RussellHltn wrote:Can you shed any light on why? I was surprised to see that as I've never heard of any ward or stake that use their machines for any photo-related tasks. Is this a preview of something to come?
I have no idea where it came from, but we found a legit copy of Publisher 97 laying around. Might be old, but still does the job. We use it on occasion to print banners or flyers, and were kicking the idea around of starting a branch newsletter. Photos come in from USB flash drives and people's digital cameras, so an imaging editor being handy isn't that much of a stretch.
We were using the database feature in Open Office to keep track of our member-missionary door knocking efforts. We'd take little booklets out with us to note which address numbers we attempted on each street, and abbreviations for the results (NH=not home, CB=come back later, NI=not interested, PI=potential investigator, etc.) When we return to the building we then key this all into a database so later we can run a report for the neighborhood that shows the last several visit attempts on each street. You can also run a report of just those in the neighborhood that showed some degree of interest so you don't waste your time coming back to the people who repeatedly said they are completely uninterested.
We added a comments field where we can add in a couple words that caught our attention. Often people will say they already attend some other church, so we ask them which write it down as we're walking to the next house. When that shows up on the report next time as we're approaching the door, sometimes it is helpful in striking up a conversation as you can begin to ask them about their specific beliefs in reference to something or other their denomination teaches. If you can get someone to really start thinking for themselves whether something is true or not, then they are much more likely to desire to hear our views of the topic.
When someone is found through these quorum efforts that indicates a desire to have us come back and teach them, their name & address gets keyed into the Referral Manager website (referrals.lds.org) with the name of the member that found them specified as the "missionary" that referred them. We do it as a missionary referral instead of a member referral so we can distinguish the stats & reports between referrals of people our members are aquainted with, verses those we found simply going out into the community knocking on doors.
-Jeff
Still, the price/performance ratio is excellent. There are a lot of Ward and Stake computers out there to license. That adds up to a pretty penny.
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