Tag: Illuminate

Illuminate Conference 2014

So, I’ve been a little quiet about the Illuminate Conference this fall. Normally I’m promoting it pretty heavily already. In case you’re a new reader, Illuminate is a conference that I launched a few years ago at my church. Illuminate’s goal was to equip, empower and encourage those who serve kids in the local church. It was a conference that was both local and affordable, designed specifically for the volunteer in mind. No other conference put together such a high quality lineup of communicators for such an affordable event for volunteers. Oh, and Illuminate has been so successful. The first year saw nearly 1000 attendees in three cities and the second year saw nearly 2000 participants in five cities. What a fun ride.

So, what’s new this year? Well, my vision for Illuminate became bigger than my capacity to run it on my own (remember, I’ve got a full time gig too). So, I asked Orange to come in and help me take Illuminate to the next level and I’m so excited to see what Illuminate is becoming. Sue Miller and Amy Fenton have taken the reigns and are putting together an amazing team of communicators and assembling top notch content and are packaging it in a format that is new, but even more strategic than I’ve done in the past.

Read More

Yard work, new year resolutions, conferences and the end of the world

I know a good blogger isn’t supposed to write blog posts apologizing for not blogging more. Supposedly it’s tacky. I was just afraid that some of the CMO readers thought that one of my resolutions for this year is to blog less. Oh contraire. The honest truth. I was pretty sure the end of the world was coming, so I just lost all motivation to blog. Now that I know we’re safe, at least until the Choctaw apocalypse prediction of 2017, I should be much more active on the old blog!

Read More

Illuminate: Freakishly awesome content

Can I share with you one of my best kept conference attending secrets. I learned this one from some good friends of mine. When deciding on which breakout to attend, always pick the speaker over the breakout title. Well, unless what the speaker is talking about has no interest to you. It’s true though, sometimes a really great breakout crashed and burns because the speaker didn’t communicate it well enough. Stick with a strong ministry leader/communicator and you usually won’t be disappointed with the experience.

I’ve taken this little rule to hear when it comes to planning Illuminate Conference breakouts. If I pick the best speakers I can get my hands on, then it doesn’t matter what they talk about, it’s going to be great, right? Pretty much.

No, I’ve gone through the painstaking process of picking an incredible team of communicators and lining them up with the things they are most knowledgable and passionate about. You can know that when you bring your team to Illuminate, your volunteers are going to walk away with pages of notes because they’ve learned from some of the best.

Check out some of the breakouts we’re hosting in different cities this year:

Read More

Did someone say Illuminate?

Well, this week I’m getting the word out. I’ve been really quite for the last several months about Illuminate. Why? Because there have been way too many moving parts and I’ve been working like crazy to get it to all come together. We had some events move around and although registration opened months ago and already, hundreds of people are registered for 2013 events, today is the day that I’m publicly launching Illuminate on the interwebs. Yes, it’s time! If you haven’t been there in a while, roll on over to illuminateconference.tv

So, what can you expect this year? Last year was pretty awesome. We had just over 1000 people participate in three different cities. This year, we’re turning the “awesome” dial up and I’m pretty sure we’re going to do some pretty incredible stuff. Let me list off the reasons for why Illuminate is going to rock:

Read More

My Holy Hangover

Just so you know, I felt like a dork typing in that title. Whatever. So it’s Thursday and it’s been forever since I’ve blogged. I’ve had a lot of distractions, namely the Nashville Illuminate Conference....

Read More

A wireless conference

Yesterday I made an announcement via the KidzMatter weekly email blast. As many of you may know, the Illuminate Conference is making final preparations for the last stop in the 2011-2012 conference year. On February 18th,...

Read More

Excuses are lame

I love to see people overcome opposition. A few months ago I had a survey that I wanted potential new staff to fill out (as part of the interview process). The online form I used for the survey broke. It was not intentional at...

Read More

Angry Birds: LIVE!

I was going to not say anything about this until a few months from now in case we choose to play this in Nashville, but I’m starting to see several other posts about playing Angry Birds in Kidmin. I figured I might as well...

Read More

Illuminate comes to Austin

Today is Wednesday and the Austin Illuminate begins in three days. I’m so excited!!! We have over 50 churches from all over the state of Texas (and even one from Oregon) gathering at my home church this Saturday. Although...

Read More
Loading

Recent Comments