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.

DBS iBanking - Donation channel is open from today, Wednesday 11 August 2010

1. Login to DBS iBanking
2. Select “Payment Services” on the left navigation panel
3. Select “Bill Payment” on the left navigation panel
4. Select one of the following from the droplist :
“RED CROSS PAKISTAN FLOODS”
5. Enter your telephone number as the Bill Reference Number
6. Select the deposit account to debit
7. Enter the donation amount
8. Select “Confirm” to complete the transaction

DBS/POSB ATM

1. Insert your ATM card and enter PIN when prompted
2. Select ” More Services” and language
3. Select “Credit Card/Bill Payment”
4. Select from the billing corporation list
“RED CROSS PAKISTAN FLOODS”
(Press 99 <Enter> to go to the next page, repeat and you will see the desired name)
5. Enter your telephone number as the Bill Reference Number
6. Select your account type to debit the donation
7. Enter the donation amount
8. Select “Confirm” to complete the transaction

OCBC – All donation channels will open after 9am on Wednesday 11 August 2010, and will end on 3 September 2010

OCBC  ATM

1. Select “MORE SERVICES”
2. Select “BILL PAYMENT”
3. Select “PAY TO GOVT / STAT BOARD”
4. Select account to debit from
5. Enter donation amount
6. Enter account number to debit from (for customers with more than 1 account)
7.  Enter bill code “5561” for RED CROSS-PAKISTAN
8.  Confirm bill code entered
Transaction is completed. Please keep transaction receipt for reference.

Note: Applicable to both OCBC and FairPrice Plus cards

OCBC Internet Banking

You can access our Internet banking website at the following link: https://www.ocbc.com/internet-banking/ and follow the step-by-step instructions.

1.  Login using your Access Code and PIN
2.  Click on Login Button
3.  Enter your One-time password from your selected token.
4.  At left navigation menu
5. Click on Bill Payment
6. Click on By Account
7. Select Your From Account to be debited
8. Select Red Cross-Pakistan and enter the amount that you would like to pay.
9. For Bill Reference number, please enter your contact number.
10. Click on Preview button
11. At Preview Page, review your input and click on Submit button
12. At Acknowledgement, a message will be displayed to inform you of the status of your transaction

You may Save/Print your Acknowledgement page for your own reference

OCBC Mobile Banking

1. Log into Secured Mobile Banking with your Internet Banking Access code, PIN and 2 Factor Authentication token
2. Select Bill Payment followed by Bill Payment to Billing organisations
3. Select Red Cross-Pakistan
4. Select your ‘From Account’ to be debited
5. Enter your contact number at the Bill Reference no. field
6. Enter donation amount
7. Click on Preview to verify payment details
8. Click on Submit to confirm donation
9. Successful donations would be reflected on your transaction history or monthly statement.

Fairprice Plus Internet Banking

1. Login using your Access Code and PIN
2. Click on Login Button
3. Enter your One-time password from your selected token.
4. At left navigation menu
5. Click on Bill Payment
6. Click on By Account
7. Select Your From Account to be debited
8. Select Red Cross-Pakistan and enter the amount that you would like to pay.
9. For Bill Reference number, please enter your contact number.
10. Click on Preview button
11. At Preview Page, review your input and click on Submit button
12. At Acknowledgement, a message will be displayed to inform you of the status of your transaction

You may Save/Print your Acknowledgement page for your own reference

OCBC Phone Banking

Step 1: Call 1800 – 363-3333
Step 2 : Select Language
Step 3: Press 1 for Account Information, Funds Transfer & Other Account Related Services
Step 4 : Enter 7 or 8 digits Phone Code
Step 5 : Enter 6 digits Phone PIN
Step 6 : Press 3 for Bill Payment
Step 7 : Press 4 to select Other Organisation bills
Step 8 : Select “Red Cross-Pakistan”
Step 9: When prompted for Bill Ref no, please enter your contact number and press # key
Step 10: Select Account type to debit from (if required) (e.g. Passbook Savings; Account with Statements)
Step 11: Enter Account Number or press 0# to select account number (if required)
Step 11: Enter amount and press # key
Step 12: Press 1 to confirm donation

FairPrice Plus Phone Banking

Step 1: Call 1800 – 820 2020
Step 2 : Press 1 for Self-Service Phone Banking
Step 3 : Select Language
Step 4 : Press 1 for Account Information, Funds Transfer & Other Account Related Services
Step 5 : Enter 7 or 8 digits FairPrice Plus Phone Code
Step 6 : Enter 6 digits FairPrice Plus Phone PIN
Step 7 : Press 3 for Bill Payment
Step 8 : Press 4 to select Other Organisation bills
Step 9 : Select “Red Cross-Pakistan”
Step 10: When prompted for Bill Ref no, enter your contact number and press # key
Step 11: Select Account type to debit from (if required) (e.g. Passbook Savings; Account with Statements)
Step 12: Enter Account Number or press 0# to select account number (if required)
Step 13: Enter amount and press # key
Step 14: Press 1 to confirm donation

UOB Personal Internet Banking

1. Login to UOB Personal Internet Banking
2. Select “Bill Payment” on the left navigation panel
3. Select “Quick Pay” on the left navigation panel
4. Select the following from the Billing Organisation List :
“RED CROSS – PAKISTAN FLOODS”
5. Enter your “telephone number” as the Bill Reference Number
6. Select the deposit account to debit
7. Enter the donation amount
8. Click “Submit” to confirm the transaction.
9. Click “Confirm” to complete the transaction

As the funds collected are for international relief and assistance, the donation will not qualify for double tax deduction. The SRC requests that that no donations-in-kind be made due to logistical considerations. This public appeal ends on 4 September 2010.

