videos with corresponding downloads that you can use to create your own documentation processes. We hope you enjoy this other side of Education Services and would love to have your comments and feedback! Email us at education@fellowshiptech.com or post your comment here.

Blessings!

Tara Coulson
Learning Specialist/Documentation Specialist
Fellowship Technologies

FTeU Contest - Teach and Win!

FTEducationSvcs — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 03:10:00 GMT

We’re on a mission here in the Education Services department. Our mission is to help you learn how to use Fellowship One and then how to teach others to use it. So… we’re holding a contest. Watch Bill’s video blog below and become a star!

Deadline and fine print

All entries must be submitted to education@fellowshiptech.com by June 30^th. You may submit multiple entries but please submit them in separate email messages. Judging begins on July 1^st overseen by the clearinghouse of fine auditors that make up your Customer Services team at Fellowship Technologies.

Videos should be less than 5 minutes in length and can cover any Fellowship One topic or best practice process related to Fellowship One. If you need a FREE video capture tool, we recommend using Jing, it can be downloaded for free at www.jingproject.com

We will announce a winner on July 14th and your video will be featured in our blog and video llibrary. Additionally, choose your prize—a customized Bob shirt or a starring role in a Bob video.

Dynamic Church 08 and Bob

FTEducationSvcs — Thu, 22 May 2008 19:08:00 GMT

Education Services is back from the Dynamic Church User’s Conference more fired up than ever. We have so many things we want to do – we’re just praying for the time to do them all!

We loved seeing new and old friends at the conference and took home all of your great ideas. Within the next few days, I’m told the power point slides will be available to download from the conference web site.

Cool things we learned at DC08

Jing is too cool! Did you notice all the presentations that included short videos? These videos were made using a free screen recording tool from TechSmith called Jing. This product installs on your PC or Mac and allows you to record yourself moving around the screen and then decide how you want to share it with others. We’re all about sharing here (and free never hurts anything). Check them out at the Jing Project site.

Tip: Those of you using WebLink can really benefit from this. You can now make videos showing how to create an account or how to register your child for VBS.

Second cool thing is that our customers are amazing! We knew this already, but to see you in action at the conference was incredible. Your presentations were dynamic and engaging and your questions were challenging and thought provoking. We are truly blessed to have you partner with us as we grow Fellowship One to new heights.

What about Bob?

While we were at the conference, Bob snuck into our video library (click on New Free Video Library). He’s in the following locations:

· Administration >> Administrator’s Overview

· Contact Management >> Contact Management

· Ministry >> Small Groups >> Small Groups Overview

· Coming soon to People >> Group Email will be a new character (Pastor RJ)

Check out Bob featured in Curtis Simmons' Keynote --->

What’s coming to education?

Next up for us is to provide you with supporting documents for the video library. For example, case studies that describe the benefits/advantages of different methods of configuration. Additionally, we want to provide you with other documents that will complement our existing documentation to help you do your job.

With that in mind, we need you. We would love to hear your stories about how you effectively use Fellowship One. Please comment below or send us a message at education@fellowshiptech.com.

We have liftoff!

FTEducationSvcs — Thu, 01 May 2008 15:19:00 GMT

You may have noticed with the release of Fellowship One Check-in v. 2.5, we released the brand new, Flash-based video library. We are excited to bring you this new format for learning Fellowship One and hope that it meets your needs. This blog entry will discuss the best ways to use the library and describe future plans.

How to use the library

The change to the new library is quite dramatic and you may be wondering about the best way to view the videos. With the exception of Contact Management, the library is arranged by functional area (or tab). Contact Management spans so many functional areas in Fellowship One, we felt you were better serviced if we provided videos separately.

As shown below, you simply choose the topic you are interested in learning about, click it to display all of its sub-topics or videos.

What’s coming next?

Our goal is to continually improve the library. We will do this by adding more videos, re-recording videos that are out-of-date or need new examples, and providing you with tools you can use. We will be providing you with documents you can download in conjunction with the videos that will help you use Fellowship One to the fullest extent. You will see these documents begin appearing in the upcoming months.

How can you help?

We would like to hear from you about what you want to see in the video library. What topics can we cover for you? Would you like to see examples? Do you have a good example to share? Please feel free to communicate with us either right here by commenting on this entry or by sending us your thoughts by email to education@fellowshiptech.com.

A Look in the Toolbox

FTEducationSvcs — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 15:50:00 GMT

This blog is all about Bob. Who’s Bob? Bob is a representation of common situations that demonstrate the purpose behind the functionality and workflow in Fellowship One. The new video training library, set to release at the end of the month, will include videos that illustrate how Fellowship One can streamline the workflow of processes at your church. The idea is to present solutions to real-life scenarios in pictures that are easy to identify with.

The star of these videos is Bob, who is an idea that came to Bill as he was reading Dan Roam’s The Back of the Napkin. We all loved the idea and everyone’s reading the book and providing new ways for the staff of Dynamic Church to help Bob get plugged in through Fellowship One best practices. Check out the video below for a preview of Bob and a look into Bill’s toolbox.

