Today I updated that outlook PD tool to deal with the new nationalID format.  There are also some additional labels to help Office 2007 users get the different reports working. (Basically the trick is to open microsoft word before running a report and they will display as beautifully as they do in Office 2003. Please don't hesitate to let me know feature requests etc but note I am not working as much on this project since I am on Sabbatical (until summer 2008) and because I have been using my development hobby time to work on www.meetingstarter.com and other Graceful Tools (see www.gracefultools.com)

 

Over the last few months a few Stanford alumni and I have put together a site that has already been an incredible service to student at Stanford and I believe can be a great tool for everyone inside InterVarsity. The tool is called meetingstarter.com and it is a tool to help you meet with people face to face.  It has three tools:

• Appointments - makes it easy to schedule one on one without lots of emails negotiating times and location
• Meetings - helps you quickly pick a time and a place for a meeting
• Events - a quick and easy way to do online registration for a conference

I will write more later but check it out. It is really easy to use so long explanations might not be necessary.

I wanted to recommend a great little tool to keep calendars in Outlook in sync with public google calendars. this is a great way to organize calendars.

 While I like google calendar for its simple interface and easy ability to share It is still easier for me to use Outlook and I like having categories on my calendars.  Remote Calendars gives you the best of both worlds.

You can find out more or download Remote Calendars at: https://sourceforge.net/projects/remotecalendars/.

 Enjoy!
 

This version of the Outlook PD tool satisfies most of my wishes in a good contact manager and partnership development tool. As someone who is very interested in using technology well to serve the things I do I am very happy with this tool. Try it.  I think you may like it too. For more information view the readme file at IVtools Readme.

 Some of its functions include:

• creation of custom contact form which enables you to view additional fields for each contact
• ability to intelligently import donor addresses from the Excel files from the ivcf portal
• ability to intelligently import donation (DTR) information from the Excel files from the ivcf portal
• ability to intelligently import Alumni information the Excel files from the ivcf portal
• Ability to sync directly from DTR Emails that are sent from Beth! (you should still do your initial sync from the portal Excel files but after that you can save yourself many visits to the staff portal
• ability to create a review of your previous and upcoming week using from your outlook calendar
• creates suggested followup views and prospect list views for outlook contacts based on giving patterns
• ability to quickly create mailing labels and to mark the "last successful mailing date" accordingly
• ability to create a custom email mailmerge to those who receive your email updates.
• ability to create a quick status report based on what support has come in, what you should expect based on your expected giving and therefore what percentage you still need to raise.
• Ability to sync directly from DTR Emails that are sent from Beth! (you should still do your initial sync from the portal Excel files but after that you can save yourself many visits to the staff portal
• Create quick printable Reports to excel

I recently updated a new version of the Outlook PD tool. Much of what is new in this version is under the hood. You can download it in the Downloads section of IVtools.com.

What's new:

• Most significantly I removed the requirement for users to have Microsoft Access installed. This was limited certain users from doing the donor update functionality of the tool.
• Vista and Office 2007 are now fully support. (I haven't tested Office 2003 on Vista but I suspect it would work as well).
• A new Contact View can be created called "IV Donor View" This will show everyone who has giving in the current fiscal year.

Something else that is fun:

Sometimes I want to print up information from one of my contact view and take it with me or share it with a supervisor. It is easy to cut and past from the table view (in contacts) into excel the formatted is nothing to write home about. To remedy this I created a view that I am using called followupreport.doc which is located in the My Documents directory. You can use this or create your own printable versions by:

While viewing the followup view (or any view of outlook contacts).

In Outlook go to Tools - > Mailmerge

Choose "Existing Document" in the "Document File" section.

Click ok. You will see the generic merge file.

Now you simply need to merge the document. (in outlook 2003 press the "merge to document" button on the Mailmerge toolbar")

There you have it.

I just had a good conversation with the developer for www.studenjourney.org (sj). It is exciting to hear how others are using technology in ivcf to serve students. If you want to get a sense of the future of this project you can visit his blog at http://sjorg.blogspot.com.  From the description of the project you will discover that much of the functionality of student journey is under the hood. 

I just uploaded new versions of the outlook PD tool (version 1.3).

In this release I have updated the Create Contact View feature in some significant ways. First of all the new version should work for those who have had trouble with this feature in outlook 2003.

There are three basic views that can be created and then recreated. These are:

• Basic view  - which displays all the contacts with a wide range of relevant fields.
  
