Church Tech Dump

Oh tight! One of my favorite ChMS companies and the one I use at my home church has released a rad new feature that smashes together Twitter ans SMS text messages into one, rad communications tool! Here’s the release from their website:

CCB’s Twext™ feature combines the convenience of Text Messaging with the reach of Twitter™

COLORADO SPRINGS, CO, JANUARY 4, 2010—Church Community Builder (CCB), the pioneer of socially-based church management (ChMS), has released an innovative new communications tool that combines Text Messaging and Twitter™ - called CCB Twext™ - that will provide church and small group leaders with leading edge communications capabilities.

“Effective communication tools are critical for all churches. Because CCB highly values the interactive social nature of church communities, adding Text Messaging as a communication option was a no-brainer for us, states Steve Caton, VP of Sales and Marketing. However, we really wanted to take the next step by providing a way to seamlessly integrate texting with Twitter, thereby adding yet another communications vehicle to the mix where appropriate.”

CCB Twext™ Offers the Following Benefits:

Group Texting: In addition to email and mail merge, every Group Leader has the option to communicate with their Group participants via Text Messaging.

Twitter™ Integration: If a group within the church has its own Twitter account, the Group Leader can add that account to their CCB Group. When utilized, a Text Message sent to the group will also immediately post as a Tweet on the group Twitter™ feed. This further extends the reach of the Text Message to those who may not receive text messages but are a member of the Twitter group.

Member Controlled: Group members have full control over their ability to receive text messages. They must proactively edit their CCB profile before receiving them. This ensures people don’t end up paying for text messages they do not wish to receive.

CCB Twext™ represents another major milestone and differentiator for CCB’s innovative church management solution. In addition to providing benefits to the entire congregation, CCB also offers the most robust communication tools to your leadership so they can remain connected to those they serve in the most relevant manner possible.  For more information or to speak with someone at Church Community Builder about this and other valuable functionality, email sales@churchcommunitybuilder.com or call 1-866-242-1199.

If you’ve been following me on Twitter, you might have noticed me tumbling to my death or being blown into a fine mist every now and then. The source of my destruction is a very simple game called Canabalt. In a nut shell, Canabalt is a game where the goal is to jump from roof top to roof top for as long as possible before dying. Only one button is used to jump. That’s it.

It’s a simple game with simple mechanics, simple graphics, and a killer soundtrack. And, like most things I come across, I believe the church can learn a few things from Canabalt and its developers.

1. It doesn’t have to take 7 months to execute a good idea.

Canabalt was created in seven days! I’ll let someone else talk about how important building the right team, communicating effectively, and managing milestones is to pulling something like this off, but if you aren’t starting with a good idea, you may just be spinning your wheels.

I once attended a film production weekend workshop where the speaker, an eccentric character, told a story about how he had all these people telling him about their screenplays. He’d hear stuff like,

“I’m a screenwriter! I’ve been working on my screenplay for four years and I’m almost to the third act!”

His response to this was something along the lines of,

“Four years! Whatever you’ve been doing for the last four years, it hasn’t been writing.”

He went on to say that if you have a good story, three weeks of solid writing should get the job done.

Think about that the next time you’re dreaming up new ways to implement technology in your ministry or working on the new church web site design.

2. Simple is good.

When Canabalt was built for the Kyles’ Experimental Gameplay Project, the theme for that month was “bare minimum.” In an interview the games’s creator, Adam Atomic, says he had just finished revisiting Super Mario Brothers for the NES and realized that,

“You pretty much hold right and B, and hit A at the right time to hop obstacles.”

The game he came up with took the best things from Super Mario Brothers and condensed it into an easy to pick-up-and-play game. Brilliant! But what can the curch take away from this?

Take a walk through your church’s bulletin. Is it simple? Does it clearly communicate what the intent of the church is? Do the events and programs promoted in the bulletin coincide with that intent or is it just a bunch of fluff and stuff to keep your church members busy?

When I’m playing Super Mario, like Adam, I’m enjoying my run the most when I ignore the Goombas and Koopas, pay no attention to the power-ups, and simply run for my life towards the flag at the end, getting there as fast as possible. Chew on that metaphor for a minute!

3. You don’t need a huge budget to do things well.

One of Canabalt’s best features is its sound design. In the previously linked to interview, it is mentioned that many of these sound effects were recorded on the built-in mic of a laptop! Amazing!

You may not have the best equipment or the biggest budget, but with a little resourcefulness and know-how, you can still do it well.

4. Don’t betray your mission.

The creator of Canabalt says,

“…it makes a lot of sense to start with something simple, purify it, then figure out how you can expand on it within your time limits and budget without betraying it or messing it up.”

I couldn’t agree more. We often heap so many features, ideas, words, images, etc. into what we are working on that we lose sight of the original goal.

5. Observe, adjust and repeat for maximum awesome.

Canabalt takes advantage of something called “procedurally generated content.” In a nut shell, the game is constantly monitoring how you are playing the game and then adjusts the game so that the next obstacle provides the best balance of fun and challenge. Genius!