Click here to watch Bob

Tools of the Trade: Flash Player

FTEducationSvcs — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 18:11:00 GMT

Today, I’d like to discuss the format of our videos and how we plan to deliver them to you. Let’s start with the Flash® Player and how it will help us deliver training to you. Camtasia Studio allows us to produce our videos in Flash format: either with the .swf or .flv extensions. This option was the most important factor for us when we were choosing a format for video delivery.

Watch Tara's
Sneak Peek Demo

According to Adobe, the Flash Player is estimated to be “installed on over 800 million Internet-connected desktops and mobile devices”. Additionally, the Flash Player and Flash videos are platform-independent meaning that no matter what operating system you are running, you will be able to view our video training.

Several challenges immediately became apparent:

a. Where do we host the videos? Our host must support streaming videos.

b. How do we deliver them?

c. How do we maintain them?

There's nothing like a couple of good challenges to get the creativity going! Obviously we needed a corporate decision on challenge a. Hosting any kind of website has a monetary impact and since we needed approval for this, we handed the where off to our director, Lance Dacy and our Senior Vice President, Curtis Simmons. They found us a solution in the Experience site.

Challenge b was also a focus of our discussions. How do we deliver these videos? Do we provide our users with one big honking HTML file that lists all videos, descriptions, length, intended audience, etc? That was an OK solution, but not ideal. You would have to scroll around quite a bit to find what you were looking for. Our next thought was to provide different pages based on main topics with smaller lists of videos. This was also not a bad solution, but still not a winner. Both of these ideas required someone who knew HTML to be able to keep everything updated.

Curtis Simmons happened upon the winning solution while working with the company that was developing our Dynamic Church Conference website. Element Fusion recommended a cool tool called Flash Nifties. This tool installs very quickly on your website and then scans specified folders for images, videos, flash movies, text files, and more. Flash Nifties constructs your video library based on the nested folder structure that you implement. We immediately loved the ease of use of this product and thought it might be a good thing to share with you guys.

Challenge c was a big concern for us. There are just two of us here and we both have “day jobs”. So, we needed a solution that was easy to maintain. We are still working on this part of our plan. Flash Nifties certainly helps due to the fact that it immediately updates based on the contents of your folder structure. We can always produce new videos and remove old ones without any impact on our client. The remaining challenge will be to ensure all videos remain up-to-date with every release!

What you’ve all been waiting patiently for is a sneak peek at the video library! Click the link below to watch a quick video demonstrating the new library and its simple design. Please feel free to comment, we would really like to hear from you.

Watch Tara's
Sneak Peek Demo

Tools of the Trade

FTEducationSvcs — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 16:41:00 GMT

As promised, this is the first in a series of blogs explaining how we are creating and producing our new video training library. We are in the home stretch of a project to dismantle and recreate 24 hours of video training in a new easy to use format. Bill and I thought it would be fun to tell you how we did it.

Watch Bill's
Camtasia Demo

The first tool we had to find was software to record the training. We had a copy of Adobe’s Captivate, which we had used in the past. It did a good job with the video creation and is definitely a tool of choice by many education departments in the high tech business world. However, ultimately it was not fast to edit a created video. We estimate that it was taking around 6 hours to produce a 5 minute video (from storyboard/setup to final production). For the true digerati, Captivate is cool because it allows you to edit frame by frame. But this was not ideal for our team. We needed something that would allow us to record and edit much faster.

We have always used a product called SnagIt to capture screens for documentation purposes. It’s a cool image capture tool that allows you to snag just the area of the screen you want to display and then provides editing tools to make the picture even slicker for presentation. SnagIt led us to another product made by TechSmith called Camtasia Studio.

I have to wax poetic here for a moment; this product truly was the answer to a prayer for us. Not only is it easy to record, it’s easy to edit your recording, add additional tracks, and add images. Suddenly, we found our time to produce a video cut drastically. Bill can now record and edit a 5 minute video in about 45 minutes to an hour. It then takes me about 30 – 45 minutes to produce it.

So, with Camtasia, we were able to cut a 6 hour production cycle to 2 hours. This product gave our project new life. So without further ado, here’s Bill with a short 3 minute video on Camtasia and how it works. We think this would be a cool ministry tool.

Watch Bill's Camtasia Demo

The Silence is Deafening

FTEducationSvcs — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 18:01:00 GMT

Most of you know that it's just Bill Wheaton and me (Tara Coulson) that make up the Education Services department at Fellowship Tech. Though we are small, we like to think we're big - at least most of the time. The Bible is full of stories of small people doing giant things and its pages are always an inspiration for us when we're thinking about upcoming projects.

What does this have to do with learning Fellowship One? We have been quiet for awhile because we have been working on a huge project that has been under wraps for most of last year and into this one. As many of you know, we have a free video library available on the Education tab of the Experience site. While educational, these videos were not very user-friendly for a variety of reasons including the frustrating proprietary video player provided by our vendor.

