I need technology assistance and advice to help missionary work

[Pergamum]

Hello;

I am not low-teach, but I am far from hi-tech (is there a medium-tech?)....


So, I have a few needs to help the missionary work to which God has called me.

Also, I value your advice about good and bad missionary communication practices.




FIRST:

I use hotmail to send out my email prayer letters. I have a 100 per day limit to prevent spam abuse.

So, I send it out over 3 days and usually make it into a pdf attachment.

If you were a missionary needing to send out several hundreds email updates, how would you do it? What format? How do I manage the never-ending address changes, additions and removals from my list, etc?

I pride myself on being an avid communicator, but this is a large chore - especially with many, many needs here.


SECOND:

I use Prayerletters.us to send out my snail mail prayer letters. Sometimes people change their addresses as well and this results in a regular cost of mailing letters that get returned to me (about 3-5% every time I send out snail mail letters...my mailing list runs about 250). I need to keep sending snail mail letters too it seems because some of the older supporters are not yet email saavy.

THIRD:

I need to write and publish some booklets for the national church here. What is a good program to do the formatting and layout myself so that I can merely send it to a printer in this country with a thumb drive. I need all booklets to have attractive layout and pictures (many people here are only semi-literate).

FOURTH

I need to print out large quantities of brochures about my own work and also about the work on the field here. One for my personal furlough needs, and the other becuase I will be representing my mission at Urbana 09 in St Louis this year (Dec 27th-31st).

But Kinkos will break the bank for me!!!

What is the best way to mass produce these materials? Any churches have printing presses or facilities to help me do this?


FIFTH:

What are some general advice and warnings about good and bad missionary commmunication practices. How can I make things easier for me and bring glory to God in my efforts to communicate needs.




Sixth:

Oh yeah, I forgot....

How can I post PDF prayer letters securely online so that supporters can come to a website and see my prayer letters, but others cannot? Remember: I have had info security problems in the past. I would love to post moreinfo on Facebook, but can this be done securely?..especially if I am posting info on the Religion of Peace, etc?

 

[jambo]

The first thing is you need to streamline. Sending prayer letters, missionary updates etc is fine when it is going to family, friends, your home church and others who financially support you. But sending it to people to hear you speak at a meeting, are stirred and ask to receive your prayer letter actually pose a problem. Some of them forget you five minutes after you are gone, others may use the first few prayer letters to pray but then because of the number of missionary prayer letters they receive then yours is relegated, and then others will pray faithfully. The missionaries problem is he does not know who uses them and who doesn't.

I would compose a list of those who need to receive it (family, close friends, home church etc) and for all the others send a note asking them to respond saying they want to continue receiving news or else you will remove them from your list. It is true some intend to respond but don't; but you do need to be ruthless and prune the list.

Hotmail/Spam limitations. I would move away from hotmail to another provider. Hotmail has its risks and defects and I would switch to another provider that lets you send more than 100 mails per day.

Snailmail: This is always the problem of people moving house and not telling you. If a letter is returned then just take them of the list.

For the supporters with e-mail, I notice some missionaries use blogs to keep people updated. It might be easier sending a mail saying the blogpost has been updated and people can log on themselves to see updates.

Booklets: I recently published a booklet for our church. It ran to 62 pages of A5 but I just typed it, transferred it to a USB stick and gave it to a local printer who produced it. It turned out well but it was just done through Microsoft Word programme.

Brochures: Again with Word I find these things straight forward enough. A digital camera and a few bits of text and the results can look quite spectacular.


Good/bad communication practices. When I wrote prayer letters I was always mindful of the person I may have been writing about. How would they feel if they read this? A good practice is keep people regularly informed and also to follow up items that have been mentioned previously. Also supporters liked to hear about the work but they were also interested in the family too and how the children were doing at school etc.

Security: Also I would never put anything on line, no matter how secure, that could compromise any of the local believers or that could be construed as being critical of the local regime. There is a need to communicate needs but there is also a need to protect the people you work with and amongst. Sooner or later, the wrong person gets access to it.

 

[Edward]

THIRD:

I need to write and publish some booklets for the national church here. What is a good program to do the formatting and layout myself so that I can merely send it to a printer in this country with a thumb drive. I need all booklets to have attractive layout and pictures (many people here are only semi-literate).

FOURTH

I need to print out large quantities of brochures about my own work and also about the work on the field here. One for my personal furlough needs, and the other becuase I will be representing my mission at Urbana 09 in St Louis this year (Dec 27th-31st).

But Kinkos will break the bank for me!!!

What is the best way to mass produce these materials? Any churches have printing presses or facilities to help me do this?


Sixth:

Oh yeah, I forgot....

