Compliance and Your Church's Insurance Policy?

CALL 1-866-579-7475 TO REVIEW YOUR CHURCH SAFETY/SECURITY PROGRAM, ASK FOR OPHELIA LIVINGSTON.
Do You Know What Is Covered?

Edward started his Saturday just like he did every Saturday: he went to the church to get ready for his participation in the church Children Ministry’s outreach. But, this Saturday was different. It was his turn to do a run in the church van to pick up some of the children. Because Edward did not have a Commercial Driver’s License (CDL), the children's pastor clearly instructed Edward not to transport more than 14 children at any one time. "That will keep us in compliance," thought the children's pastor, who remembered that the law does not let an individual transport more than 15 people in one vehicle. He wanted to make sure that Edward stayed within his legal limitation.

The Church Made Every Effort To Comply With The Law

Edward gladly complied, making three runs without any problems. However, on his fourth and final run, with 7 excited children riding in the van, Edward ran a red light in his hurry to get back to the church on time...which resulted in an accident that injured three of the children! The children's pastor visited the three children while they were in the emergency room and had a time of prayer with them and their parents. Between the three children, there were two broken arms, one broken leg that required surgery, and a bill of $120,000.00. The church filed a claim with the church insurance company and the insurance company paid it. Whew! That was close.

Was The Driver Negligent?

The church was very supportive of Edward and understood that he was trying to serve the church by picking up the children. He still could not figure out how he ran the red light. He just did not see it. Seconds earlier he saw a text message come in and briefly looked at his phone to see whom it was from. Before he knew it, he was in an accident.

The Driver (Edward) Gets Sued

Three months after the insurance company paid the claim; Edward got a letter from the church's insurance company letting him know that they wanted him to reimburse them the $120,000.00 for his gross negligence. They also stated that they would sue him in court if he did not agree to their terms for repayment of the claim. Confused and completely surprised by this, Edward first took it to his pastor. But he, too, was bewildered by the lawsuit against Edward, and so the pastor took it to the church attorney, asking, "Can our insurance company sue one of our members for the claim that the church filed?" Unfortunately for Edward, insurance companies have the right to seek reimbursement from the person or entity legally responsible for an accident after they have paid out money on behalf of the church. This is known as Subrogation. Webster definition of subrogation is “If one person performs a duty of another, they are then "equitable subrogated" to the rights of the person owed the duty”. The most common form of subrogation is when an insurance company pays a claim caused by the negligence of another. Who would have thought that the same company that is supposed to protect the church, sues one of its members?

Get The Right People Listed As Insured Under The Church Policy

After inspecting the church insurance policy, they noticed that the policy covered the acts of the board of directors and employees but it did not cover volunteers and members. Getting the members and volunteers of the church listed as insured is not automatic. In fact, you have to specifically request it. Since Edward was not listed as insured on the church policy, he was not protected from being sued by the church's insurance company.

Get An Insurance Policy and Cover The Right People

The number of churches and ministries that do not have an insurance policy of any kind is a surprise in itself. Though many pastors know of the real possibilities that exist in today's litigious society, they see insurance as an expense that brings no benefit. As a risk management consultant, I see it differently. It is an asset, because it protects the wealth and prosperity of the church. When getting a general liability insurance policy, make sure that the policy covers the board of directors, employees, and church volunteers, including members. This is very important. Incidents like the one Edward went through are frequent. The church was diligent to make sure they complied with the law, but it failed to spend adequate time reviewing its insurance policy to make sure the right people were covered.

Many Different Types Of Church Insurance

Did you know that there are over 30 different types of liability insurance? That does not include property, theft, missions' travel, fire, key man and many more. Getting the right policy is absolutely important. We have added the topic of church insurance to our seminars because getting the right insurance policy is a must. Have you spent time lately thinking about insurance for the church? You may have felt intimidated by the number of policies that exist. With the right information, you will be able to get the right policy that provides maximum coverage at the best price. Call today and schedule your risk management seminar.  1-866-579-7475!

Woman Attacked and Raped at OKC Church

 CALL 1-866-579-7475 TO REVIEW YOUR CHURCH SAFETY/SECURITY PROGRAM, ASK FOR OPHELIA LIVINGSTON.

