At the start of the COVID Pandemic here in Canada (March 2020), churches – like all other organizations – were faced with the challenge of how to stay ‘open’ during the complete lockdown that the Ontario Government had mandated. I attend this church and when it went into lockdown I spoke with the Pastor and volunteered to help rebuild their website so he could use the website to post his weekly sermons. We also discussed how streaming could be done using Facebook and what needed to be done to improve the church’s Google listing so church attendees could be kept informed about whether or not the church was open.
After the website was rebuilt, I continued helping by posting the Pastor’s sermons onto the website on a weekly basis as well as posts of the week’s live sermon. I also migrated all of the church’s mailing lists from various Google and Excel spreadsheets and added these names to a mailing system that was integrated into the church’s website using a product called MailPoet. Because this mailing system was integrated into the website, it provided a one-stop-shop for church staff to manage the membership and mailing lists and send weekly and ad-hoc news to subscribers. To keep things easier for staff, I implemented MailPoet’s Latest Post Notifications system whereby a newsletter gets sent out automatically to all subscribers every Saturday afternoon. This newsletter contains a summary of all news items added to the website during the week including Sunday’s sermon. This has saved a lot of time for me and church staff in preparing the weekly newsletter and it ensures that everyone on the mailing list will have the most up-to-date news and the week’s sermon on a regular basis.
Some other services I have provided for the church include:
- Zoom training on:
- How to do a live video recording
- Using MailPoet for membership lists and sending newsletters
- Using Google Email more effectively
- Complete software setup and configuration of a new laptop
- Replace failed hard disk drive on a DELL All-in-One unit and restored all software and data and updated all software to latest versions
- Remote Desktop Support
- Automated the integration of their website with Google My Business and Facebook so all new website posts are automatically added to Facebook and Google My Business
- Created surveys, using SurveyMonkey for church voting
- Website hosting
- Implementation of Microsoft 365 for church
- Migrate all email from Google and from SMTP to Microsoft 365
- Implement SharePoint sites for news and file sharing
- Implement Teams for collaboration and project management
- Provide several user guides and training videos for staff on the use of Microsoft 365
