Google: A Free Solution for Small Budgets
June 2, 2008
Worship Planning has become high-tech these days. There are dozens of options of web-based and software-based resources to aid and assist in worship planning and scheduling. Most of these premium resources have monthly subscription fees. For example, some worship leaders have chosen to use pay services such as Planning Center Online to plan and share resources with team members. I think that is a great option for those who have the financial resources to implement that. Large churches typically have a big enough budget to accommodate the monthly fees associated with PCO and similar solutions.
But what if you’re serving at a smaller church with little to no financial resources set aside for this sort of thing?
Google works.
Google works nicely.
And it’s free.
So here’s how it works.
- Get your whole team on email. It’s the 21st century; there’s no reason we should be communicating with carrier pigeons. No seriously, make sure everyone’s connected. Do a workshop if you need to.
- Go to Google and sign up for a Google account. I used my own existing email account. You don’t necessarily have to set up a gmail account.
- Set up a group. You’ll find “Groups” in the top links of google (possibly in the “more” link).
- Go to the members section and MANUALLY add all of your team members (using the email addresses you’ve collected from step 1).
Voila. You’ve created an email based discussion group that can be accessed through email OR by visiting the groups page you created.
What Can You Do With This Group?
- Upload files to the file section. Each week I add reference mp3s, chord charts, vocal rehearsal tracks, and whatever else my team members need to prepare for rehearsal.
- Start discussions. Similar to a discussion forum, you can start and reply to topics in your group. I post the weekly line-up and who is scheduled to sing and/or play that week.
- We also use the discussion forum for “get to know you” question games, silly photo caption contests, “off” requests (by team members), observations from leaders, praise, constructive criticism, prayer requests, daily or weekly devotionals for team members, etc.
- It’s one of the small ways we build community within the team. Not only do we see each other twice a week, but every team member is constantly connected to the discussion forums.
- Each team member can also choose the level of email activity they get each day. For instance, you can choose to get every email reply to a topic, or to get one summary with all emails for the day. You can even choose no email activity and participate by visiting the site only, but I encourage our team members to at least select the daily summary email option, since, at times, we make changes to a key or the rotation might change.
We really push pre-practicing. We want all of our team members to be able to sing or play their parts BEFORE Wednesday rehearsal if possible. It only takes a few minutes for our singers to download their tracks and have them in their mp3 players or on a cd. It takes a little bit more for our musicians, but in the end it’s VERY worth it.
Before you go and upload your whole iTunes worship library to Google though, make sure that what you are “sharing” with your team is legal. I’m NOT advocating just ripping mp3s and posting them online. What I would suggest is that you make rehearsal tracks using your own musicians if possible.
I know that Google doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of some of it’s pricier alternatives, but it’s definitely worth a look if you’re on a zero to low worship budget. My team has consistently gotten better because of the availability of reference material to practice BEFORE our regular rehearsal.
Russ Hutto
Russ serves in Media/Music at House of Joy in Valdosta, GA and blogs at www.russhutto.com.
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Russ,
Great thoughts. My church has used Google and yahoo groups to coordinate ministry efforts.
It’s also cool to see a post up for the zero budget and low budget guys.
Another good resource is writeboard (writeboard.com) from 37signals. It’s a scaled down version of backpack (their subscription service.) It doesn’t have any file sharing or email reminder capabilities, but it’s quick and easy. It also has the ability to subscribe by RSS to see any revisions to something that was created. This site would probably be more useful for songwriting collaboration. We’ve found it very helpful for worship planning. Might switch over to Google groups, though, after reading this article!
That’s great, Russ. Lots of helpful info. I can definitely see how using Google groups (and Gmail, Google calendar, Google docs, etc etc) would be super helpful in a worship ministry.
Sounds like a great alternative to planning center for those on a low budget.
Wow! Thanks for this post. I had been looking for a free solution that had some features of Planning Center Online for a while. I ended up just posting my practice tracks and chord sheets to a free web hosting service called Fileave. With the Google groups account, there are so many more features for interaction and collaboration, on top of it having more storage, actually being secure, and being easier to upload and share my files.
This is a really useful post, many thanks!!
Thanks, everyone, for the great comments.
We’ve been using the google groups option for almost a year now and it is definitely an easy-to-use and money saving option for churches with small or no worship planning budgets at all.
Ryan, I agree about Writeboard for songwriting collaboration and things like that. My co-writer and I are using Writeboard for the children’s worship book we’ve started working on.
Russ, great article. We use The Planning Center Online at Sojourn and it works out well for us, but realistically, not every church has the budget for something like that. As you say, Google works nicely and it’s free. Thanks for presenting your case so well.
Bobby – Writeboard is a bit more limited than some things – but for something quick and free with comments and rss updates – you really can’t go wrong if the task works with it!
I lead the worship design team at Asbury Seminary, and we use google docs to coordinate all of our Orders of Worship (we have 3 services a week). Everyone having access to the OW makes it really easy for us.