We have known we needed to have videos for about three years. Marie Armitage, a delivery manager, and I dreamed of providing this service for at least a year before we were able to move on it. As a stopgap measure, when Bill joined FT eUniversity, he and I chose to record the videos in our desktop sharing software during live classes. These recordings were cool if you were part of the class, but for those of you that weren't, listening to the extraneous stuff that goes along with hosting live training was not ideal.

The “huge project” we undertook was to dismantle all 24 hours of our existing video library and transform it into tiny bite sized Flash videos. We have affectionately been calling this project “chunking” since early 2007.

What does this do for you? For one, Adobe’s Flash player is more than likely already installed on your computer. Whoo hoo! No more crazy problems installing the player. But that’s not all; we chose to create these videos in small segments to allow you to quickly locate and listen to information you need at the time you need it.

When are they coming? Soon! We have found a place to host these videos and are in the process of final production and organization. We are praying for an end of April release. Over the next few weeks, Bill and I will be sharing a series of blogs on how we created, produced, and organized the videos for your enjoyment.

As always, please feel free to comment here or send us an email at education@fellowshiptech.com with your comments or suggestions. We love to hear feedback.

See you at Dynamic Church 08!

Tara Coulson
Learning Specialist
Education Services

What is Your Function?

FTEducationSvcs — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 17:33:00 GMT

During the summer of 2007, FTeU began offering Core functionality training sessions as recordings available for viewing at any time of day or night. While this makes it easier for you to schedule a class when your schedule permits, you lose the ability to ask questions on specific topics. In order to give you the chance to ask questions on various topics, we have introduced Functionality Forums; these hour-long sessions offered each week on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Functionality Forums are live WebEx sessions that give you a chance to ask questions and interact with your peers from other churches. Each week there will be one session covering General functionality (People, Ministry, Contacts, and others) and one covering giving topics. Functionality Forums based on your questions and comments so there is no preset agenda. If you have questions that you need answers to or you just want to listen in while getting other things done in the office, you can sign up on the Experience site, then login and learn.

To register for a Functionality Forum, Click this link Functionality Forum Registration , navigate to the date you would like, and then click Register to the right of the Forum you would like to attend.

Print a Name Tag

FTEducationSvcs — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 00:16:00 GMT

Ever wonder how you can control which rooms print name tags during check-in? There are two places this feature can be configured. The first is the Add/Edit Activity setup form and the second is on the Rooms & Locations setup form.

The rule is that if Print a Name Tag is selected for the Activity, then all Rooms & Locations for the activity will print name tags regardless if the Print a Name Tag box is selected for the RLC.

The cool thing about this is that if you do not select Print a Name Tag for the Activity, then you can control which rooms print name tags and which do not simply by choosing to select the check box (or clear it) at the Rooms & Locations level!

Show Me!

FTEducationSvcs — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 11:33:00 GMT

You may have noticed some changes to Fellowship One over the past couple of weeks, as with all new features, we want you to know how to get the most out of them. To make things easy, we have started adding 2 to 5 minute “Show Me” videos to the Help Windows (accessed by clicking the in the top right corner on most screens). “Show Me” is kind of like TiVo, (only, instead of boring things like American Idol, you get Bill explaining how to use EXCITING Fellowship One features). You will even be able to fast forward, rewind, and pause!

We will continue to add more “Show Me” clips to Help Windows for new and existing functionality.

To check out the latest “Show Me”:

1. Click the People tab

2. Click the

3. Click Show me how

4. When the window opens, click the giant play button (the big triangle that point to the right, you know just like on your 8-track tape player)

5. Sit back, enjoy the show - as many times as you would like (and don’t forget your popcorn)!

If you have suggestions for “Show Me” videos please let us know by entering a comment below.

Welcome to Guiding the Way!

FTEducationSvcs — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 22:45:00 GMT

Welcome to Guiding the Way! In this blog we will offer how-to tips and tricks as well as sharing ideas on how to get the job done in Fellowship One as efficiently as possible. We like working in Fellowship One and really enjoy sharing ideas and methods that help you streamline your processes. If you can reduce time in front of the computer, you will have more time to spend on ministry.

In addition to all things Fellowship One, we will occasionally look at other topics including, but not limited to, MS Office, Internet research, web site design, writing, raising kids, cooking, smoothies and espresso (Diet Coke for Tara) drinks.

Please do not hesitate to let us know what you think by using the Leave a Comment section at the bottom of each blog entry. We also welcome your suggestions for future blog topics.

Guiding the Way is a team effort, produced by Bill Wheaton and Tara Coulson, both members of the Fellowship Technologies Education Services team and your eUniversity faculty.

Here’s a sample of a how-to article:

Blog comments are an easy way to communicate to the blog authors and offer a way for you to let your opinion on the subject be known. Use the following procedure to leave your own comment to this post.

To Leave a Comment

1. Type your name in the Name field. This field is required.

Note: If you are logged in to the Experience site, the Comment field is the only required field.

2. Optionally, in the URL field, enter your church URL or your own blog URL.

3. Enter your comments in the Comments field to let us know what you’re thinking or what you would like to see covered in future posts.

4. Click the Submit button.