First Church Communications Team

Meeting Minutes

Tuesday, April 3, 2007

Members Present: Megan Chichester, Janet Mody, Jerry Niebaum (interim chair), Michelle Parmley, Amy Rose, Andy Smith, Bill Uhler, Patti Winn.

Update on Guidebook & Email: After a considerable amount of work, Jerry and Rachel Wegener were nearly finished with adding email addresses to the other contact information for members in the upcoming guidebook. Because of differences in the way the data was stored with the church and the publishers of the guidebook, all 922 member entries had to be reformatted. For each entry in the guidebook, up to 2 email addresses will be listed. Jerry reported that approximately one-half of the congregation has an email address listed in the guidebook (404 entries) and that 80-100 entries opted out of having their email address published.

Web Annex: Jerry has been working on a website he calls the web annex to the church’s site. Included in this site are pages for music and history. The music site contains links to the CD “Celebrating 150 Years.” There are 18 tracks available for download in a mp3 format or for Ipod. The history site contains a history of our pipe organ and the history of First Church 1915-1954 and 1954-2004. There are currently no links from the church’s website to the web annex and we need to discuss this with Candice so the word can get out about this available information.

Follow-up Business Card Collection: The collection of business cards has been very slow. Megan created a new label for the collection jars that will better match the PowerPoint slide that is shown before worship. We’ll continue to collect cards and then discuss at the next meeting our next step in this ministry.

Inspiration Network & Other Advertising: Jerry was approached by a cable network called the Inspiration Network that is shown locally on channels 88 & 89. They want to provide video on demand information about local churches and would like for First Church to create a 15-minute informational video on the church. The cost to the church is $250 a month plus the initial costs of creating the video that have been estimated at $1000-1500. Roger Bain has volunteered to create the presentation. He is scheduled to attend the next meeting to show us a presentation he did for a past capital campaign and also some samples of video from the Inspiration Network.

Tom Brady has expressed his desire to drop the current radio ministry, which costs $200 a month. Tom does not think it is very productive especially with some of the technical problems that occur during the broadcast. The quality could be much better. If we drop the broadcast, there would be money available for the Inspiration Network video. We need to decide if that is really something worth doing.

Andy brought to our attention an opportunity that we decided was very economical. We will be putting an ad in a publication called “Lawrence Welcome” for $300 for one year. This publication is distributed to new Lawrence residents and contains information about community services.

The Leo Center: The Leo Center is an organization that helps low-income families with a variety of needs including food and medical assistance. They would like to have First Church help in getting the word out about their organization. More information is needed about them before we commit to any assistance and Amy has offered to do research.

Next Meeting: Tuesday, May 1st, 7:30pm room 303 Downtown. And unless we have something to discuss, we will break from meeting during the summer resuming regular meetings in September.