There are a number of organizations performing relief effort down in Haiti right now.

ELCA Disaster Response partners have survived the quake and are already working to serve the people of Haiti.

This weekend in worship we’ll be asking that you make a donation to the ELCA Haiti Relief efforts.

CLICK HERE TO DONATE

I recently made the switch to Google Apps for the staff at Our Saviour’s Lutheran Church. We have been using it for about 2 weeks now and things are going pretty smoothly. At Our Saviour’s we have a wide range of staff, ranging from “not-at-all-tech-savvy” to “uber-tech-savvy”.

Here are some reasons why we switched to Google Apps:

• Move email storage off our internal servers
• Save on IT expenses
• Web-based email, calendar and docs allow us to function even when our servers go down
• We’re transitioning our website to a new Cloversite in February 2010 (more on that in a future post)

I sent an email out to our staff after 2 weeks of using Google Apps asking for feedback, the following are their responses:

Q: What is one good thing you like about Google Apps that you have found out while playing around?

A: I like creating files/labels for stuff.  It is really easier to find them rather than scrolling all over the place.

A: Chatting is awesome.

A: I need to play more … have not done more than calendar and email.

Q: What is one thing that you used to be able to do with Outlook that you are unable to do with Google Apps?

A: I haven’t found anything i cannot do and lots more than I could do.

A: Pull my hair out when my blackberry and outlook calendar had double calendar entries.

Q: What benefits do you see to using Google Apps?

A: It seems to be faster and I am getting the hang of the calendar and the filing

A: Ease of use.

Q: Have you been using your calendar? If so, what kind of events have you put in your calendar?

A: I have been mostly using the calendar for personal things but as I become more familiar with it I will put other stuff in.  I am not good about following any calendar really, so this may help me untax my brain.

A: Haven’t looked at it yet but I will.

Q: Have you been using Google Docs? If so, what kind of documents have you uploaded?

A: Nope, but again will at some point.

Here is some other feedback from staff:

The transition was pretty smooth…Congratulations!

1. The calendar is handy, as it gives email reminders for meetings.
2. The sharing of documents is neat, although I found the opening and saving of it a bit slower than on the server.  But, perhaps the advantage of security and not needing to log onto the server outweighs a small con.  I’ll probably use it for common documents, but not everything since there would be SO MANY.  It’s a bit unnerving when you get the message that it is not on a secure server.  Given that I type up a lot of confidential information, I wouldn’t use Google Docs for that.

Overall, I’m getting the feeling that the staff here at Our Saviour’s Lutheran Church likes Google Apps. They’re still learning it and playing around.

Is your organization using Google Apps? What pros and cons have you experienced?

One of my most favorite parts of working at Our Saviour’s is that I get to mentor high school kids and travel with them on their awesome adventures! Every once in awhile one of those kids does something amazing. Okay… it happens a lot…

Jennie is one of those kids. She’s now a freshman at Augustana College in Rock Island, IL. She’s decided to join forces with the Children’s Miracle Network and raise money for local children’s hospitals.

As Pastor Mark posted on his blog yesterday,

Basically I’m doing a dance marathon where we raise money for local childrens hospitals, and we spend time with the kids playing games, and just dancing.

-Jennie

So here’s what I need you to do. Jennie needs to raise $200. She’s already a little over half-way there. I’m thinking we can raise her the rest of the money really quickly!

CLICK HERE to support Jennie and the children’s hospitals near Rock Island, IL.