What I thought would be a social networking event turned out to be an author talk from Joe Calloway on his book, “Be the Best at What Matters Most: The Only Strategy You will Ever Need.” He was joined by Nashville company bites of knowledge’s, Julie May and Gary Hornbuckle. Bites of Knowledge is the case study featured in the book.

View from the back of the packed E|SPACES author talk with Joe Calloway featuring Julie May and Gary Hornbuckle of bites of knowledge

Here are the takeaways I took home, I mean, to work:

• Check-in with clients and team, contact clients proactively, communicate for accountability, repeat
• Good connecting includes frequent: asset managing, issue managing, project managing
• Understand what the business or need is first before trying to resolve issues
• Reward performance and incentivize behavior of employees
• Clarity and accountability go hand in hand
• Value reliability first before “singing on the plane like Southwest”

What creates real value for customers, or in our case at our organization, for missionaries and pastors?

“High accountability equals high employee morale because everyone knows what’s expected.” Joe Calloway, Be the Best at What Matters Most

In my four years here, I’ve learned that these are what they value and what we strive to meet. These are in no particular order and really just flying off the top of my head from a purely communications department perspective:

• Excellent level of service from the Nashville administrative staff. When a question is asked, a response is expected within a decent turnaround time. (I personally try to reply ASAP because I’m always on a mobile device be it a phone or a tablet.)
• Information about our major events and initiatives, including pricing and promo materials like graphics and videos.
• Consistent communication on how we are reaching our vision: “(Every Nation) exists to honor God by planting Christ-centered, Spirit-empowered, socially responsible churches and campus ministries in every nation.” How many churches do we have around the world? In North America? How many campus ministries? Missionaries?
• Careful attention to the questions or comments from Ministry partners regarding their financial giving.

We look at these interactions, and everything we do here, through the lens of our Office Values:

• Christlike Character — Are we demonstrating Christ in our response to an issue or situation? Meaning, are we showing grace, truth, mercy, compassion, love, and all that good stuff?
• Relational Unity — Is preserving our relationship evident as the ultimate goal of our correspondence?
• Craftsmanship — Are we going to the next level in our craft and in the service we provide, i.e. gift processing, communications, information technology, etc.?
• Innovation — Are we discovering and utilizing the latest, greatest tools to make our service more effective?

I think having Core Values has been the driving factor that helps all of us at the Nashville office get things done. They’ve definitely bailed me out when I’ve been in situations where I want to throw something against a wall.

Is this being Christlike, Thelma? Am I building relationship by this reaction? Do I stick with snail mail or do I explore jumping on the social network bandwagon? (Umm, this last one is actually NOT an issue for me. Just sayin’.) Do I stick with an online template, or do I design something from scratch?

You get the picture.

Are your office values the standard to live by or just the pretty sign tacked on a wall?

Boss: “We’re to go to the hurting, empty streets.” — How can streets hurt, and, if they’re empty, why would we go there? Needs a little rewrite…

Me: Yes, streets can hurt… because they’re empty and want to be walked on! Did you not take a poetry class in college?!

We felt awkward about doing a mother-daughter dance so I made a video instead. I had a band in college called Angel Witch and we used to do a cover of a Guns N’ Roses song. My daughter found a cover by Taken By Trees which I was going to sing. I decided to use it as the backdrop of photos from our life, her life.

I finished it on Saturday night and she finally got to see the secret I was putting together after the wedding.

My life is in transition! I’m looking forward to whatever is on the horizon for me.

Here’s what it was before:

The old version of this post on our old Staff Blog on WordPress.

Our consultant reminded me of a crucial point. “Who is the post about?”

Us.

Her recommendation was to revamp it into something that would be an answer to someone’s potential question. She suggested changing the title and the content to, “Five Ways to Get Involved in Campus Ministry.”

I spent half of my afternoon rewriting the entire post and making it less about us, and more about helping someone find information on getting involved in campus ministry.

Hello, Google Search. Come find it.

Here’s what it is now:

Here’s the new version of the same post.

Not only is it a more engaging post, but it actually offers five tips for anyone looking for information on campus ministry. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that it was easy putting this together. Without our consultant’s advice, I wouldn’t have been able to turn this post into something people will hopefully find useful.

Now, to come up with seventy-five more posts like this that potentially help people find answers to their questions.

It’s the sweet gestures from the unexpected that make today special.

It’s symptomatic of small nonprofits, particularly small nonprofit Christian ministries. Limited staff are outnumbered by responsibilities. So you make the best use of your time, work more than the recommended forty hours per week, and focus on putting out fires or almost erupting blazes. (When my department assistant came on board, she would ask me, “How did you do all these things by yourself?!”)

I digress.

