Month: August 2013

Emerging tech: Chromecast

It’s been a crazy busy month, I totally missed the Chromecast announcement. Earlier this month, Google announced a new product called Chromecast. It’s less than revolutionary, but there are several compelling reasons to keep your eye… or even purchase this little device.

Let’s be clear though, the Chromcast is no Apple TV. In it’s current state, it will not replace your Apple TV. However, you might want one of these things for other reasons. Let’s take a look at what it does.

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Barcode App Recomendations

Okay, in the next week or so, I’m going to write a little bit about moving to self check-in. For the past 4 years, I have been wanting to upgrade to self check-in at Gateway, but we’ve not had the resources to do it all at once. So, I’ve been working on it all summer and we’re launching self check-in a week.

We went the barcode route and started distributing them last week. Here’s my big question though.

Do any of you recommend a good barcode app for your smartphone? We spent a little extra money to get the nice barcode readers, like the ones they have at Starbucks and airports. It was important to me that we had another option for people who forgot to bring their barcode.

The only app I know is the keyring app. It’s a great app with lots of options, but a little more complicated than I’d like. I want to make it super simple for parents to create a digital copy of their assigned barcode. Keyring makes you walk through 2-3 steps I’d prefer to avoid for simplicity. So, does anyone know of a simple app that stores your barcodes for future scanning?

Your help would be much appreciated!

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Self-Evaluation: You are not as awesome as you used to be

Right now, repeat this after me:
“There are things that I’m emotionally attached to. I recognize this potential weakness. I need to invite someone to be honest with me about these things and do what they encourage me to do.”

That wasn’t so hard, was it. This happens all the time and we have to recognize that we are going to get in the way of what’s best for your ministry. Need proof? Look at the 60 year old wearing clothes that he/she bough 20 years ago. That person thinks they look great because 20 years ago they WERE great. However, no one has been truly honest with that person saying, “Dude, can I take you shopping?” or someone did but the person doesn’t believe them.

Just know that this IS going to be you someday. It could be you now. Here’s what you need to do:

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Evaluation: Measuring what you can’t see

Effective evaluation can be very hard to do, especially when it’s your own ministry. We’re too bought in and invested that bad news is hard to take or it just takes more emotional effort to go digging for the ugly stuff. This is where it might be helpful to bring in people from the outside to poke around and ask questions that you haven’t thought to ask yet. Sometimes though, I think we get in trouble because we’re only evaluating the things we can see. What you can’t see tells an entirely different story.

This is where leader’s bias comes in. On any particular weekend, hundreds of elementary kids come to our programs and they love it. We get emails and comments in the courtyard about how much the kids love coming to church. We do baptism interviews and these kids talk about why they love coming to church and it’s easy to get a slanted view of performance. We change our tactic and begin asking the kids who already love our program what it is that we could do better to make them love it more. Although this is never a bad idea, we’re missing the point entirely. We’re only evaluating what we can see.

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When is the last time you did a ministry evaluation

This summer I’ve been in ministry evaluation mode!
In May we had a pretty significant leadership team retreat where church leadership put NextGen (even more specifically, Kids) in the cross hairs for focus. This is a really good thing. I committed to spend this summer evaluating every aspect of what we’re doing, where our weaknesses are and how we might turn those around. Here’s one of the biggest learnings I had.

Every year for the past 2-3 years, we have almost 1000 families visit Gateway for the very first time.

That’s amazing! In one of our leadership meetings, we talked about how we can attract more people to our church. I shared these numbers supported by years of check-in data and we quickly realized that we do not have an attraction issue, we have a retention issue. In the past 12 months, only 40% of our first time families came back for a second visit. Ouch! I was able to dive deeper and see that specific rooms have higher retention rates than others. This data tells me that we’re doing some things right in certain environments where we’re failing in others.

My investigation showed that it’s primarily our elementary (especially older elementary) where we’re losing the most visitors. With and average of 60% of our visitors not coming back for a second visit, our elementary percentage was even higher than this. Not good at all.

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