• IV Followup view - This displays those how have the iv followup field as marked (this field is changed each time you load a dtr into outlook and every time you run a FPD report. It includes unthanked -  those who have given in the last 12 months but have not been thanked during that time frame, Large Gift - This is any gift that is greater than twice their monthly amount, and lapsed donors - This is anyone who you have a monthly amount for but they have not given in over two months.
  
• IV Prospect View - This includes as filter that only shows those who are marked as prospects, if you would like a current donor, prayer partner or other contact to show up in this you can change their status to prospect.

These views can also be created for those who work in teams on an exchange server to filter based on the primary staff contact. This is great when using a shared folder and can be very helpful in helping a team of staff coordinate their connection to alumni.

In addition to these view this version has an updated way of creating a PD Report. The PD report creates a word document with some of the standard summary information that staff often need to review to check in on their partnership development status. This report is protected in order to enable some of the formulas to work and prevent users from accidentally changing it. To update the automatic fields simply press the TAB key.

I hope this helps. Please note the new forum recently created for you to indicate any bugs you find or feature requests.

Enjoy. 

I have been in a number of conversations recently with friends and colleagues about how technology could be used to help staff and our fellowship better serve students, the campus, and those who partners with us through support and prayer.   Around the country staff and student leaders are innovating in order to better serve the campus.  At the same time many of our friends and colleagues are spending innumerable hours reinventing the wheel if for no other reason than the previous inventors have not had the forum to share these ideas. The purpose of this website as a whole is to begin the process of sharing, particularly in the area of technology.  In the Silicon Valley we have been using some of these technologies since the late 90’s.  My hope and prayer is that this blog will enable the innovators around the country to go beyond inventing the wheel and begin putting their creativity into other things like inventing the bicycle, the car or things that I haven’t even dreamed off. 

As I have been thinking about not reinventing the wheel with my technology I realized that I have been reinventing the same email to describe to a number of staff some of the things that I have seen and been using.  The purpose of this blog post is to get beyond this wheel and move onto other things.   

Below are some links and descriptions to some of the technologies that I think are very helpful for ministry and that I think more folks should consider using. Enjoy.

Event management:

• signature conference: www.ivevents.com/jjp
• Simple conference: www.ivevents.com/event/336

Surveys

• Simple Survey: www.ivevents.com/survey/1086282770
• Appointment scheduling survey: www.ivevents.com/survey/1086282687 (currently inactive)

Shared pre-formatted tables:

• Simple Table  signup tool: www.ivevents.com/sheet/11 (password iv for editing).

New Student Outreach tool:

This integrates a campus website guestbook and creates a online database where student information can be stored.  Information entered into it is automatically forwarded to the appropriate small group leaders or other contact people. Student leaders staff/ can use this to track follow-up with students. It is an ideal solution to add information collected from fellowship meetings, small groups, and public area tables since it enables all this data to be collected in one central location. It deals well with duplicate entries.

To test it visit: www.ivevents.com/nsoapp. the sample guestbook for the test campus can be accessed at: http://www.ivevents.com/nsoapp/pagaddself.cfm?campusID=6. To see an implementation of this see the guestbook tab at www.ivstanford.org. 

Portal site

One portal site that is more exciting than most of what I have going on is www.studentjourney.org. This enables easy creation of simple campus sites for their region and much more.

File Sharing/Publishing

Currently implemented (but under utilized) at www.intervarsity.org/mx.  It is also present in many other context (www.studentjourney.org, www.ivevents.com, www.bayup.org etc).

Calendaring (cal support, shared calendars, published calendars etc)

This is stuff that most folks in the enterprise world utilize a lot but underutilized by staff. Some staff are beginning to share Google calendars which could potentially meet a lot of our need. At Stanford we are beginning to publish our campus ministry calendar which can be used by Area and Regional staff when scheduling events or students when they are planning plane flights home.  If a standardized format was used (like ical) then staff would be able to spend a lot less time trying to figure out which dates everyone is free and could spend more of their time making the events worth the time we will spend at them!

Google Spreadsheets/Docs

This has been a wonderful tool for our teams collaboration on things like teaching series, brainstorming lists, and tactical oriented staff meetings. The online collaboration is really nice. We primarily use it during our staff meetings as an alternative to a whiteboard.

 Jon Paris Team Leader IVCF at Stanford, 2-8-07