Tag Archives: Calendar
A little calendar planning love for you my friends!
Posted on 26. May, 2011 by Kenny.
A couple of weeks ago I got the distinct pleasure of leading some breakouts at the Orange Conference. It was a ton of fun and I know that it was helpful to many. One of the breakouts I led was “How To: Plan a Ministry Calendar.” It was a 45 minute session on ministry planning goodness.
I’m not really going to share everything here (since I know that you can purchase the audio of the breakout from Orange), but I will share a few parts. Here is a short section about tips and tricks to planning you ministry calendar:
Let me share with you a few tips to keep in mind while you’re in the calendaring process.
Print out your calendar
Sure, you can do the whole thing in Google Calendar, iCal or Outlook… but you’re likely going to miss stuff. When you have it all printed out, you’ll see patterns and gaps. You’ll see where you have an extra week because it was a long month or where you’re simply doing too much of one thing. I like to print out an 18 month stack that I give all my staff before we go on the retreat. One page for each month that already has holidays and some of the big stuff. If I get it to them early enough, they can start putting their stuff on it.
Then, I also like printing out the calendar really big and putting it on the wall so we can all sit and stare at it together… we can write right on it. If you don’t have access to wide format printer, it might cost you a little money to have one printed. Worst case scenario, you could simply go to Office Depot or Staples and buy a big desk calendar. It’s not huge, but it’s better than taping 11×17 sheets of paper to the wall.
Color code
Once you start stacking all these events on the calendar, they’re going to get confusing and hard to find. Systematize your events. Make your baptisms, baptism classes, child dedications and child dedication classes in blue. Put events like camp or mission trips in red. Put staff meetings and retreats in orange. Put major church events or local events in black. Come up with an organized way of doing this and stick with it throughout the calendar.
Sticky notes
Over the course of your calendar planning, everything is going to change multiple times. Don’t use markers, they’re too permanent. Don’t use a pencil though, because you wont be able to see it or find it later if everything is in pencil. Get multi-colored sticky notes and put all your events on color coded notes and place those on the calendar. This way you have complete flexibility throughout the process. One you’re a few hours from being done with the retreat, start transferring from stick notes to marker. At the same time I’ll have several staff members begin putting all the events on the actual (digital) calendar. When done, I’ll roll up the calendar have put it in a closet for reference. You’ll not believe the number of times I’ve had to pull it back out to verify a date that was on our calendar. I’ve had one in my trunk for almost 2 years now.
Okay, I’ve got some Calendar Goodness for you now. Are you ready?
The last time I planned out a ministry calendar, I printed a large version of an 18 month calendar out for the team to work on. It was way too big. Nearly 60 feet long. Ha!
Today I’m getting away with my key leaders on my Kid’s Ministry staff and we’re planning the calendar. I redesigned a 20 month calendar (much smaller) to work on. I have four months per section:
- May-August (2011)
- September-December (2011)
- January-April (2012)
- May-August (2012)
- September-December 2012)
Since I’ve gone to the work of designing the calendar files, I thought I’d share with you. Each 4 month section is 48 inches tall and 75 inches long. They’re all in a zip file that can be downloaded here.
Enjoy!
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Calendar Planning: Promotion deadlines
Posted on 22. Dec, 2009 by Kenny.
A few weeks ago I wrote about the calendar planning retreat I took the kids staff on. We took about 12-14 hours to map out all of 2010. We wrapped up that retreat with a pretty clear idea of what the following year would look like (there were a few unknowns, but those would be determined within a few weeks). There’s nothing like having your year all planned out. Next year we plan to do this retreat in August or September so we have a bit more of a head start.
However, I’ve noticed a flaw in the fully planned out ministry calendar. It’s happened to me and I’ve talked to dozens of others in the ministry who’ve been plagued by this problem. What is this problem I’m talking about? It’s called the “the event is one week away and there’s literally no way we can plan for it or promote it, so we either need to push it back or just cancel it” problem. Has this ever happened to you? I know that this year, I paid a little more in shipping to get my baptism announcement cards than I usually do because the big day just snuck up on us.
