Faith in the Workplace: Ask a Career Coach Some Good Questions

Over the past month or so, I’ve been working with Yahoo! columnist and blogger Penelope Trunk … career coach extraordinare. She’s been a blast to work with … and just seeing the stats from her blog has made my eyes cross sometimes.

Well … she’s just released a new book called Brazen Careerist: The New Rules for Success.

Anyway, I was talking with her about doing a Q&A on the topic of work and career and the intersection of that with faith and spiritual values … and I thought I’d open up the brainstorming of ideas to the readers of this blog.

I think it’d be fun to poise some good questions to her about how a person of deep convictions — enter the evangelical Christian — can “successfully” live out your faith and values in the workplace.

Also … I’d love to hear some questions from pastors that they’d love to get the unique perspective of a “career coach” … both the questions and answers will be interesting to hear I’m sure.

Let’s be general about the questions. But also think about different scenarios a Christ-follower in particular might face. And the whole subject of “faith in the workplace.”

Send me an email with your ideas for questions … or fill out the contact form below.

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May 21, 2007 · Filed Under CCP Talk & News, Case Studies, Church Leadership

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Get Ready for Rockin Church Plants!

rockin-church-plants-small.jpg

Yes, it was bound to happen sooner or later! I am taking some notes from Cory Miller and will be launching a “Rockin Church Plant” series in a couple of months. Since church planting is in my blood and I can totally relate to these radical visionaries who are in the trenches daily following God’s call, I naturally have to give out some props to my band of brothers! And you can help too… Read more

April 10, 2007 · Filed Under Case Studies, Church Planting

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Case Study: The Q-Drive Youth Ministry Website

Check out my church’s Youth Ministry’s new website — Q-Drive.

Here are some details about the site:

  • Site is managed using Blogger via their FTP publishing option.
  • Template is a tweaked version of Blogger’s Minima template (one of my favorites).
  • Total cost: Roughly $9 for domain name. (Our hosting plan includes unlimited hosting of unique domain names.)
  • It’s still in beta … we’re still tweaking it.
  • I’m hoping to optimize it for search engines.
  • We’re using FeedBlitz as a free email newsletter. Our youth pastor posts to the blog, FeedBlitz sees it and sends it out.
  • We’re using categories (like For Parents) to distinguish posts for different audiences.
  • Flickr is making photo galleries a breeze!
  • Tobin Jackson rocks! (Yes, he’s our rockin’ youth pastor!)

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December 29, 2006 · Filed Under Case Studies, Church Media, Web Site Design

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Case Study: How We Promoted our Christmas Musical

Christmas invite card frontThis may be a little too late for some of you this Christmas, but I wanted to show you the invite business card we used for our musical presentation this year. Granger calls these “invest and invite” cards.

Download a printable PDF with our Christmas invest and invite cards sample here.

Ingredients Used:

* 2,500 Business card printing from Online Print House

* IStockPhoto for the front image, then I used the color scheme for the back

* Fonts: Goudy and Garamond

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December 14, 2006 · Filed Under Case Studies, Church Marketing

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My First Free Blogging Evaluation: Jerry McQuay of Between Sermons

Between SermonsPastor Jerry McQuay of Between Sermons was the first to take me up on my offer of a free blog assessment. (Get one too by simply sending me an email with your blog address.)
I asked him for permission to pass on my comments to CCP readers as a case study. Here are my suggested tweaks and observations to him:

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December 11, 2006 · Filed Under Blogging, Blogging Tips, Case Studies

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Case Study: How I Promoted a Tuesday Night Service for Singles

How does a church get the word out and attract new people to a Tuesday night worship service for single adults, called Day Three?

Our initial idea was to send out a direct mail postcard, targeting single adults in a 3-mile radius around our church.

[We are located next to a major mall in OKC, and have a lot of apartment complexes around us. From demographic research, we know there are many young professionals living in them who we think would enjoy the music and message of “Day Three.”]

Through the postcard, we wanted them to take a first step — logging onto a specially-themed Web site, where we would try to lower the barriers for them taking the next step — attending a Day Three Tuesday night service.

Another objective was to introduce them, through the postcard, to a “face,” a person — our singles minister, who wrote a short letter on the back inviting them to the Tuesday services. We personalized it even more with a signature and offered his email address and phone number.

Here’s the promotional tools we used:

  • Direct mail postcard [front, back] — sent to this about 4,800 people in this area.
  • Web site — since our hosting service gives us unlimited domain management, this cost less than $10. I bought the domain name, uploaded a folder for it, and pointed the domain to it. I also planted tracking code in the site too using Google’s Analytics.
  • Word of mouth — our singles minister asked our members to invite others.

Things I wish we had done differently:

  1. Got the direct-mail postcard out faster — seems like in ministry we’re always on a tight deadline
  2. Offered something for free — I’ve talked about this before [in 1, 2, 3, 4 posts]
  3. Sent a coordinated email to all our singles asking them to invite others — Word of mouth spreads easier if it’s … easy as pushing the “forward” button on an email
  4. It takes work and good planning to do something like this

Ingredients I used for this:

Weigh in on this … give me some constructive critiques … comment on this post or send me an email.

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September 22, 2006 · Filed Under Case Studies, Church Marketing, Public Relations, Web Site Design

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