Day 5 – Phillip Nagle Still Pedaling on his Mission to Raise $48K for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.

Some people think he is crazy for attempting to ride so many miles in 48 days. I even had a friend bet me a pair of Speedplay bike pedals that he wouldn’t make it. But I am a believer: He’s going to make it. I know it. I hope you will be a believer too.

At the end of the day on July 23rd, Phil was 550 miles into his 8,000 mile journey to raise money for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. Today he is headed for the beautiful state of Vermont. Being a flatlander from Ohio, Phil went above what his training had prepared him for and conquered the hills in the Allegany National forest in New York. “My legs are a little sore,” he admitted humbly. (I wonder how he is going to feel when he hits the Rockies!) I have to confess that I wish that I was riding with him: A ride like this comes once in a lifetime if we’re lucky. And to ride for such a mission makes it even more special.

Phil is using One Call Now phone notification to send updates during the course of his journey. To hear this online updates, go to http://go48in48.com/onecall. If you would like to be added to the One Call Now calling list to hear Phil’s updates by phone, please email your phone number to Christina.brownlee@onecallnow.com

TO WIN A FREE DELL PRINTER… CLICK HERE

Phillip Nagle is riding his bicycle across 48 states in 48 days to raise $48,000 for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society!

One Call Now is proud to sponsor Phillip Nagle on his quest to cycle through mass quantities of pain by riding across 48 states in 48 days. Phillip is dedicating his campaign to his uncle, Alvin Nagle, who died of leukemia as a teenager. Alvin was ambitious, athletic, and always helped others.

As an avid cyclist, when I heard about this campaign, I thought he was crazy. But after reading about Philip on his website at go48in48.com, I immediately admired his dedication and vision. It will be an epic journey that I cannot wait to follow, and live vicariously through, particularly the southern states and up into the beautiful American Northwest. The level of self determination and willpower necessary to take on this level of effort is truly amazing and inspirational.

Come Along with Phillip on His Journey:
1. Add your phone number to the One Call Now family profile to receive update notifications by phone. Click here to sign up.
2. Follow Phillip on Twitter: http://twitter.com/go48in48
3. Phillip’s website: http://go48in48.com/
4. Follow One Call Now on Twitter: http://twitter.com/OneCallNow

Click Here to View Route Details

Grow your church this summer—We can help!

Grow your congregation using One Call Now. We’re thrilled to introduce the next step in reaching your community—access to new residents in YOUR area!

Why new residents?
Each year, about 23 million households—over one fifth of all households in the U.S.—move to a new residence. Movers represent the single largest opportunity to both acquire and retain congregants because:

• Movers are forced to sever the connections to daily routine—including their church or synagogue—and must immediately reconnect them.
• Movers actively establish new patterns and loyalties during this short window of opportunity.
• This is your opportunity to share what you have to offer first!

One Call Now’s New Mover Program connects you with potential members who are new to the area and eager to make connections. You’ll receive their full name, physical address, and a phone number (if available) to use in your marketing efforts. A list of new residents in zip codes you have pre-selected will be mailed to you each month. Take this information and connect with your area’s new residents!

• Call to welcome them to the neighborhood
• Send out awareness pieces such as your newsletter
• Create invitations to join you for service or vacation Bible school this summer

Introductory Special!
We’re so sure you’re going to love this new service that we’ll give you the last two months of new movers in your area FREE when you sign up today!

Visit us at One Call Now or call Phil at 877.698.3262 x1155 by July 31st to take advantage of this special offer.

One Call Now looks forward to continuing to provide your members with outstanding communication tools to increase participation, grow your congregation, and keep your members excited and informed!

About the Authors
Phillip Elmore, Director of Business Development for One Call Now’s Religious Market and Christina Brownlee, Marketing Director for One Call Now™,

One Call Now has calling plans for large churches, voice broadcasting service plans for congregational churches, and group calling plans for synagogues and chabads.

One Call Now is a market leading automated phone and text messaging service serving business, government, schools, religious, and sports organizations. Learn more at One Call Now.

Coaching Tips: What’s the Best Way to Communicate with Parents?

