Childrens Ministry Online

Calendar Planning: Promotion deadlines

Posted on22. 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 on23. 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 on14. 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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