OKLAHOMA CITY -- An Oklahoma City woman is attacked and raped at a local church. Luckily, within just a few hours, police were able to make an arrest. The accused rapist is 30-year-old Antwine Walker. The crime took place at Britton Baptist Church near Britton and Western. The suspect occasionally worked at the church doing odd jobs. Police say that made it easy for employees to ID him.
The alleged rape victim told police she was ambushed and assaulted just seconds after arriving for work early Tuesday.

"The suspect actually followed her to the back of the building, threw some kind of rope around her neck and proceeded to choke her and rape and sodomize her in the building," said Sgt. Jennifer Wardlow.

Walker remains behind bars at the county jail.

Walker has a lengthy criminal record, including convictions for burglary and violating a victim's protective order.

The church pastor says he knew of Walker's criminal past but wanted to give him a chance to go straight.

No one at the church wanted to go on camera to talk about the crime. 

How to Create an E-Book

There are many reasons why a person would want to write an e-book. One is to help spread his knowledge and teach others about a certain topic. Another is to promote a business, organization or idea. And also, it can be for marketing purposes to help sell a certain product or service. Whatever the reason may be, it is essential to understand the basics on how to create an e-book. Because you must understand that it is not simply about putting sentences together, slapping it all in one file, and publishing it as an e-book. There is more to it than that.

You probably have tried making your own first e-book and when you released it to the public, or even offered it for a fee, you realized that the feedback was not really that good. You might even have received some negative feed back regarding the quality of your e-book. Rest assured that just like everything else, writing an e-book is not really a rocket science. It is easy to understand and achieve if you keep the following points in mind.

1. First of all, know your goal for creating that e-book.
Everything has a purpose. All things have a goal and your creating an e-book is not an exemption. List down the things that you want to achieve through your e-book. Think first your main goal and then break it down to smaller goals and stick with them.

2. Practice good grammar and proper spelling.
Part of the basics on how to create an e-book are using the right grammar and checking for any wrong spellings. Why are these important? You must remember that you are positioning yourself as an expert, as a professional in your field. The only reason that you will be seen as such is if you conform to standards and you present yourself as an intelligent and smart person which good grammar can greatly help you with.

3. Who are your target audience or readers?
An e-book naturally has a target set of readers. Are they your colleagues? Perhaps they are people who are just starting to learn about marketing and stuff. Maybe you are trying to teach people the proper ways of protecting their home computers from malware threats. As the topics of e-books can be greatly varied, so are their readers. You must nail down who your readers will be and then fashion your e-book specifically for them.

Other things that you have to consider when you're creating your e-book are the number of pages or word count. Since people are just reading online or through their computers, their attention span is very short. So it is best if you keep your e-book very short. Another point to consider is your choice of words. You can use highly technical terms if your readers are your colleagues. But if it's just anybody from around the globe, using layman's terms is usually the best approach. These are just the basics on how to create an e-book. Follow these and you are all set for a successful launching of your e-book.

Creating a Twitter Following - Do You Need Help, I Do.

After you’ve been on Twitter for a little while, you will find that you’re following people who you’re actually not all that interested in. You want to remove them, but it seems like such a pain that you never bother. Not only that, but some of these people followed you just so you would follow them back, then they dropped you like a bad habit to game the system a little.

On the other hand, you see that there is a core group that you regularly interact with. You share common interests, DM and reply to each other’s tweets, and generally have a good time. Problem is, some of their tweets get buried by the noise you’ve accumulated.

This post will help you remedy this situation. You need to cut the dead weight and get focused on those who say things you actually want to read. Who knows, maybe you’ll replace the losers with more people you can relate to.

Trimming The Fat

We need to get rid of people who we follow that are not providing any value to us. First to go are those that aren’t actually tweeting. How can you get value from someone who doesn’t say anything? We can use Twitoria to drop anyone who hasn’t tweeted in a while. You don’t even have to give up your password. You do have to open each profile in a new window and manually remove/unfollow them.

Another option here is to unfollow anyone who is not following you. At first, I thought this was a shady thing to do. The argument is that you follow people because they provide you with good content, not because you expect them to follow you back. I actually agree with this argument, but the fact is that there are very few people who are just that awesome and the ones you’re following probably don’t fall into that category.