It’s Going to be a Great Season
Whether this is your first year or your twenty-first, we applaud and thank you for the time and effort you spend guiding the development of young players. Their spirit, enthusiasm, sportsmanship and athletic abilities are in your hands. After participating in a number of coaching education courses over the years, I’ve noticed that coaches continue to ask, “What’s the best way to communicate with parents?” Meanwhile, parents are wondering exactly how they can best relate to and support the coach! Answering these questions is the purpose of this guide. This booklet is targeted at youth sports coaches. Although written from a soccer coach’s perspective and for soccer coach Certification Seminars, this booklet is appropriate for all youth sports and activities. We will cover different options, tools and methods coaches can use when communicating with parents and players. Effective coaching means going above and beyond the basics of coaching the game and building players’ skills; it means communicating with parents, encouraging players and building a strong sense of team and family for a successful season. We have pulled together several simple things you can do to keep your group in the loop and eliminate the frustrating hassles of communications.

THE COACH’S JOB
Do What You Do Well; Delegate the Rest
Many coaches want to train the players, coach the game and leave the rest to someone else. This may be the ideal, but it is not realistic. Responsibilities for a great season include player selection, parent meetings, scheduling, finding a place to train, securing the game field, locating/scheduling officials, getting results to the proper authority, identifying how the team will play, and more. Certainly, your best bet is to delegate responsibilities whenever appropriate. Coaches must learn that they are not always the best individuals to do all of the tasks. Experienced (and happy) coaches identify what they do not want to do, or are not best at doing, and find someone who can and will perform those tasks.

About the Good Call Authors
Edited by George Perry, NSCAA Senior National Staff Coach, and Winner of Berticelli Coaching Award and Leib Lurie, former Venture Crew Leader and Pack Master, BSA

Read more by downloading the One Call Now GOOD CALL Coaches Handbook.

One Call Now is a market leading automated phone and text messaging service serving business, government, schools, religious, and sports organizations. Learn more at One Call Now.

11 Tips for Church, Parish, and Temple Administrators

Here are some friendly ideas that will help you become more effective in your role as administrator for your congregation.

1. Keep a regular office schedule so vendors and church members can reach you.

2. When buying new office or meeting room equipment, be sure to budget at least 20% a year for maintenance and replacement costs.

3. Pay attention to the parking lot. Church members who have trouble parking are less likely to attend. Convenient parking increases attendance and collections.

4. The best way to get people to attend a meeting or religious study class is to offer food. Coffee, juice, donuts and muffins before a class will nearly always boost attendance dramatically.

5. Keep your communications to the congregation short and sweet – get to the point, be factual, be positive.

6. Be pro-active. Look for problems to fix while they are still small and manageable. Nagging problems only grow worse.

7. Ask for help every week, and get volunteers to help with the church facilities and activities. Don’t suffer in silence. Get help. Others will enjoy helping you.

8. Set time aside to communicate with your clergy individually. Make sure they know you are supporting them and find out what they need.

9. Be humble and admit errors and oversights on your part with candor and humor. Everyone makes and forgives mistakes.

10. Enjoy your work and treat everyone to a smile. You’ll get a lot more support with a smile, and your congregation will be the better for it.

11. Use an affordable and reliable service like the One Call Now automated phone-messaging service to reach your congregation, study groups, choir, or youth group. You can create a phone number list in advance for each group, including home, work, and cell numbers. When it’s time to call, record your message from a script, select the list or lists to use, and let the automated service place all your calls.

About the Authors
Phillip Elmore, Director of Business Development for One Call Now’s Religious Market and Christina Brownlee, Marketing Director for One Call Now™,

One Call Now has calling plans for large churches, voice broadcasting service plans for congregational churches, and group calling plans for synagogues and chabads.

One Call Now is a market leading automated phone and text messaging service serving business, government, schools, religious, and sports organizations. Learn more at One Call Now.

