Catholic Tech Talk

I’ve seen lots of blog posts and articles advocating podcasting your church’s homilies.  Unfortunately, unless your quite geeky, this can prove to be a daunting task.  Its actually rather simple, If you know the technologies pieces and how they go together.  I ran across this article from the Catholic Diocese of Sacramento describing in technical [...]

Many of the comments and questions I receive on Catholic Tech Talk center around building a good church website, website design tips, and site maintenance.  The most common question I receive is one looking for examples of good church websites.  While I occasionally lament that there’s a lot of very poor websites out there, increasingly [...]

I just got back from the 2012 Interactive Connections conference.  It was a great couple of days of information sharing, discussions, along with a few good debates.  It is great to see the church awaken (albeit slowly) to the power of Internet and technology.  I loved in particular Father Rice’s (@lrice) keynote address.  It was [...]

I’ve been thinking a great deal lately on what makes a great church website.  I’ve seen some beautiful websites, gorgeous sites that are virtually non-functional and, on the other end of the spectrum, there are those content rich sites that are so densely packed with information they can only be used by experienced research librarians [...]

As I drove into work today, I was surprised to hear two of the main stories beyond the upcoming presidential election were both on Social Media.  One was a brief interview from an Egyptian Author, Wael Ghonim, who just published the book “Revolution 2.0″ on the power for crowds, crowd sourcing, and social media to [...]

I’m starting to see more and more good Catholic Apps out there, so many, that I’m losing track of them.  Consequently, we’re starting to create the Catholic Tech Talk Resource Pages which is a compilation of your favorite apps or church services.  Please take a look at our growing list of Catholic Apps here, http://catholictechtalk.com/mobile-apps.  [...]

In terms of technology adoption, I’ve heard cynically stated that Catholics move ‘at the speed of church’.  Well, as John Fielding put in his comment on the last CTT blog entry, Vimeo vs. YouTube, “we Catholics are finally catching up”.  I am pleasantly surprised to see that Catholics now have two annually technology conferences available [...]

One of the challenges hitting some web administrators is the need to provide a bilingual version of their website.  The Hispanic population is one of the fastest growing segments of the Catholic faithful and in many markets in the US its becoming a prerequisite that the church offer masses in both English and Spanish.  If [...]

Take a look at your Church’s Home Page today.  What’s on it? In larger companies or design agencies, there’s a formal role on a web project called a User Experience Designer.  This person’s role is to consider the user’s wants, needs, and understanding when they go to your website.  While attending ParishSoft’s User Conference and [...]

“We’re compliant” is a phrase I’ve heard too many vendors say rather dismissively.  Unfortunately, equally too many customers dismiss these responses as well with almost a sigh of relief.  While the statement sounds good it shouldn’t be treated as a rubber stamp.  If your church accepts credit cards for online donations, events, or any retail [...]

We often say that Church needs to utilize Social Media to better connect with the youth of today as well as reach out to anyone interested in learning more.  Well, I couldn’t of found a better example of leveraging Social Media this week than Busted Halo’s Sacraments 101 series on YouTube.  This series does two [...]

In the spirit of Twitter’s #ff (Follow Fridays), I’d like to introduce you to Catholic Tech Talk’s $FF or free finds.  A $FF is our acronym (yes, us techies and the Catholic Church love our acronyms) for a recommendation on a technical tool or service that is free or nearly free that can help our [...]

Jimmy, tweets don’t die, but they don’t go to heaven either.  They actually live forever out on the Internet. If you use Twitter, you tend to live in the moment.  Everything about Twitter is geared toward recency.  What’s ‘trending’ on Twitter is a familiar term for Twitter users.  As a microblog tool, you may think [...]

I’m spending the weekend at the Catholic New Media Conference and quite frankly, I’m impressed. The quality of the speakers, the content, and the questions are on par with any secular social media conference I’ve seen. There’s about 120 people here from a broad spectrum of parishes and dioceses and they’re all excited and engaged. [...]

Do you check out our website, follow us on Twitter, on Facebook, via an RSS feed, or do you just wait for the emails to come out?  Do you think there’s a team of people behind the scenes executing all these functions for you, the reader, trying to reach you on whatever social media venue [...]

Software As a Service (SAAS) SAAS is becoming rather commonplace in Corporate America, but has only recently started to enter our world. The idea that your church’s software and data is housed ‘somewhere’ in the Internet cloud may leave some uneasy, but I’d like to make the case that its actually a better place for [...]

Chances are your church has a Church Management System (CMS) such as ParishSoft, ACS, Logos, or Parish Data System.  A CMS tracks your church’s members, their pledges, donation history, sacramental history, and may help you manage your church’s finances.  It’s probably installed on one computer in the office somewhere and, if your lucky, it’s networked [...]

Make Sure This Doesn’t Happen to Your Church’s Facebook Page One of they keys to successful communication is needing to listen to the person that you wish to talk to.  The same definitely holds true for Social Media. Social Media is about engaging other people online.  That engagement includes active listening, monitoring the conversations and [...]