To get rid of the folks that don’t follow you back, hop on over to Twitter Karma. Put in your Twitter user name and password and whack the button (or just click Sign In With Twitter to use the safer OAuth option). It will take a while to load, but you will eventually be able to see all the people who you follow that do not follow you back. You can actually select them all and bulk un-follow them. Simple as that.

Finding Your Crew

Now that you’ve kicked some people to the curb, it’s time to take a look at who you actually engage with on a regular basis. You can probably name a few of these people off the top of your head. The reason that you need to know who your real tweeps are is so that you can give them priority by adding them to groups or simply looking out for their tweets. Also, it’s always cool to look at stats because you may be surprised at what they tell you.

There are a bunch of tools for seeing who your BFF’s are, but my favorites are Twitter Analyzer and Mailana. With Twitter Analyzer, just put in your Twitter username, click User’s Friends, then Closest Friends. I won’t get into all the other features available here, but you may also want to check out Disregarded Friends. These are the people you keep ignoring and you might want to correct that.

Mailana is a whole different story. Once you put in your Twitter username, you’ll see a graphical representation of your social graph. The thicker the lines that connect people, the more they talk to each other. The BFF’s list on the left should provide some valuable data as to who you like most.

Making New Friends

Mailana gives you a quick list of who you should be following based on your current habits. Another option is to check out Twubs or WeFollow to see what users are interested in the same hashtags or events as you. Probably the most popular tool for finding new followers is Mr. Tweet (@corvida recently became the Mr. Tweet blog editor). All you have to do is follow Mr. Tweet and he will DM you a link about what he’s found for you. This can sometimes take quite a while though.

A few things I’ve done to find new people to follow:

• Use Twitter’s built-in threading to see what parts of a conversation you’re missing. On the web, click “in reply to” and you can see who those you follow are talking to. They may share your interests.
• Keep an eye out for people talking about you or ReTweeting your stuff. Since Twitter implemented Mentions, you can just check your replies tab to catch these tweets. You probably don’t follow all of these people and the fact that they’re talking about you means you should check them out.
• Set up searches to catch people talking about topics you’re interested. Most Twitter clients have a method for setting up persistent searches. You can also just go to Twitter Search and look for keywords and topics that interest you.

Owning Your Googgle 10

It’s becoming more and more important for small business owners to “own” their Google results. In a world where you are what Google says you are, when someone searches for your name they need to be able to find you. The real you. Not a lookalike, another company with the same name or that social profile you thought you had taken care of it. Business owners must protect their brand, and sometimes that means doing just a touch of proactive online reputation management to secure your Google 10.

Your Google 10 is the top ten results that appear when someone does a Google search for your name. How do you go about ensuring you own all ten spots? Surprisingly, it’s not that hard. Here are some of the sites and profiles you’ll want to grab and pay attention to.

Grab your .com: Chances are you already have this one and it’s naturally ranking very well for your brand. Congrats. That’s one listing. Time to go after the other nine.

Join Professional Directories: Whatever your industry, there are guaranteed to be at least a handful of directory or resource sites you can join to help customers find you, while also helping you to take advantage of the company profile pages they offer. Often these directories will require a small application fee for your profile to be reviewed, but if you’re able to choose targeted sites, you’ll get both customers and a major search ranking benefit from them. To find these directories, try doing a search for [your industry] + directory].

Get Social: Besides just being a great way to reach out to customers, social profiles are known for how well they rank in Google due to their authority and all the links being pointed at them. If you’re looking to claim some space, try creating a Facebook Fan page, Twitter account and corporate accounts on sites like LinkedIn, Crunchbase, Naymz, etc. Don’t just register the accounts, though. Actually build out the profiles and make them useful. There’s no sense ranking a profile if the information on it isn’t up to par.

Target Industry-Specific Social Sites: Thanks to the social media boom, there are social sites now geared toward virtually every industry on the planet, whether it’s finance, sports, art and design, programming, SEO, etc. Find your niche and get involved. Create accounts on these sites and engage in the community when it makes sense. Many of the smaller social sites will also allow you to link to your “mainstream” social media accounts like Twitter, Facebook, etc. Take advantage of this feature. The more links you get to each account, the stronger it will become and the better it will rank. If there are any forums in your area of specialty, consider creating usernames on those as well.