Critics have said that HubSpot is an unnecessary luxury because inbound marketing doesn’t require all the bells and whistles HubSpot offers. I disagree. For now at least. Here’s why:

HubSpot Academy has great trainers who are very adept at online adult learning techniques. Coming from a training background with customer contact centers in the Philippines where I developed curriculum and trained associates on American accent training, I can spot a great learning experience a mile away.

If you’re new to HubSpot, attending their classes on “Goal Setting,” “Blogging,” “Keywords,” and “Page Performance” are a must. They offer live and archived sessions of recorded trainings and numerous resources to download as homework and research.

Our dedicated consultant, Rachel Sebell, has been extremely helpful in my HubSpot learning process. She has a solid understanding of edu’s and orgs and what strategies each of her clients needs. I’m challenged after our consultation calls and feel like I’m in college again with my assignments.

HubSpot Tech Support rocks. There’s no other way to put it. Not only are they friendly and helpful, they’re not patronizing, which means a lot to me. They understood I’m not a newbie to CMS so they didn’t bother wasting both our time by walking me through diagnostics I didn’t need. We jumped right into my issues.

I will say that depending on the time of day you call, their call hold times can be painful. On two separate occasions, I had to wait for twenty and then forty-five minutes. But it was worth it. I knew that when I finally got through, I would be in the hands of an expert and my issue would be solved.

Communications and IT need to work closely together for inbound marketing to be successful. My biggest challenge so far has been discovering that we’ve lost opportunities on maximizing our SEO because of how our domains are structured across the globe. I can’t fix this issue by myself but with IT, we can make search happen.

Am I confident we will not need to renew our contract with HubSpot next year? I know I can be successful in HubSpot using all of their tools but I don’t know if it will be worth not using their software and venturing out on our own.

I’d like to think I’ll be an SEO rockstar next year. Whether that’s still with HubSpot or not, only time — and our communications budget — will tell.

If you don’t know anything about internet marketing, then I highly recommend giving HubSpot a look. If you know an SEO ninja, bring one on board as a consultant but be prepared to get your hands dirty. If you have the money to spend on hiring ninjas to do everything for you, by all means, hire one or two.

I still have old posts here on radio and earlier posts from 2007 but hereon in, I’m keeping it focused on communications.

I’d love to see you on Tumblr! I post music and my insights on faith there, and a bunch of other things that just don’t fit here anymore.

My oldest Tumblr is from 2007. I don’t know what to do with it at the moment but you’re welcome to poke around. My not-so-secret fitness Tumblr is Fat Lady Working Out.

Compartmentalizing is good. Keeps everything separate.

Here’s the current promo video we pushed out to raise the excitement bar on registration.

Script: Thelma Bowlen
Editing: Jay Kim

There’s still time to take advantage of our Early Bird Rate! Register by March 31 to qualify for our iPad mini raffle!

My boss made a comment that summarized our discussion as we identified the opportunity costs of a new organizational effort I am leading:

“You’re the best one for the job, but these jobs are not the best use of your time.”

It got me thinking about the importance of finding balance and focusing on tasks that are the most productive use of my time.

What other things have I been struggling to make happen that I should not even be working on in the first place? How does one transition from doer to manager to director in a traditional office setting?

Who can say no to that?!

I had been using Buffer for a few months now and credit it to helping me strategize our content and grow our followers by an additional 1,800 over a five-month period. Create a schedule once, throw in updates, and Buffer pushes them out according to your pre-created times. Easy-peasy.

But while my loyalty had strayed to Buffer for a season despite my relationship with HootSuite, when our new Media & Communications Assistant came on board last month, I realized it was easier for me to manage everything inside HootSuite. I set Buffer aside, and Rachel and I have been plugging in updates exclusively via HootSuite. But updates in HootSuite still require creating a schedule for each update. Not as easy as Buffer, or Timely for that matter, but definitely an extra step.

Enter today’s AutoScheduling feature for content sharing on HootSuite. Yay! One of my feature wishes has been fulfilled! But it does have one drawback that I’m guessing HootSuite is either working on or will roll out in the near future.

It doesn’t allow me to autoschedule all posts and not just content I find via Hootlet. Now that upgrade would send me over the moon! Let me autoschedule everything!

I tried autoscheduling all day today and noticed the optimized times HootSuite found for maximum exposure for our global account was in the afternoon. We have followers in different time zones, so I was hoping it would factor in my night time here in Nashville and schedule posts between 1am and 6am, times that get good traction when I check our analytics. It only scheduled updates between 8am and 8pm Central, so I put in a few more manually. Not too much of a big deal but I don’t want to miss out on the crowd while I’m sleeping. This little difference is where Buffer wins since I can include times within 1am and 6am for updates to roll out.

I’ll keep using Hootlet’s AutoSchedule for now and will take note of any nuances in the way it chooses our best times to schedule. For the most part though, I lovet!