By constantly observing, adjusting and repeating the process, we could maximize our effectiveness in and outside the church.

How effectively does your communications team handle incoming projects? Get feedback from your team and those who work with them. Adjust. Observe. Get more feedback! Do the same for all communication vehicles, small groups, visitor relations (great source of feedback there), anywhere!

By the way, go play Canabalt. It’s a good time.

OneBody has released an open source version of their social network and directory software for churches and I’m wicked excited about it!

<rant>

Churches spend a lot of money on church management systems (ChMS). Over the last year, I’ve had several discussions with those in the church tech sphere about the lack of a viable, open source ChMS. It seems to me that the thousands of dollars spent each year by churches on commercially available solutions like ACS, Church Community Builder, Fellowship One and the like could be better spent on stuff like feeding the poor and whatnot.

Please don’t get me wrong. I’m all for the companies mentioned above making a profit on their products (especially CCB, I love you guys). And I realize that an enterprise level ChMS coming out of the open source development community is a tall order so there will always be a place for them. However, I also think companies like Automattic (they make Wordpress) have proven that there is money to be made in the open source, web app market.

</rant>

OneBody has a load of valuable features including:

• Unlimited staff/admin logins
• Unlimited users
• Groups
• Online directory
• Data import/export (sync with your existing ChMS!)
• Social networking
• Campaign Monitor sync
• Custom themes
• and more!

OneBody also provides a variety of hosted solutions and development services to get your church up and running.

In the next week or so I’m going to install OneBody and give it a good going through. I’ll post my thoughts afterwards. In the mean time, I shot an email off to Tim Morgan at OneBody with a few questions. Here’s what he had to say:

Is OneBody meant to be used as a ChMS or work in tandem with an existing ChMS?
Originally, OneBody was built specifically to be used as a secondary,
slave database if you will, to an existing ChMS. Though in the past
year or so, I and several others have worked to make OneBody start to
become a viable ChMS in its own right. It still lacks many of the
features big ChMSs have, but could be a decent alternative for small
churches.

I hope to make that gap between a real ChMS and OneBody narrow a lot
more over the next several months.

Are there plans to release features like online giving, calendars/events, member management, etc?

1. Online Giving - no plans at this time, but that’s mostly because I don’t feel like I know enough about this space to make wise choices.
2. Calendars/Events - Yes. We have some integration with Google Calendar for groups, but a native calendar/event format would allow for a lot more flexibility, and churches are definitely asking for it in OneBody.
3. Member Management - We have some limited functionality in this already, as I mentioned, but hope to improve it with time.
4. Etc. - Yes, we have lots of plans for more stuff! 1.0 is quite milestone, but we’re not slowing down!

OneBody has a component built specifically for syncing data with an external system. We built it originally around ACS, but it is adaptable to any ChMS that can export data to CSV.

Are there plans for a plug-in type architecture for developers to add functionality to OneBody?
This is sort of a chicken-and-egg problem. We have a basic structure for plugins, but without an example of what is really needed by a real plugin, it’s hard to know what hooks and other APIs we need to provide in our code to plugin writers.

I assume the needs will become more obvious as people start to plan with OneBody more and think of things they want it to do.

In general, though, if a feature is useful to some percentage of churches over like 20%, then adding the “plugin” directly to the source code of the core product is what I usually recommend.

Yesterday Adobe announced that Flash CS5 will allow developers to export their Flash projects as iPhone apps. I think that’s really cool and the announcement produced the following thoughts in me:

• Oh tight! Now I can develop some of my own apps instead of outsourcing to developers (which I don’t mind doing, for the record)! :-D
• Oh man. I wonder if this will increase all the garbage apps in the iTunes store. :-/
• Hmmm…I wonder if this will allow development of more premium apps on a smaller budget. :-)

After that, I did not give it much thought. That is, until I drove into work this morning.

While daydreaming on I-35 a new thought hit me. If you’ve read Church Tech Dump long (there might be 2 of you…hi mom!) then you know my thoughts about iPhone apps for churches. In a nutshell, at this point they are novel but don’t do much more than a mobile website. This of course does not take into account the appearance of YouVersion Live (does that come out tomorrow?).

Now, with the news that Flash will be a development platform for the iPhone, things change a bit. There is now a lower barrier to entry for developing iPhone applications. The learning curve for creating something useful with Flash is much smaller. Your church may already have someone on staff who can move around in Flash with some level of comfort. Now, even if your church’s iPhone app is nothing but something neat to look at, at least you didn’t spend $10k developing it.

According to this FAQ, apps developed in Flash will still have access to some of the iPhone’s APIs including:

• MultiTouch
• Screen Orientation
• Saving images to Photo Library
• Accelerometer
• Geo-location
• Cut / Copy / Paste

That’s fun!

One thing that I guarantee will happen is we will begin to see app templates made available on sites like themeforest.net. Imagine developing a native app using a template that you bought for $30. That’s kind of fun…as long as your app actually does something useful that a website cannot do. Time will tell. If you have any ideas about what a useful iPhone app built in Flash looks like, please share!