Make Media: The search engines like media. In fact, they like it so much that they’re starting to replace “regular” search results with images, videos and news clippings. Because so few companies are being proactive about media content, you can often overtake competitor listings simply by creating media content and optimizing it – including the name of your company in the title, file name, description and within the tags, etc. As mentioned before, video and small businesses go really well together. Obviously, Flickr, YouTube and Vimeo are great sites to focus on for these purposes. [If you’re really adventurous, perhaps even create your own podcast!]

Guest Blog: Guest blogging is a great way to increase visibility and bring visitors to your site, but it can also be an effective way of grabbing more search real estate. Offer to provide a blogger with unique content in your site. In return you’ll often be given a brief bio box which will allow you to link out to your Web site and maybe even some other prominent profiles or content pieces. If the site owner is agreeable, you should also put your name and company name in the Title tag of that entry.

Speak At Local Events: Look for opportunities to speak or get involved with local events in your niche. These spots usually come with speaker bios that you can build out to rank very well (and very easily) for your name and company. They’re also exactly what you want to be ranking for when a potential partner or prospect goes searching for your brand. It shows that you know what you’re talking about AND that you care about your community.

If the list above looks a bit overwhelming, fear not. Chances are you won’t have to create each and every account mentioned in order to secure and protect your Google 10. However, variety is the spice of life…and Google rankings.

Four C's of Growth for Any Church

by Anthony D. Coppedge

Making a difference. Those are strong words, serious goals and often difficult processes. Usually, making a difference requires change.

Every local church should be making a difference – a notable impact – on and in their local communities. One of my favorite questions to ask people about their church is this:
If your local church literally went away tomorrow, would your community notice the impact?
To answer that question requires a gut-check and sincere honesty. A lot of us would say “well, our membership would notice and a few other local churches would notice.” The question is really “would the unchurched/formerly churched world even care or notice if your local body stopped existing?” No matter how you answer that question, there are things your church could be doing to become more effective and intentional about meeting needs in the local community. Change, though, can be difficult. A strong commitment by leadership coupled by an set of actionable steps are required to get people out of the pew and into service in your community. It requires – and will foster – growth. I think there are four “C’s” for this kind of healthy growth.

• Change
• Cost
• Control
• Commitmnet

In identifying these four C’s, I’ve tried to help break down the component level issues so we can dialogue about the why? and the how? of impacting our communities.

Change – not simply modification – is often hard and usually requires the art of subtraction before applying the addition of new ministries or initiatives. Sometimes we have the best intentions with less-than-the-best results. Someone has a passion and some charisma so we give them a new ministry area. That’s great, but how are you evaluating the effectiveness of the myriad of groups, ministries and events that aren’t really resourced or promoted as part of the vision of the church? As leaders, we must apply the art of strategic subtraction by whittling down the ministries that are good, but don’t fit within the focused vision of the church. By freeing up leaders, resources and time, it’s easier to make changes that provide more impact and add to the mission of the church. What ministries, groups or events does your church need to rethink, reorganize or remove?

Cost – can be associated with budgeting for people, time and resources. If you’re not budgeting for all three, your true costs can add up very quickly. As important as hard costs, opportunity costs can also be very significant. Free, in particular, can turn out to be anything but free. For example, if you’re going to offer your facilities as free meeting spaces for civic, municipal or business events, your costs for cleaning, heating/cooling, projection/lights, audio technicians, etc. can all be expected. Those costs are very real, even though the venue might be “free”.
I know of a church that provides the manpower for an annual city festival for free. Their members simply sign up to work booths, concessions, cleaning or whatever it takes as a way to show their commitment to their city. The church does provide a simple T-shirt for their workers that includes the festival name and logo (notice nothing about the church is on the T-shirt!). This is a cost that the church pays for so as to look professional and help the event be more successful. What new initiative(s) is your church considering that has all of the costs mapped out?

Control – it’s hard to manage more than we’re used to managing. Most churches stay small because we can manage (control) a smaller size. In his book “Ladder Shifts”, Dr. Sam Chand tells us that may leaders limit their growth when they make the choice to stay in control of what they can touch and oversee. I won’t go into a full leadership discourse here as there are many far more qualified than myself to speak about this issue, but I will point out that when we have to have full control, we’re limited ourselves and the vision God has birthed into leaders. I believe we miss this point when we think that we’re the provider for all that needs to happen. Both on a personal and corporate (team) level, we must realize we’re only responsible for the stewardship of all that God provides (Jehovah-jireh – God-provider). In what areas are you holding on tightly to control and limiting your – and your church’s – healthy growth and community impact?

