The Ministry Partner Giving Analysis Report

Are you preparing MPD goals for the coming year?  One thing you should do is print your MPGA report before February 7th, even if you won’t look it over right away.  You can see this report any time in the Staff Services area on the Staff Web for a detailed look at your ministry partners (with your actual reimbursement expenses to help you in your planning for next year and also lots of helpful graphs about distribution, frequencies, and more).

I can think of two times when you might want to download a hard copy:

1. any time before taking an extended MPD trip (see below about MPD trips) or
2. after the January 10th paycheck and before February 7th, when the report reflects a complete year.

The MPGA report is a moving window into your current MPD information on our servers for any twelve-month period.  Therefore, between the January 10th and February 10th paychecks is the perfect time to get a copy of your MPGA report.  During this time period...

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This is the last in a series of three posts about the great day at Lake Hart we had with our guest, Steve Raquel, on Tuesday (see the first point in the notes below with important information about obtaining the PowerPoints and videos).

In helping us understand how to manage social media, Steve suggested using a social media communications dashboard (like HootSuite and Seesmic).  He also described the internet as flowing like a river.  We need to find the best times to be at the river’s edge with our content and then be patient—it takes time to grow a following.  He mentioned how important it is to include Tweets and Facebook sharing and comments on our websites.

You’ll learn more from the video on social media and websites, including:

• Using OfferPop for promotions within Facebook and Twitter
• Why having a fan page is a good option to consider
• The importance of boilerplates
• Considering using FourSquare for events
• Capturing data with bit.ly and Google Analytics
• Find...

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I like using a particular password, but after I was almost snared by a phishing attempt, I needed to change a lot of my accounts because they shared the same password.  This was a secure password and easy to remember, however, it’s not really a good idea to use the same password for multiple accounts, so I decided this was a good opportunity to create unique passwords.

I stored the new passwords in a spreadsheet (see What You Need to Know about Passwords), but then I was constantly needing to look up the new passwords.  I had made such a variety, I couldn’t remember which password went with which account!

I finally found the solution from a suggestion I found on the internet.  I’m now using my “favorite” password (let’s call it strongfavorite) and then add a unique identifier, depending on the account.  For instance, my password for Facebook could be strongfavoriteface or strongfavoriteFB.  Now all I have to do is remember my favorite password and my identifiers: like hoot for HootSuite or TD for Twee...

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I like using a particular password, but after I was almost snared by a phishing attempt, I needed to change a lot of my accounts because they shared the same password.  This was a secure password and easy to remember, however, it’s not really a good idea to use the same password for multiple accounts, so I decided this was a good opportunity to create unique passwords.

I stored the new passwords in a spreadsheet (see What You Need to Know about Passwords), but then I was constantly needing to look up the new passwords.  I had made such a variety, I couldn’t remember which password went with which account!

I finally found the solution from a suggestion I found on the internet.  I’m now using my “favorite” password (let’s call it strongfavorite) and then add a unique identifier, depending on the account.  For instance, my password for Facebook could be strongfavoriteface or strongfavoriteFB.  Now all I have to do is remember my favorite password and my identifiers: like hoot for HootSuite or TD for Twee...

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No matter whether you read and/or write blogs, knowing something about categories and tags can help you.   (Part two of this post will be written more for readers of posts, but still of interest to bloggers.  If you’re not a blogger, you can skip to the last part of this article.)

When I started blogging I didn’t have a clear idea of the difference between categories and tags.  This article, “Using Categories and Tags Effectively on Your Blog,” from Problogger will help you to get the big picture.  I recommend you read it to learn the difference and then return to this post.  I like to think of categories as the table of contents for my blog and the tags as if they are part of the index in the back of a book.

Welcome back!  I hope that explanation was helpful.

As the Problogger article states, preferably use just a few categories and also reflect that in your navigation. Our family/ministry site uses these two principles (see MikeAndSus.Org).  You’ll not...

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