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Is Your Church in the Cloud?

Posted by John Saddington on Mar 25, 2010

Quick question of the day:

Do you use cloud services for your ministry and/or organization? Why and which service?

Go.

John Saddington

John is the Chief Editor @ The 8BIT Network and Senior Blog Junkie here at ChurchIT.He enjoys Triple-Tall Americanos, developing Wordpress Themes, and a few other Random Things.

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17 Responses to “Is Your Church in the Cloud?”

  1. Mark Meeks
    Thursday, March 25, 2010 at 9:08 am

    We’d be lost without the cloud. Currently we’re using Google Wave and Google Calendar for planning. To some degree we use Google Docs. We also use Vimeo a lot both for sharing videos with the church Body as well as “hidden” accounts to share videos among the creative staff.

    In the past we’ve used Yahoo Groups and Wiggio for file sharing and collaboration, but find Wave handles it a little bit more nicely (even though it can be a little buggy at times).

    Reply
    • John Saddington
      Thursday, March 25, 2010 at 9:17 am

      what about your hosting and services there?

      Reply
  2. Stuart
    Thursday, March 25, 2010 at 9:16 am

    Yup – my church sure is in the cloud.

    Cloud cuckoo land is where! ;)

    Reply
  3. Joseph Parente
    Thursday, March 25, 2010 at 9:28 am

    Love to hear from anyone who is doing this with good/bad experience. It’s high on my list with relaunching our church website. Not convinced yet either way.

    Reply
  4. Graham
    Thursday, March 25, 2010 at 9:41 am

    Yes we do! We switched over to Google Apps back in December. Loving it! Still trying to figure out how to get Google to upgrade us for free to the “Educational/Premiere Edition” since we are a non-profit. I heard it was possible… just haven’t gotten the right code or something like that.

    Suggestions?

    Reply
    • Greg Davis
      Thursday, March 25, 2010 at 10:25 am

      Yea, I tried that for our church but the problem was we did not have an official 501(3)(c) filing. Google requires that identification number in order to qualify for the upgraded edition.

      Reply
      • Nick Blevins
        Thursday, March 25, 2010 at 10:46 pm

        Greg, your church isn’t a qualified non-profit? I noticed your church giving page says gifts are 100% tax deductible, how do you pull that off without a 501c3?

        We simply provided our tax id # and Google approved it pretty quickly.

        Reply
        • Greg Davis
          Friday, April 9, 2010 at 3:44 pm

          Apparently according to the IRS rules, churches have ‘defacto’ 501(3)(c) status.

          Reply
    • JayCaruso
      Thursday, March 25, 2010 at 10:31 am

      Graham,

      Check this link. This is the form to fill out. As you can see, there is an area there where you select that you have under 3000 people. Says it takes about 1-2 weeks to make the change.

      http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/request.py?contact_type=nonprofit

      Reply
  5. Greg Davis
    Thursday, March 25, 2010 at 10:22 am

    We are very much so. As technology director, I don’t want us to waste time and money on IT. IT for us is a tool – a means to an end. Doing ministry and reaching people for Christ is our purpose. So, we utilize technology services which help us accomplish our vision. Cloud services we use or have used include:

    * Google Apps
    * Planning Center Online
    * Church Community Builder (CCB)
    * Web Hosting (Media Temple)
    * Vimeo
    * Social Networks (Twitter, Facebook)
    * Lala
    * TokBox (video conference)
    * Dimdim (remote desktop sharing)
    * 37Signals Products (Basecamp, Highrise)
    * TimeBridge
    * MemberHub (for Group Collaboration)

    May have missed some but that’s what comes to mind.

    Reply
  6. Joseph Parente
    Thursday, March 25, 2010 at 10:31 am

    Hmm.. I guess I was thinking more in terms of hosting. We are using many of the same services:

    Google Apps
    Basecamp
    Facebook, Twitter
    Vimeo
    Lala
    LogMeIn
    Etc.

    Anyone have insight on publicly accessible cloud storage in particular?

    Reply
  7. Eric Frisch
    Thursday, March 25, 2010 at 1:45 pm

    Definitely. We use Planning Center, Google Calendar, Box.net (to distribute charts, etc. to band members), Dropbox (to move files to our PowerPoint laptop, no matter who has it at the time).

    Reply
  8. Matt Kerner
    Thursday, March 25, 2010 at 2:04 pm

    We’ve been using the cloud for almost three years for mail services and docs. Most of our cloud services come from Google, but we do use S3 and a few other services. We do all of our worship planning in Google spreadsheets and collaborate with a lot of other documents. Using Google Apps for mail has been great in reducing management overhead. To date we’ve not really had any major issues. I do sometimes wonder about the need for local backups of cloud data, but haven’t put much work into it yet.

    Reply
  9. Malcolm
    Friday, March 26, 2010 at 11:03 am

    Yes, we are.

    We are using Church Community Builder for our church CRM and online community. Still need to expand overall usage within the church though.

    Our staff is now using Google Apps mail… although all of them are using Outlook to check their email… we are looking at ways to go more cloud based.

    Reply
  10. John Voorhis
    Monday, March 29, 2010 at 12:55 pm

    Comprehensive Google apps vs Exchange discussion @ the Church IT Roundtable:

    http://citrt.pbworks.com/Google-Apps-Pros-Cons-Other

    Reply

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