Catching Up

I guess I've been too busy doing eMinistry over the past three months to blog about it, but a lot of great things have been happening. Classes in November included 2 classes with National Episcopal Health Ministries and 2 with Barbara Crafton on "Forgiveness" -- along with classes on the MDGs, Designing a Confirmation program, and Discernment 101. December was spent taking care of organizational details like our first board meeting and end of year financial and registration statistics. In mid-January we completed and filed the IRS application for tax-exempt status, and our state and federal taxes are due next week. Developing and running a non-profit is certainly an interesting process!

We've got great classes scheduled for the spring -- again our biggest challenge is in getting enough registrations to hold them. Some classes are easily subscribed, others are requiring targeted emails to diocesan committee and commission chairs. I know that 2007's emphasis has to be on promotion. We've proved we can get great leaders and develop terrific classes -- now we need to explore all the avenues for letting people in congregations know about what we offer. I purposely stayed "under the radar" in terms of promotion last year. Now I think we are ready for press releases and maybe some advertising.

The past couple of months I've been working on two project proposals which would fund the development of about 25 classes in two different ministry areas. We'll know more soon about whether these will be funded. Both would significantly raise eMinistry's visibility. And both would provide a focus for developing a comprehensive program of classes in those two ministry areas. Now that we have some real experience in running teleclasses, we're able to better estimate the time and administrative support it takes to make them happen. All of that will impact the type of funding we seek to help us develop into a full-fledged operation over the next three years.

Onward and upward!

Elizabeth