IT wise. In the UK. We’re talking here about supporting a city centre church with with at least 10 staff and a congregation of 500 with 1 part-time IT bod. Anything outside of the following means you’re going down the bespoke route and you have to be really sure the gains are worth it, as it means an increased support burden.

  • Website - a bootstrap responsive (single page?) site which points people to your google calendar and twitter. Your site won’t change much eg when there is a new member of staff. Don’t use joomla or wordpress as a) after the initial excitement, no one will want to write for the site and b) at some point an update will break your expensive theme. Use a professional photographer - no one goes to websites anymore, but if they do, they just look at the pictures.

  • Online articles - a jekyll blog. And yes it’s responsive.

  • Email - google apps gmail.

  • Public calendar - google apps calendar. Make people subscribe to it rather than displaying it via a pretty webpage which usually isn’t that pretty.

  • Dropbox - people love it.

  • Audio hosting and feed - libsyn, soundcloud.

  • Updates/photos - twitter eg take a photograph of your calender.

  • Event/conference registration - wufoo, eventbrite.

  • Printer support contract - Konica Minolta. It might be just a coincidence but every organisation I’ve worked for, used Konica and I’ve always been impressed with their level of service.

  • AV support contract - get one. And don’t leave it to the last minute as it takes time - finding a good AV firm who will support a system they haven’t installed can be tricky and if you do manage to find one, they will want to do an audit. The best I’ve worked with are d3.

  • NAS - get an inexpensive 1 or 2 bay synology or qnap. This is mainly for the av team to park their large files. Chronosync to backup up once a week to external drives, always have one drive off site.

With the above setup requiring minimal IT support, the most important tech person onsite is the head of the AV team - you want him/her to be hands-on as this helps problem solving when the AV engineers turn up.

The AV team are the ones who put in the hours - finding out requirements, rehearsing, setting up equipment, the actual events themselves, tidying up and editing. And like a lot of jobs, they can put in a lot of effort and not have too much to show for it - things/equipment still go wrong.