As I’ve published over 500 articles on eQuipping for eMinistry (e4e) in over five years, I thought a good post for January 2015 would be to share some possible ideas for new tech resolutions for you using previous e4e posts.

No Staff Left Behind

It’s always been my concern that Cru staff maintain at least a minimum level for their tech skills. If you know you need to learn some new tech skills, find something that would work for you in one of the sections below and… share this post with your friends.

Every one of us needs to make it a priority in our lives to keep growing in this area as technology changes every year. Determine to learn a tech skill every week (or month). At minimum, you should know the Essential Tech Skills for Cru Staff. Choose from these posts to save printing and battery costs, manage your social media, and more.

Let’s get right to this, shall we? Just pick what will work for you.

New Year’s Resolutions from the You-Can-Too Series

Maybe you started the You-Can-Too series from last year and would like to complete it. Or maybe you didn’t do any part of the series last year, but have time this coming year to focus on one of the sub-topics: social media, communication, websites, or databases. Visit the table of contents for the series here. At minimum, here’s a summary of some ideas from the series to have giving links on your blog, on MailChimp emails, and more.

New Year’s Resolutions for MPD

Your January MPD Tasks explains the MPGA report and the 13-Month Report and why you would want to look at them in January.

Setting Communication Goals for the Year Ahead gives you some ideas how to use StaffWeb reports to plan your connections with your ministry partners in the year ahead.

Is your give.cru.org page up-to-date? It needs to be. How Does Your Free Web Page Look? will tell you how to update and what you should include.

Plan Ahead to Publish Regular Prayer Letters has my downloadable spreadsheet that I use to plan our prayer letters and fund appeals. I look it over every January to see if it needs any adjusting, but essentially my online calendar and this spreadsheet are the same every year. We stick to these dates and publish a prayer letter or fund appeal every six weeks (and also write blog posts and email news in between).

Switch from sending PDF newsletters to MailChimp.

Read Keep Those Cards Coming to learn an organized way to send regular greeting cards easily to your ministry partners.

Other New Year’s Resolutions

Sign up to be an Online Missionary with Global Media Outreach.

Make sure all your communication internally, or in blogs, or in prayer letters, follows Cru’s style manual. Read In GOS We Trust.

Start using the Online Reimbursements feature on the StaffWeb.

Start following eQuipping for eMinistry regularly and encourage your friends to as well.  Here’s some reasons why.

My New Year’s Resolutions for eQuipping for eMinistry

We anticipate a very full year for the Schmitt clan in 2015, so as best as I can, I’d like 1) to continue with six varied posts per month, especially focusing on blogging this year, and 2) to tweak e4e’s structure a bit so you can easily come back to it when you’re ready to tackle specific tech goals.  For example, if you want to begin using Twitter in ministry, I’d want to direct you to one location in eQuipping for eMinistry with a step-by-step guide.

What did you decide you’d like to do for next year?  Did I overlook something that you’d like to do? Feel free to suggest it and I’ll see how I can help you.

Source: The image of Baby New Year was printed in 1910 and is in the public domain.