Tim Postuma

I've used a few different survey tools, and SurveyMonkey is a fine one. Not cheap, but also not terribly expensive if your church will use it a lot.

Another option is Google Forms. It's much more basic than something like SurveyMonkey, but it's also free. And their feature set is slowly improving. For example, they now have page routing based on response (i.e. if someone answers X, show them additional questions. If they answer Y, skip those additional questions). Check it out.

It all depends on your questionnaire and how complicated it is. If you're able to post a link to it, that'd be great to see what it looks like.

Anyone else with experience using SurveyMonkey, Google Forms, or other similar tools?

If I recall correctly when this has happened in our church, the council nominated an elder who had just recently finished their term. They brought that single nominee to the congregation for a vote of affirmation (done in a very brief congregational meeting after a service).

They were then installed in a later worship service (again, probably an abbreviated form; similar to how we might if an elder/deacon wasn't able to make the main installation service).

Be sure to check into Ustream.tv (or Watershed, their ad-free paid version) or LiveStream. The latter is what we've used for the Synod webcast the past couple of years.

Both are easy to use and have free versions. So you can just sign up and test it out with your camera. If you have a USB-enabled camera that will stream (my 6-year old Sony camcorder does it, so I imagine many do), you can try it out at home before trying to figure out how to patch in the church audio, etc.

Both allow for recording content and downloading it after it's been recorded. If you decide to use a paid service and the archive hosting fees are too expensive, consider downloading and re-uploading to a different service (we use Blip.tv for the Synod archives for that reason).

Ustream even allows you to webcast from your iPhone. My dad did this for a funeral so that overseas family could 'attend'. Sounds crazy, I know, but to those people it meant the world.

Any other churches using Ustream for their services?

Kyle - You may want to check out LiveStream, particularly for it's Procaster tool that handles encoding from a wide range of devices. Here's the user guide. LiveStream is what we've used for the Synod webcast for the past couple of years.

Thanks, everyone. What great info!

My church is on a September to August fiscal year.

On the positive side, most of our ministry program changes are implemented in the fall. So this allows us to budget for a full 'ministry year'.

On the downside, it makes for a lot of budget meetings in the summer. As I discovered when I got on council :-)

This is a small suggestion...but one thing I've done in leading a couple of congregational meetings over the past year is to invite questions ahead of time.

In the materials distributed a few weeks before the meeting, I invited members of the congregation to email me their questions/concerns before the meeting. I explained that it wasn't to squelch comments at the meeting itself, of course, but to have a better meeting. If council gets questions beforehand, we know what some of the key issues to discuss will be. Plus we can even do a little research ahead of time or brainstorm some possible solutions to offer to the congregation. I think that leads to better decisions than on-the-spot scrambling!

I've only had a few take me up on it, but I think it helped. We had a big decision to make at our last meeting and I was able to respond to the person with some clarifications before the meeting. But then I also kicked off the congregational discussion with those same emailed questions....figuring they were probably on other peoples' minds as well.

Something to consider. Hope this helps.