Cognitive Information – Turning Data into Information

27 Apr 2023

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Digital Re-Branding Guide for Churches

Uncategorized

With many churches across the country currently re-aligning denominations, this guide will help you in renaming and digitally rebranding your church. When you start this project, you will find the sprawl of digital content across not only your church website but also across the interwebs. I'll use the word church, but this guide will be useful to nonprofits as well. Let's get started. Table of Contents: Name and LogoNew Denomination BrandingChurch WebsiteFinding Social Media AccountsFacebookOther Social MediaGoogle Business EntryPhysical PropertySummary Name and Logo Before starting work across the interweb, be sure your church board had firmly decided on a name,…

02 Feb 2023

By Allen

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Reimagining Your Brand for a New Vision and Mission

Business, Websitesbusiness, nonprofit

Sometimes we start with a good plan and later get a better plan. That may mean renaming and rebranding your business or non-profit. I've been there with my own business and worked for businesses that went through the process. I'm helping a non-profit through this process now. It takes a lot of planning to do well. Naming and Re-naming In grad school, I was fascinated with naming and wrote a marketing paper about "The Art of Semonemics." I've got it on a 3.5 floppy disk somewhere. Semonemics comes from Greek "Semon" for sign and "nemeon" to appoint. It is the…

19 Dec 2022

By Allen

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Great benefits for Non-profits with WordPress

Ministry, Websitesretirement, volunteer, website, WordPress

Even though I'm retired, I often find myself helping non-profit organizations set up websites. My recommendation to most of them is to set up a WordPress site. Very few need the demands of more complex sites. The non-profits I help are usually Christian-based, which is not popular in some tech communities and outright targeted in some parts of the world where they operate. Using WordPress is accessible in all languages, stable and very affordable hosting is available. Overall, this allows me to remain useful and focus on work with purpose.Why WordPress? To start, over half of all new websites on…

01 Dec 2021

By Allen

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Retire Early, Find Purpose (Part 2)

Featured, Ministrybusiness, purpose, retirement

In Part 1, I talked about retiring early. It is a matter of planning, math, and a little psychology of delayed gratification. Now, the work of finding your purpose takes some introspective digging with questions like: If you knew you could not fail, what would you do? If money was no object, where would you invest your time and energy? What accomplishment are you most proud of and why? How or where could you do that again? What is the one thing you cannot NOT do? Each of these questions is a variation on a theme of finding what drives…

25 Oct 2021

By Allen

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Retire early, find purpose in life

Ministryministry, retirement

Part 1 When I retired in my early 50's, people either ask "Aren't you too young?" or "How did you do it?" To the first question, I say you are never too young to retire from one career to find purpose in another. My career was right on track, but it was on the wrong track for where God wanted to lead me. To address the latter question, start by living debt-free and saving like crazy.1. Live under your means. When my wife and I married when I was 30 and still had student loans and bad credit. Then I…

03 Apr 2021

By Allen

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2020’s Impact on Habits and Worship

MinistryCOVID, ministry, technology

"It takes 40 days to build new habits." We've heard that from experts for so long it has become internet truth. Actual studies show it can take from 18 to 254 days to shape habits. Whether you believe 18, 40 or 254 days, we need to recognize that the 2020 year of COVID-19 lock-downs forced churches to adapt new technology to reach people. Those people, in turn were building new online habits for worship and connection. Businesses and churches had to adapt quickly to survive. Parking lot church, outdoor worship, and even huge crowds worshiping on California beaches. Businesses adopted…

12 Mar 2021

By Allen

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From Software to Seminary

Featured, Ministrycareer, Learning, ministry, seminary

It started in 1979 with "Hello World." I was a kid learning Basic to program a text based adventure game on a TRS-80 and I was hooked. I wanted to take a game apart and make it better, so I did. I learned programming and ended up having a pretty good career in IT, focused on database systems and business intelligence. Now, 42 years later, it is time for a new adventure. The industry has changed a lot in those years. Back then we learned programming BASIC by buying magazines at Radio Shack. The magazines were full of pages of…

11 Oct 2019

By Allen

Rowing as Teamwork in Action

Featured, Uncategorizedteamwork

I just completed 12 weeks of rowing with the OU Corporate team 'Row U' which culminated in a 2 minute, 500 meter race. While I did learn a lot about rowing my first crew season, I learned even more about teamwork. The twelve weeks were spent teaching the basics of rowing. For me as a landlubber, that meant starting with terminology like what is 'port' and 'starboard', 'bow' and 'stern', and seating order in the boat. Rowing is more than just arms rowing a boat. Our coach, Carolyn, helped us each learn and work on our personal rowing technique. She…

19 Jan 2019

By Allen

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Promoting IT Learning in 2019

BusinessBig Data, Microsoft SQL, Training

I've been to so many user groups that have great attendance yet struggle to get speakers. IT is an industry that has been changing and growing ever since I started. Along with that change, there was always someone willing to share what they knew and help me learn. I like to teach others because there is no way to go back in time and thank my teachers for the TRS-80 lessons, but I can pay it forward to the future generation of geeks. Each year, I start with some new personal goals and this year it involves learning more R…

03 Apr 2018

By Allen

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How to get started with data analysis

Businessanalytics, business, data

I recently heard Paul Young, author of "The Shack" say that behind each of his books was a question. I just finished a meeting with an executive and one of the questions he asked was “How do companies start with data analysis?" We talked about that and other data topics, so I wanted to sum it up. Companies will get into data analysis when they have problems answering three basic questions: Where have we been? Where are we now? Where are we going? The first of these, “where have we been?” is asked when a Company needs to see their…