DREAM International Creative Ministries

MinistryTech: IM and emails

August 28, 2009

Communication is a basic key to a successful ministry. Numerous things can go wrong because of miscommunication. When iDREAM is out conducting an event, having a couple walky-talkies on hand is always great. In this day of age its hard for our generation to live without a cell phone or device that can connect to the internet. On top of that, social sites like Facebook, Myspace and Friendster is making communicating with friends and relatives easier and sometimes even creatively.


You might be thinking, “how does this tie into my leadership or my ministry?” In the next few posts of MinistryTech we’ll go over some tricks and ideas that can help save money and time by using the free services that are on the internet.

For starters, lets start with Instant Messaging and email. There is Yahoo Messenger, Gtalk, MSN, and Skype to name a few. Not everyone in your church or ministry group has a computer or internet in their homes but almost everyone has an email address in one of those major e-communication companies. One way of keeping information constant and consistent is to broadcast it over email and instant messaging. During a meeting or worship gathering, you can easily hand out pieces of paper where they can fill up some basic information (name, email, cell, etc..) that you could use in contacting them or passing on information. From there you can either use your own email address or create a new one using your Church’s or ministry’s name. Try to make email accounts in the companies that your members use.

If you are interested in instant messaging you can download Pidgin which is a program that allows you to open multiple accounts to view and chat. Pidgin does not take up too much memory and is simple to use. You can now keep in contact with your members all the time. Best of all it is FREE!

When you need to manage your email accounts you can either use Microsoft’s Outlook or download the free alternative, Thunderbird. Thunderbird is simple to use with its user guide in adding email accounts. Now sending email can be easier without logging into each account.

To finish up this MinistryTech edition, I’d like to pass on a little tip. The Philippines is known as the SMS capital of the world being that everyone has a cell phone and uses text messaging as a past time. The online service Chikka is a great tool for sending out text messages for free. Chikka is limited to 5 messages a day per member. Its not that bad if you need to pass on 1 or 2 messages a day to all your members.

Next week: Social Networks for ministry



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