How can I post PDF prayer letters securely online so that supporters can come to a website and see my prayer letters, but others cannot? Remember: I have had info security problems in the past. I would love to post moreinfo on Facebook, but can this be done securely?..especially if I am posting info on the Religion of Peace, etc?

Let's start with format - first, you need to identify who will be doing the printing (and for large press runs, a commercial printer is probably going to be much cheaper than a copyshop like Kinkos (by the way - they've changed the name to FedEx now so look for the new signs)

Once you know who is going to print it, find out what formats they can electronically accept.

You've indicated that you do your prayer letters in PDF - that might be a good format for the brochures and booklets to make sure that they end up looking like you want. But again, check with the printer.

As far as security, you could set up a password protected web page on a secure server, but managing the secure passwords, doing resets, and vetting who gets them is going to be a time burden. And remember the basic rule of email and internet - if you put in an email, or on the web, expect everyone to have access to it eventually. (The contractor for the secure server may use a Muslim in India as their tech person, for example, who would have access to anything you 'securely' put up.)

So think twice before you do anything with sensitive info.

 

[Semper Fidelis]

Regarding the first issue: Google Apps. Getting your own domain name is cheap. If you need a free subdomain I can give you one. Setting up Google Apps is free and it allows lists up to a few hundred per account and you can set up as many accounts as you want.

In lieu of PDF, I would send out HTML e-mails.

 

[Pergamum]

Rich, why not PDF? Why HTML emails? Can I add pics and make it visually rich in HTML?

 

[Brian Withnell]

On the email issue, you might want to think of a private group in Yahoo that is moderated (and you are the moderator). Our church uses this for our internal prayer group, and the beauty of it is that all the members of the group control their own email address (once you are a member, you can change the email address that receives messages). Sending a message to the group (a single email) means that Yahoo then replicates the message to the rest of the group. By having the group moderated, then you don't have to worry about someone doing a reply and it going to all the members of the group.

 

[DonP]

yes a group could be good but have someone stateside manage it for you so you are not directly connected if you want max security.

Same with emails so you don't need a web or blog, or have someone stateside handle and post your blog

If you have some stateside forward your emails to your lists for you and add the message at the bottom

Do not post on any websites, or print this out.

That helps.

You have more freedom in what you say for yourself if someone else is managing the posts or emails.

Also MS Office Publisher will give you much more power, ease and variety than Word for printing.

Remember to save files in backward compatible modes if you send .docs. Many do not have the ability to open .docx 2009 version etc.

So save as old. But let people know there is a free tool so you can use 2003 and open docx now. It works great. Many may not know about it yet.

 

[Pergamum]

ok, now I am ready to publish a pamphlet/small book.... I wrote it in Word. I have Publisher however if needed. I also have access to cheap printers.

What's the best way to format it and turn it into a book, and add pictures to accompany the text?


P.s. the booklet is on Romans 9-11, anyone got any good pics of olive trees and what it means to be grafted in and cut off.... It is simple and must be visually appealing to aid reading.

 

[Semper Fidelis]

Rich, why not PDF? Why HTML emails? Can I add pics and make it visually rich in HTML?

I'm just thinking that HTML allows you to "say" what you want to say within the e-mail itself without the person having to open a PDF. You can do a lot with HTML but it might create a lot more work for you so it's probably fine to use PDF but I would ensure that you compress your images to the resolution needed to avoid large attachments.

 

[Brian Withnell]

ok, now I am ready to publish a pamphlet/small book.... I wrote it in Word. I have Publisher however if needed. I also have access to cheap printers.

What's the best way to format it and turn it into a book, and add pictures to accompany the text?


P.s. the booklet is on Romans 9-11, anyone got any good pics of olive trees and what it means to be grafted in and cut off.... It is simple and must be visually appealing to aid reading.

You might want to send a message to my wife. She is in Georgia for the next few days, so I won't see her during that time. But she used to do a lot of publishing (public affairs for the USDA Forest Service). I know she has don't publications that are full books, and delivered them in PDF format to the publisher. She also used to be an editor for a newspaper. (She is jwithnell on this forum).

 

[Pergamum]

pm sent.

I have a printing house here in country (albeit a Pentecostal one, but the guy is a good editor to chekc my local language abilities since I am composing theology in a foreign tongue) .......and if I can give them a flashdisk they can print it straight from the flash disk.

If this is the case, is the best method for me them to compose my book or pamphlet into Publisher and then make it into a PDF to print?

What about page numbering so that when the books are folded and stapled I don't have page one, then 4, then 3 then 5....(understand?)...if my printed page takes up half a page, and I need to fold over the page to make it into a book, can Publisher arrange my pages into book format?