Commitment – to constant evaluation. Because it’s hard to manage that which we don’t understand well, many leaders will fail to evaluate the effectiveness of a “good thing” and stick with the programs and processes that have become comfortable. Leaders are often visionaries with the capacity to imagine the future and usher people into new processes, programs and paradigms (a little alliteration there for my pastor friends). Casting a vision from God is usually fairly straightforward; having the commitment to both see a vision come to fruition and honestly evaluate it (and re-evaluate it, again and again) requires more than charisma and good communication skills.

Using metrics (defining the parameters, agreeing on the benchmarks and analyzing the data) is an important part of being committed to constant evaluation. We have a tendency to shy away from things we have a hard time measuring or, for whatever reason, are held too closely to be honestly evaluated. What ministries, events, processes and metrics is your church using to make the necessary changes to accomplish the vision from the Lord? These are honest, somewhat in-your-face questions that may be hard to hear. My hope is that you’ll be honest and dialogue with us (comment below) about how you’re viewing the four C’s of growth.

Surviving Social Networking

Churches getting exposure with Social Media

With more than 80 percent of American adults online, churches of every size can benefit greatly from a variety of technological tools. An increase in options during the past decade has led to more advantages—yet it's also caused confusion for many churches. Pastors and staff often feel overwhelmed by the shear amounts of work involved just to keep up with changes.

Let's look at several technology-related projects, broken down by church size (although all of them should be considered by churches at all levels), that can help your church and its goals without becoming overly complex.

Small Church (less than 100 members): Tweets, Blogs, and Facebook
If your church is just getting started, or it's been around for a while but doesn't yet have a strong presence on the internet, several simple and inexpensive technology projects can help you build awareness for your church, keep in touch with people within your congregation, and achieve broader communication goals.

With more than 80 percent of American adults online, churches of every size can benefit greatly from a variety of technological tools. An increase in options during the past decade has led to more advantages—yet it's also caused confusion for many churches. Pastors and staff often feel overwhelmed by the shear amounts of work involved just to keep up with changes.
Let's look at several technology-related projects, broken down by church size (although all of them should be considered by churches at all levels), that can help your church and its goals without becoming overly complex.Small Church (less than 100 members): Tweets, Blogs, and Facebook.

If your church is just getting started, or it's been around for a while but doesn't yet have a strong presence on the internet, several simple and inexpensive technology projects can help you build awareness for your church, keep in touch with people within your congregation, and achieve broader communication goals.Start posting

One of the easiest projects that can perhaps have the most benefit to your ministry is to start a blog. Blogger by Google (www.blogger.com) is surprisingly simple to set up, create posts, and upload images and videos. Another bonus: Blogger is free. With a blog, your pastor or church leaders can write about points not mentioned in the sermon, discuss ministry aspirations, hint at goals for the future, and even bring up personal issues to begin a more authentic communication channel within your church.

Start tweeting
Twitter (twitter.com) is now the third-largest social networking website, next to MySpace and Facebook. It can't be ignored—and it can be an effective tool for ministry. Twitter, known as a micro-blogging service because it allows its users to send and read other users' updates (known as tweets), publishes text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length. Users send and receive updates for free from any device with an internet connection, making it incredibly simple to share what you're doing, what your ministry is working on, and things people can check out on your blog and website to extend the online hand of friendship. To simplify how much to keep track of, consider a free, simple service called Ping.fm (ping.fm), which allows you to connect your blogs and social networking accounts and update them simultaneously via e-mail or text message.

Start networking
Facebook (facebook.com) can be a wonderful, free tool to connect with people online. You'll quickly find that many people in your congregation are already members. After you set up an account for your church (and Facebook now offers a direct way for groups and businesses to set up a page at facebook.com/pages/create.php), you can "friend" members who also are on the site, usually by finding them by e-mail address. Next, look under the "Applications" area of your home page for "Groups." Here, you can set up a group for church members to join and interact. Another Facebook application allows you to form causes (simply type "Causes" in the Facebook search tool to get started), a great way to get people involved in specific ministries within your church.