12 Most Humorous Church Signboards

From around the country, we’ve picked twelve of the most humorous messages from church signboards:
1. Keep using my name, I’ll make the traffic jam longer.
2. Great wedding, ask me to the marriage.
3. We need to talk – God.
4. Forbidden fruit creates jams.
5. Wal-Mart is not the only saving place.
6. If your spirit is sick, we’re the hospital.
7. Why is there anything? Answer at 10AM Sunday morning.
8. Best time to start going to church – ten years ago and tomorrow.
9. There’s no do-over in life, but there is forgiveness.
10. Holy water made here – we boil the hell out of it.
11. Friends don’t let friends go to hell.
12. Prayer – wireless access to God with no roaming fee.

Communicating with Your Church, Synagogue, or Chabad
Humor is a great tool for engaging with members of the congregation on a human level because it lowers defenses and opens the mind.

One Call Now’s automated phone messaging service is another great tool that lets your reach out to all your congregation members to keep them informed and participating.

You can use an affordable and reliable service like the One Call Now automated phone-messaging service to reach your congregation, study groups, ministries, choir, or youth groups. You can create a phone number list in advance for each group, including home, work, and cell numbers. When it’s time to call, simply record your message, and let our phone notification service place all your calls. One Call Now has calling plans for large churches, voice broadcasting service plans for congregational churches, and group calling plans for synagogues and chabads.

About the Authors
Angela Kirchner, President and Christina Brownlee, Marketing Director. One Call Now is a market leading automated phone and text messaging service serving business, government, schools, religious, and sports organizations. Learn more at One Call Now.

Protecting the Sports Team Coach and Manager by Bruce Brownlee

Sports clubs and school systems nationwide are cautiously guarding their sports programs from the stigma that results from accusations of improper conduct between a sports team coaches and team managers and players.   Here’s a short list of tips you can use to guard your reputation.

On the Field or at the Gym

1. “Keep the ball in front of you” and “move your feet faster” both sound OK.
2. If you aren’t coaching another team, pack up and get going once the parents and players are gone.
3. If a parent fails to pick up a player on time after practice, have another coach, team manager, parent, or administrator stay with you until the parent arrives.
4. In case of severe weather, put players into a safe structure, or worst case, into passenger cars as a last resort.  No matter how bad the weather, do not sit in a passenger car or building alone with an individual player.  Split up the team so there are several players in each car waiting with parents and coaches.

Protecting the Travel Team Coach On the Road

1. If your club or school can provide an ATC or trainer, take them with you.
2. The parents home and cell phone numbers should be included, as well as the player’s social security number and medical insurance policy numbers and claims verification phone numbers.
3. While traveling or while at the hotel for a basketball, soccer, or softball tournament, never go into a room or other private space alone with a player for any reason.
4. It’s OK to tape an ankle, treat a wound, apply an ice bag, check a knee, or provide Pepto Bismol in this way.
5. Each player already has friends and parents, and trying to be either of these, or trying to be “one of the guys” undermines your effectiveness as a coach.

Safe Communications Before Practices and Games

1. If you get such a contact, just follow up with the parents, not the player, in person or by phone.
2. Well-intentioned attempts at humor are misunderstood, and emails are often seen in a different light when forwarded to persons outside the team who are not familiar with the context.
3. If you must send emails, never send emails to players unless you copy their parents on each and every email.
4. Archive the emails to a file archive later to retain them forever without clogging up your mail client.
5. Messages are forwarded, especially those with unflattering comments, criticism, and inappropriate attempts at humor.
6. Mail server administrators can reconstruct a complete second-by-second record of every conversation you have, by IM, by Twitter, or by email.
7. This ensures that every family gets the same, correct message, and this avoids the chance that you’d be talking to a young child and hoping that the correct message later reaches the parents.

Using an Automated Sports Team Calling Service

Sports team calling services let you set up a team call tree list on a one-time basis, and then use the list to send out a recorded phone message every time you need to call the team. 

One Call Now’s automated phone messaging service for teams is a great tool that lets your reach out to all your parents and players to keep them informed and participating, without the risk of getting the message wrong.  With One Call Now, you can include both home and cell phone telephone numbers for your team.

You can use the affordable and reliable One Call Now automated phone-messaging service to reach your individual team, or use One Call Nowcalling service for travel teams.   One Call Now also has an excellent One Call Now phone message plan for sports clubs and leagues.

