Resources

We’re starting out the new year by writing a couple of new free resources for our training section.  To make them the best they can be, we’re asking for your help.

First, we’re taking a look at Facebook best practices.  Do you know a church that’s doing it well?  Who stand outs in the Facebook world to you?   (Don’t be bashful, if you or your church are doing a good job, share that with us, too.)

Second, we’re still finishing up a case study on Clover websites.  If you’re using Clover, we’d...

Like the changed Biff at the end of the first Back to the Future movie, we’re putting the second coat of wax on a case study and getting ready in time for you to take it out for a spin on your big camping trip.  (Umm…what a terrible analogy.  I guess the 25^th anniversary of the movie is getting in my head.)  Anyway, gigawatts and hover boards aside, before we release a new case study we need your help.  Clover websites are becoming more and more popular among churches because they’re fairly...

It’s easy to want to use every sort of tool and technology to spread the message of what your church is up to.  But in reality, some methods may not work for your church.  A presence primarily on the web makes sense for some while printed newsletters work better for others.

In this resource, we take a look at 10 questions you should consider before deciding to use a new communications tool.  These questions will help you think through issues like defining your audience, allocating resources,...

Our latest free resource has been posted in the training section.  We're taking a look at six things you can do to improve your church communications that won't take a huge time commitment. 

This white paper looks at these topics: website auditing, spring cleaning, signage, volunteer training (refresher of church's vision and why it matters), creating a Facebook page and limiting service announcements.

You can download it now by clicking here.

Here are some great links to find free fonts:

• Font Squirrel - A selection of high quality, free commercial use fonts.
• DaFont - Lots of free and shareware fonts.  Make sure to look at the usage information.  Some are okay for commercial use and others are restricted to personal use.
• Urban Fonts - 8,000 plus free and shareware fonts.
• Smashing Magazine - Here are some links to articles about free fonts.  It'll take come clicking, but you'll find them.

If you’re like me, I start twitching with...

Stock photography giant iStock is getting into the logo business. (Yes it’s okay to boo and throw things at your computer. I use iStock images, but logos shouldn’t be a stock item. It’s a visual representation of your brand. If you think of your brand as your organization’s personality, do you want it to be generic or unique?)

Anyway...the goal of this post isn’t to have a major rant about generic logos. iStock has put together a nice article called "Six Things to Keep in Mind When Designing a...

You may have seen the City of Los Angeles, California just decided to switch all of it’s 30,000 employees email from their current system to Google. It will cost the city $7.2 million to migrate over to Google Apps which includes a form of Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar and Google Talk. But guess what. If you’re a non-profit organization, you can make the switch for free. (Well, technically it’s free if you’re 3,000 people or less and highly discounted if your organization has more than...

Here are a couple of new widgets you can install and use on your own website. For those of you unfamiliar with how a widget works, all you need to do is copy a line of programing code and paste it into your website. You may need some help from someone who is a little tech savvy to know where to drop in the widget code, but once they’re installed, these widgets automatically update giving you fresh content on your website almost every day.

The Walk the Way widget features a daily video...

Personally, I don’t like Twitter. I’ve started and quit at least three times with my personal account.

But I can tell you, as a ministry tool, it can be quite effective. We’ve seen the results of growing the reach of our programs here at ReFrame Media by using social networking and we’re able to interact with people in ways we were never able to before. Churches around the country are seeing the thing.

So to kick off Church Juice online, we’re providing our first free resource, Twitter as a...