First Church Communications Team

Meeting Minutes

Tuesday, Oct 2, 2007

Members Present: Janet Mody, Jerry Niebaum (interim chair), Michelle Parmley, Candice Ranney, and Bill Uhler.

Update on Radio Ministry: Tom Brady is in favor of ending the radio broadcast of worship services. The Administrative Board has decided to run an announcement for several weeks that the church is considering ending the radio ministry, and the Board would like feedback from the congregation on this decision—either to continue or terminate.

Streaming Sermons via the Web: We would like to pursue the project of digitizing sermons so that audio files can be available on the web for download in Ipod or mp3 format. It is still the hope of many that the youth would take an interest in this project. Bill is going to approach our Youth Director, Tami Clark, so that we can get her help in gauging interest among the youth. Jerry has offered to help Roger Bain digitize a sermon as a test for downloading. There are capabilities that West Campus has that the Downtown location does not have. There is a lot of potential here for new forms of outreach.

Christmas Newspaper Ads & Other Advertising Opportunities: Megan has created an ad for the Journal-World “Holiday Happening” section that will be coming out in mid-November. The copy is due October 12. This year, the Journal-World is offering free color for ads over 8 inches for a cost of $350. In addition, we’ll be running ads in the newspaper 4 times in the week prior to Christmas. The cost is also $350. Candice will be working with Megan to deliver ad copy to the Journal-World.

Janet brought to our attention that several Lawrence churches are advertising in a magazine called Living in Douglas County. There is a religious section with listings of area churches, and St Margaret’s, Trinity Lutheran, Free Methodist, and a few others have space ads in this section. Janet is going to find out more about this advertising opportunity.

FUMC Website Review: Candice has made changes to the church website and would like our feedback on the new design. Please go through the various links and pages to see what works well and what might be improved. Jerry and Candice are going to continue working on the site.

Remainder of the Year: We discussed our priorities for the rest of 2007. In addition to helping promote Christmas worship services, Jerry would like to see us focus on creating informational video segments on First Church using the current video presentation created by Roger Bain for a capital campaign in 2005. The video segments could be used in a variety of ways, such as on the web or broadcast on Video on Demand. Next meeting, we will brainstorm on topics for each segment.

Bishop Wilke: Janet mentioned that Bishop Wilke will be speaking at our church on January 16 on the open door policy of the United Methodist church. It is an honor to have Bishop Wilke here speaking, and we as a committee, should be prepared to help promote his talk as well as work with the audio visual team on making sure this event is recorded for use on the web or as part of our video presentation. More will be discussed at the next meeting.

Next Meeting: Tuesday, November 6th, 7:30pm room 303 Downtown.