Think VLM

I extracted the segment of the Red Cross article below on how to donate to Pakistan flood survivors.

Please consider to use Internet banking services or mobile services to give financially to help 20 million Pakistanis who are affected by the super flood.

Internet banking and/or ATM transfers
Donors can donate through their DBS, OCBC or UOB accounts, starting 11 August 2010. Donors who have accounts with OCBC can also make their donations through OCBC Phone Banking and OCBC Mobile Banking.

Read more…

Yes the new EveryStudent.com looks dasher, cooler and better!

Now EveryStudent.com is “internationlized” into one English site. Which means that the countries which previously use the English language sites in their own EveryStudent.com versions are now using the same site.

The beautiful thing about using the new site is that those visitors with any questions can email directly to the specific country they are from. This is a great filter where the visitors can be channeled to the right people to email to.

Also check out the new video room too! Hope to see more videos to engage the visitors.

I’m aware that this blog was started only recently so maybe there hasn’t been too many posts to give you a chance to comment. But while participating in the most recent CCC Blogference I learnt a lesson from a US staff member. The tone and content of the posts and comments were hindering students from responding.

There are many possible reasons why I think we staff are not blogging here as often as we’d like. We want to have better blogs and better learning, but — and I speak for myself here But my take is Singaporeans aren’t as into reading and commenting generally as compared to the west. Do you agree?

If you do agree, could you share why? But if you do comment on blogs generally, what is the biggest factor for why you haven’t commented on this site? Please tell us, because we want to blog better and learn better. That couldn’t happen and this whole thing would be irrelevant if we didn’t have our readers’ feedback and input.

At one campus staff meeting, I briefly stated four reasons from the IT department’s perspectives why all SCCC ministry sites have to be hosted in Cru.SG.

I will explain these four reasons in another blog post. But for now, I like you to consider the following question:

What is the success of a ministry website?

From my opinion, the bottom line is “relationship”. Does the netizen who come to your site wants to interact with you on a long term basis?

Cru.SG is not just a ministry website. It’s a platform for building online community with believers, ministry partners, and even pre-believers and seekers. That’s why more and more ministry sites and blogs are moving away from being a billboard to become a forum cafe. Read more…

Consider the man hours invested to design the NUS survey site (nusccc.cru.sg):

• redraft the survey questions from “oweekquestions.com“
• contextualize the terms and conditions for the prize draw
• test out the survey questions repeatedly for 30 times
• define the process of the survey
• verify all the URLs are correct and linkable
• make sure the fine prints of the content are accurate etc…

The preparations listed easily took more than 30 man hours to set up the survey site.

Very often, we bank on the ravishing design of a website to rally traffic to the site, but we forget that it’s the substance of the website that draws people back for more.

And there are more things to be done…

• Is the ministry facebook fan page ready (if the survey site publicize the fan page) ?
• Is there plan to do facebook advertising to the freshmen about the survey site?
• What and how are we going to communicate to the freshmen after getting all their particulars?

Most of the campus ministries have their own facebook groups and fan pages. But if you ask me, most of these fan pages and groups are quite dead. Valuable freshmen contacts will be lost if they come to the fan page without someone engaging them on their queries.

If we want to effectively recruit the freshmen, more background works online and offline need to be thoughtfully sketched.

After skyping with *Tony O’Hagan from Australia, I gathered from him three compelling reasons why Australia CCC started the online survey to recruit freshmen since 2005:

1. Lack of finance
2. Lack of manpower
3. Unable  to set up ministry booths during orientation week

Not all campus ministries benefitted from doing this strategy. But one thing is for sure, there’s nothing to lose from trying out this strategy either.

So how can doing online recruitment profit the local campus ministries?

Here are 4 main reasons how doing online survey benefits the local ministry:

1. It complements the local recruitment strategies (whatever they are). This means that you can still do online survey without compromising your local recruitment strategies. Read more…

Qingwen and I wanted to carry forward the discussion and learning from the last few meetings about Virtually-led movements on this blogging platform. At the moment, the software for linking the group forum with this blog is still not bug-free, so we ask for your patience.