About the Author

Bruce Brownlee is an experienced soccer coach who publishes Soccer Coaching Notes and who guest blogs for One Call Now™, a market leading automated phone and text messaging service serving business, government, schools, religious, and sports organizations.  Learn more at One Call Now.

From the Telegraph System to Twitter! What’s Next?

Everyone’s a-twitter about Twitter. Tweets are showing up in the ticker section on our favorite news channels so we can read what everyday people are saying about the latest events while watching and listening to the TV news broadcaster. We all waited anxiously to see Ashton Kutcher win the race against CNN to be the first to have 1 Million followers. (He has a lot of friends.) The founder of Twitter was a guest on Oprah, which makes it seemingly everywhere. So, about a month ago, like everyone who dares to go into the world of Tweeting, I signed up for a new account… and just sat there, waiting. “Where is everyone? Don’t they know I am here?” A few days later, I went on vacation to Key West. I thought it would be the perfect time to Tweet various happenings on lazy beaches, with lizards and the sunshine—and yes, a few times I did Tweet about what I ate.

Then it happened… My Blackberry buzzed, and it read, “SoAndSo (SAS) is now following your updates on Twitter.” Hmm!? Who is So and So, and why are they following me? They actually care that I have a sunburn?

And so it began. Before I knew it, I was following people with similar interests, and they, in turn, followed me.

I am not alone. Twitter has experienced staggering growth— from 475,000 members in February 2008 to over 7 million members in February 2009 (source: Nielsen NetView, 2/09, U.S., Home and Work). TechCrunch reports that Twitter is up to 25 million members as of May 2009, and growing rapidly since the Oprah appearance.

There are hundreds of Twitter applications available for free, including mobile applications so you can Twitter on your cell phone, Tweet Grid (search on multiple subjects at one time), and more. You can even embed your Twitter updates on your blog. There are also mashups (two web applications that are integrated into one program) including YouTube Tweeter and Twitter Jobcast. You can find all of these online at Twitdom http://twitdom.com/, a consolidated database of Twitter applications.

My favorite Twitter application is Tweet Deck. It is exactly what it sounds like. It is a personal browser that sits on my computer screen so I can watch my Tweets go by. I found many churches who were Twittering, so I started following them. Any time I like I can pull up my Tweet Deck and scroll through inspirational messages from churches all over the United States, click through to their websites and learn more about them… all for free —for now. Twitter has also been mired in buyout rumors: The latest rumor is that Apple has offered $700M to buy Twitter. Google and Microsoft were also previously rumored for a Twitter buyout. Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter, did state on The View that the company is not for sale. In 2008, the social networking giant Facebook did make an offer of $500M, and was turned down.

Soon after I realized the significance of the Twitter communication trend. 25 Million people are sitting in a virtual room, connected, sharing information, communicating in twittering snippets that point to blogs, Facebook and other social networking sites for more information.

Communication is traveling and changing at increasing speeds; changing our culture and the way we view the world we live in. Samuel Morse first demonstrated the first working telegraph system in 1838, and by 1844 the first long distance telegraph line ran from Baltimore Maryland to Washington DC. By 1870, the telephone was a reality with the transformation of speech into an electric signal by Elisha Grey and Alexander Bell. In1880 more than 32 million messages were traveling by 291,000 miles of wire.” (History of Communications http://www.fi.edu/learn/case-files/communication.html) Note: In 2009 One Call Now has dialed over 47 million phone numbers, and it is still Spring!

The first computers began to hit the scene in the 1930’s and many inventors have contributed to the evolution of PC’s and operating systems since then. In the 1960’s we saw the discovery of transferring data-packets within a network, leading to the development of the Internet. Then there was the 90s dot com boom and subsequent bust. Now, 171 years after the first demonstration of the telegraph system, here we are in a virtual room of 25 million people with the latest phenomenon— Twitter.

Something to think about… The amount of data currently contained in the Library of Congress is transferred over the Internet every second. It begs the question, “What’s next?”

You can follow One Call Now on Twitter… http://twitter.com/OneCallNow
We have found that Twitter is a great place to announce new features and community involvement, and to talk to people who use One Call Now. We hope you’ll join our conversation!