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.

God Tools app in a nutshell

Some might say we should make our first evangelistic iPhone apps two years ago, but I still applauded our organization’s effort in coming out with the “God Tools” app for iPhone. Oh, I almost forget, this app is also compatible with iPod touch and iPad.

I like the idea of putting the 50 Soularium photos in this app which I can use them to kindle spiritual conversations on campuses, and I don’t have to pay a single cent for the photos.

I prayed that this will trail blaze more CCC staff and students to experiment making more iPhone or iPad apps and Android phone apps to build spiritual movements in this digital age.

Btw you can click here to download “God Tools” app.

What brought about this new phenomena?

The two recent changes to EveryStudent.com have tremendous impact on evangelism and follow-up of new believers. In fact, these changes significantly increases the number (more than 30%) of pre-believers and believers to correspond with campus staff and students though emails.

These two changes were the setting up of the “Spiritual Starter Kit” and “Contactize” email system.

The Spiritual Starter Kit is basically a series of emails which interested visitor subscribes to find out more about God. The subscriber would receive these emails every three or four days through an automated mechanism provided by an online service provider. So far, there are more than 8,000 subscribers on the mailing list. Andy highlighted that many subscribers to write in to ask questions after the third or fourth emails.

As for the Contactize email system, it’s a powerful system to direct the right EveryStudent.com contacts to the right staff or student. It means that staff, students or volunteers who reply emails on EveryStudent.com can choose to reply emails only from those whom the contacts identified as students from specific campuses. Follow up of contacts become less of an hassle whereby staff and students can hook up to the contacts into their ministry right away.

We are implementing these two improvements into Singapore EveryStudent.com and expected to integrate them into the site by July 2010.

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.

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.

Forum is a place where people exchange ideas and views on a particular issue. Having the forum in a cafe setting makes people feel relax and comfortable to have ongoing casual coffee talks. This fosters communication. This builds community. This is one compelling reason why we want to use Cru.SG.

So when you are building a ministry site for a cause or a special ministry project, think community. Think longer term for how you could multiply your ministry site for building relationship with your audience. I will address this issue in an another blog post how we can fully utilize our ministry site for building movement and online community.

Oh and one good news… Cru.SG is now accessible to our ministry students so that they can help contribute to build the site and more importantly the Cru.SG online community. I can’t wait to see this happening soon.

1. Teach your pastor and church leaders how to create a facebook account.
2. Teach your pastor and church leaders how to create a twitter account.
3. Create a fan page for your church.
4. Create a facebook group for your church or cell group.
5. Embed a pre-evangelistic video on your church website.
6. Put up an evangelistic content eg the Four Spiritual Laws or the Bridge of Life on your church website or personal blog.
7. Type a prayer for a non-Christian online to encourage him or her.
8. Direct a n0n-Christian friend to a evanglistic articles online and ask for feedback.
9. Teach your pastor to blog.

I’m hoping to refine these challenges and make it 10 challenges to publicize it to the whole campus ministry.

Any more ideas?

• 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.

1. Should the student involve be a student leader (Servant Team or Spiritual Multiplier)?
2. What are the commitments of the student?
3. If student don’t have the VLM mindset, should the local team leaders or Qingwen educate the student?
4. Can we wait for the students to finish their exams first before we challenge them on this team?
5. We don’t know who we can challenge… how do we identify student who have that heart and vision for VLM?

After some thoughts, I decided to adjust the expectations of the Student Web Team and renamed it to Student Online Learning Team (SOLT). The main idea is that SOLT is make up of students who will engaged in VLM topics together online, and learn from one another about using Internet and technology for movement building. This team is also a VLM think tank which shares and collaborates ideas online for OCM.

I will provide the online platforms (through facebook or this blog) for these students to engage in discussions about VLM over a period of 6 months. They can feedback, suggest and evolve ideas on these platforms at their own pace. This means that the students can at any time interact on any VLM topics online without the fear of missing out meetings due to busy schedules or exams.

Perhaps the most tricky part is “who”. Allow me to be audacious in the selection of the student candidate… I will take anyone you offer. I don’t need the person to be a student leader. Even if this student knows nuts about VLM, being engaged on VLM discussions will help educate and cast vision to these students.

Other than the students that you are going to recommend for SOLT, I will also recruit students who attended my ministry equipping package on “God and the Wow Wild Web” from last year Metamorphosis conference. Most of those student were really clueless about VLM, but they quickly caught on the vision when they learnt how they can meaningfully use their online hours for spiritual conversations with their non-Christian friends.

SOLT will primarily be in an experimental stage through a learning mode for the next 6 months starting from April 2010. Evaluation of SOLT will be done in September with the SOLT members and the campus team leaders. In times to come, hopefully we can evolve SOLT to empower the students to lead more in integrating VLM into our movement building.

If you miss out the previous blog on the student web team, click here for “What Should The Student Web Team Be Like?“