We all want to see church technology ministries improve, but unlike other ministries in the church, it would seem that everything we want to do to improve what we can offer to support the whole congregation will cost hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars. We want to challenge this idea with the 1% margin improvement process.
The original concept for improving every little detail by 1% and gain big changes originally started with Dave Brailsford. If you want to understand the whole concept of this 1% margin improvement process, you can get it here.
So how can we take this method and apply it to the church tech ministry model? We have four areas to start, but this should be just the diving board to something more. None of these ideas are free, but all of them do not cost a ton of money.
- Invest In Training For Volunteers
This could be as big as sending them to a tech conference or as minimal as buying them a book. The idea is that we want to give them knowledge and/or experiences that take their skills to a whole new level. New technology never guarantees better services. New training will. I always push for investing in people first and then technology second. - Get A Stock Photography Membership
Most technology has a limited amount of use. New sound boards will only help your main service, a new laptop will only help that user, and a new mobile projector will only help for the one or two people that sign it out at a time. But stock photography can help out on Sunday morning presentations, youth ministry, the newsletter, your website, social media, and anything that gets printed or digitally shared as a marketing device. - Pay for Social Media and Web Apps
Posting social media and web content is important, but one little change could be investing in online services. There are numerous locations that could help: Bufferapp and Hootsuite, website plugins, editors, and more. This is all about giving your team the tools to succeed. - Let People Try Out Stuff
One of the most destructive forces against church technology is losing the ability to dream. You know what I mean, it was probably what got you into church tech ministry in the first place. You play with Linux, figure out the best hack to get your iPhone onto the overhead projector, mess with coding on a server and accidentally create a website. This dreaming is because we had devices and software to play with and so we tinkered, dreamed, and came up with new stuff. Why not give your team some new devices to play with: a new Chromecast, room to play in the church after hours, giving them software to take home.
If you could improve your church tech ministry with small steps, where would you start?
[…] wrote about a great philosophy that is starting to impact companies everywhere called the 1% change that you can read up here. Without rehashing the whole article again, the idea is you make simple changes everywhere to find […]