So last week I had another retreat. It was our promotional calendar retreat. It was much shorter and we just met at my house for 4-5 hours. Here’s what we did:
We created the 2010 event calendar on a google calendar that everyone on my staff has administrative rights to. Then I created a second calendar and called it Kids Quest Marketing (in google calendar, you can overlap two or more calendars) We took one event at a time and worked backwards. What Sunday’s would we want this in the program? When do we want this on the website? What dates should this show up in the Kids Quest blog? Do we want to distribute postcards, mail them or hang up posters? By what date do we need to order print material or submit graphics to the communications team? How far in advance from that do I need a graphic designer to design all these materials. We schedule all these things as appointments on the Kids Quest Marketing calendar. Now we just stick to this calendar. In staff meetings, we look ahead to see what’s coming down the pipe. We share this calendar with our graphic designer so she can know what’s coming and work ahead if necessary.
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Calendar planning
Posted on 23. Nov, 2009 by Kenny.
I did something I’ve never done before a few weeks ago. On of our Early Childhood leaders has a beautiful lake house on Lake Travis and offered to share it with my team, so I took my Kids Quest team away overnight to plan out 2010. It was fantastic!
In the past I’ve always done most of the calendar planing on my own. I usually did this on my own because I was either the only one on staff, it was easier that way or because I was a control freak. I must say it was quite fun to do this as a team. Not only did we need to just get dates on the calendar, but we had to develop some strategy around some new initiatives that were calendar driven.
We started a little later than expected (around 11:00 AM) and work non-stop until about 6:30 PM. We ran out for a few hours for dinner and got back to work around 9:00 PM and worked until 11:30 or so. It was a great outing and we got the entire year planned out. We’re meeting together again in a few weeks to set promotion, communication and design deadlines for all the events we’ve planned. I’ve learned that you can have a calendar planned out years in advance, but if you’re not careful, an event or class will sneak up on you before you’ve done any promotions.
So here’s how we executed our retreat:
Calendars
I found this great website that will create blank calendars for you. I created 18 months of calendars. Everyone on my team got a set and I sent the calendar to a good friend to print them out on his wide-format printer. I was a little over-zealous in the size and ended up with over 50 linear feet of calendar. Check out the pictures of my HUGE calendar.
Process
We started with the easy stuff. We posted all our birthdays. Why not. Then came the non-negotiables. Holidays like Easter, Christmas, 4th of July and all the other holidays that would affect programs or events. We also found out when all the Texas home games were (and big away games) and put them on the calendar. We sent emails to find out when baptisms would happen so we could plan out baptism classes and such. Once all of this was on the calendar, it provided a pretty nice framework for everything else. We scheduled dedication classes, baptism classes, volunteer orientations, volunteer trainings, volunteer events, summer camp, lock-ins, tentative pool parties and everything else we could think of. We spent quite a bit of time juggling these as we wanted to create a rhythm that didn’t wear us out but still made sense to paretns and volunteers. Once we could see how everything was shaping up, we scheduled our staff retreats. We planned them a few months before big events that would require a little extra planning. Most importantly, we planned the calendar retreat where we would plan out 2011.
Recording
While planning all of this out, several on the team were plugging everything into a google calendar. Public and shared outlook/exchange calendar have been a sore spot for me and my team at Gateway and since a handful of us have started relying on Google applications, it made the most sense for us to record this on a google calendar that we all shared. Next month we’ll create a new calendar for marketing. It will be a separate calendar so we can just view events/programs without getting distracted with all the marketing stuff; however, we can easily overlay both calendars and get a good look at the whole picture.
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Syncing Google Calendar and Contacts with your iPhone
Posted on 14. Oct, 2009 by Kenny.
So yesterday I officially switched my work mail to Gmail. I was tired of putting up with Entourage and even more frustrated with my inability to share my work calendar with my wife who manages her/our calendar with Google Calendar. Using Gmail as a catch all account is taking a little bit of an adjustment, but I really like it so far. I need to develop a system with labels and filters, otherwise I think I might drown.
Now that I’m using Gmail, my only calendar is my Google Calendar. However, I wanted to make sure that the calendar on my iPhone syncs with Google. I learned how to do this when I gave my wife my iPod touch.
Go to NuevaSync and create a free account. NuevaSync is an online service that will connect your Google accounts with your iPhone (or other phones as well) by pretending to be an exchange server. It’s really easy to set up and it’s completely free. Within a few minutes, my calendar and contacts were synced. Push email (through Gmail) and the ability to sync up to 50 calendars is available at a very low price as well. I already bring in my Gmail into my iPhone, so I didn’t see the need to pay for anything.
So, if you use Google Calendar and would prefer to sync your iPhone (or several other smart phones for that matter) to this calendar, check out NuevaSync.
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