Thank you so much for praying. I had a very fruitful time. Shannon and the kids managed well while I was gone but as always it’s much better to be back under one roof.
Here are a few photos from the conference at Columbia Bible College – in British Columbia, that is Directly below is the Canadian “Ops Team” – about nine full time staff devoted to providing operational excellence for all of their campus missionaries. In total, Campus for Christ Canada has about 160 staff on campus.
Joshua Wong is one of the trainers on the Ops Team. He facilitated several excellent seminars on Social Media, Team Collaboration and Digital Basics.
We learned so much!! The teams in Canada are trusting the Lord for huge things. It was great to see them so eager to share ideas. They’ve really created a good learning environment for their teams.
Want to hear some of their secrets? I made a short list of their good habits – very simple stuff which could help any team! See the short list here.
In this short video, you can get feel for how the Canadian campus staff do their operations training.
Russ Martin – director of campus operations in Canada – talks about some very simple habits his staff have developed:
For a team to function well, there must be smooth, well defined modes of communication.
Sharing ideas – even sharing failures – is a must for collaboration.
One team can learn so much from other teams. Ideas should not be hidden. Wheels should not be re-invented.
A threaded conversation (such as a message board or Facebook wall posts) is often most effective for sharing ideas.
Russ trains his staff to use a threaded conversation rather than email in most cases.
Canadian teams have common resource pools online where they can all share documents.
Using online documents such as Google Docs provides a great solution for saving meeting notes.
Rather than emailing a document as an attachment, the Canadians upload the document to a common resource pool and then share the link. Subtle but powerful difference.
All these practices tend to reduce email inbox overload and promote the highest level of interactivity and sharing. Can all this help increase capacity of field teams to reach more people for Christ? You bet! It’s happening even now in Canada.
All of the Canadian teams use Google Docs. If anything, this has been their “killer app” – the tool which has been the most helpful to enhance team communications. Google Apps for Non Profits has also been a huge boost for them. These tools are free, easy to deploy, easy to use and allow ultra fast sharing of critical resources.
Here at the international headquarters for Campus Cruasde, we’re two of about 900 staff who serve in a wide variety of administrative capacities. Our team is the Global Technology Office – helping ministry teams integrate technology into their mission. Here’s a quick video we made showing the 25 staff on our team, our vision for ministry and the people we serve:
Toby is one of about 3 Million Americans who have Type 1 Diabetes. Last week we took the whole family to a two day conference here in town sponsored by Children with Diabetes. It was an excellent education event geared towards helping families learn about Diabetes together and grow in confidence in dealing with it. [...]
We’ve got an appointment with Toby’s pediatric endocrinologist this morning. It’s been four days since he came home from the hospital and actually he’s doing fantastic. The shots are still … well, shots but Toby seems to be tolerating them like a man at this point. Please pray that the doctor keeps him on the [...]
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Every month, our team here at the Global Technology Office conglomerates all our prayer requests and publishes them here: www.mygcx.org/PrayforGTO Would you pick out a couple of requests and pray for them on the appropriate days? Thanks! Our prayer requests include a praise for a new sister in Christ, requests for a new system administrator [...]
The kids are not usually early risers. But believe it or not, they all rolled out of bed immediately at 6am earlier this week to hurry down the street to our favorite viewing location for the Shuttle Launch. Cool video. Clearly visible for entire 8 minute burn of main engines. Lights up the whole early [...]
Directly below is the Canadian “Ops Team” – about nine full time staff devoted to providing operational excellence for all of their campus missionaries. In total, Campus for Christ Canada has about 160 staff on campus.
