According to ChurchMag readers and further confirmed by Tyndale’s recent survey on Church and Technology, the two biggest obstacles facing Church IT (and perhaps the Church in general) is having enough volunteers and funding.
Yesterday, I shared my thoughts on a solution for the lack of volunteers — Digital Discipleship — and shared my personal experience building a Church A/V team.
Today, I’m really looking forward to your input, as we begin to formulate some practical solutions when it comes to the second Church IT obstacle facing Church Technologists: Funding.
Budget
One of the biggest reasons Church IT gets the shaft is it never makes it into the budget. Adding wifi hotspots, upgrading software and replacing the Chruch soundboard is often funded from the Church emergency fund. If it’s not coming from the Church emergency fund, it’s probably combined with another area of ministry that absorbs and dominates the majority of funds delegated.
If your Church doesn’t have a dedicated budget for Church IT, get it added. Outline a budget for the next three to five years that includes upgrades, maintenance and growth.
Toy Time
Let’s be honest, there are plenty of people that see Church Technologists as bunch of t-shirt wearing teenagers who play with expensive toys.
It’s our own fault.
I know too many Church techies that push the budget envelope too far. You don’t need the latest technology, you don’t need the highest grade computer and you don’t need to get the latest software upgrade the day it’s released.
When I worked for a large non-profit, I was responsible for purchasing computer and sound gear. After three or four years, my persona developed into such a way that other departments in the organization believed I was given approval for anything I wanted. It simply wasn’t the case. The truth of the matter was, I only ordered what I needed with a little headroom left for growth. I was responsible and frugal with my purchase requests, and over the course of time, I built rock solid trust with the powers that be.
As Church Technologists, we need to do the same. Otherwise, you’re just a dumb kid with a comic book hero on your t-shirt.
Go Cheap
The flip side is going cheap. I’ve worked in sound rooms and project booths that were so ill patched, nothing worked well, and it was a puzzle to figure anything out. You do get what you pay for, so don’t go to the opposite extreme. It’s important to find the balance between acting like a giant child and doing a bad job. I’ve found that whenever you try too hard to pinch pennies and cut corners, you end up loosing all the money you save in time, energy and more hardware and software to fix the problem created by trying to save a few hundred bucks in the first place!
Questions
I would love to hear from your own experiences!
Have you successfully overcome the funding obstacle?
Are there answers in open source?
Thoughts?
[Image via smackfu]
George says
” I’ve found that whenever you try too hard to pinch pennies and cut corners, you end up loosing all the money you save in time, energy and more hardware and software to fix the problem created by trying to save a few hundred bucks in the first place!”
Amen to this, my last church was this way, they piece·mealed everything together over so many years that when I finally came into the picture it took me weeks of agony and a couple of grand trying to sort it all out and get it to something usable..
Joshua Gish says
The sad thing is this affected me today. We needed more storage to save our broadcasts on and the guy in charge of financing ordered the cheapest brand available instead of something that would hold up. That was two months ago an sadly, the hard drive crashed today. I hope that I can use this as leverage to get quality products where needed.
Eric Dye says
This makes me sad.
I hope you can save the data.
Use it as leverage. Now they’ll end up spending more by having purchased two drives, than had they bought a good one in the first place!
Peter says
I do think that you bring up a good point Eric by asking the “open-source” question. There are so many wonderful open source projects out there that I think the church may want to consider.
One of the big ones that I know that you are big fan of is WordPress. I’m a big fan of it too and we are migrating all of our web properties to WordPress at the moment.
There are definitely pros and cons to every open source project, but nevertheless, I think that the church should consider each one when it comes time to evaluating their options.
Eric Dye says
WordPress FTW! 😀
April says
We’re in a place right now where we’re trying to purchase our camera and every month it seems that the budget just won’t allow it. It’s frustrating on my end because we just had events such as our church dedication and such that the camera would have been a blessing to have.
Jonathan Gardner says
Ouch. I’ve been there. The funny thing is for most people, once they finally see the equipment in operation, they usually say “why didn’t we do this a long time ago?”
Eric Dye says
HA! So true!
Eric Dye says
Another example of budgeting. I hope you get the camera, soon!