We, here at KidStuf, are always reaching for the stars (for better or for worse sometimes), searching for the next new idea to help us reach families more effectively. In January, we stumbled onto something that worked and wanted to share it with you.
The big idea this month is Discipline. We define discipline as “doing what you need to do now so that you can grow stronger.”
We are focusing on spiritual disciplines; like reading your Bible and memorizing Scripture. Not always the most exciting thing to talk about in a foyer environment, so we came up with the idea for The Big Game.
The Big Game was a live, online, Bible trivia competition that would be played at home during the week. In The Big Game, families competed not only for the top family spot, but for top campus bragging rights as well!
(For those of you who don’t know, we have three campuses. You can learn more about those here.)
Families were given a playbook in KidStuf LIVE and told that if they wanted to win the Game, they had to study the plays. Just like in life…when we study God’s “Playbook,” we play at our very best.
You can view the playbook here: january-trifold-outside january-trifold-inside
In KidStuf Live, we sang a fun, new song to Vinny called “R to the B.” We wanted to help him understand that the Bible doesn’t have to be boring or overwhelming when you “read a little every day and read a little every night because the Bible is true and the Bible is right.” You can find the song we used at Amber Sky Records.
And then to give families a little taste of what the Big Game would be like on Monday night, we attempted (for the first time ever) to sync up all three KidStuf LIVE productions through video iChat and play one Big Game together.
Families came up with team names and made team posters.
And then we put all three campuses and a game referee up live on the screen in four separate iChat windows to compete together. The result was unbelievable!!
The audience felt like they were a part of something bigger and it gave us a lot of momentum going into the Big Game in their home on Monday night. The very next night we had 288 families log onto www.kidstuf.com to play LIVE. We were so psyched!
If you would like to see more of what this looked like, check this month’s highlight video.
Mad props to all our tech staff and volunteers whose motto has always been, “we can make it work.” We asked them to write a little something up to tell the blogosphere how they got the job done and here’s their multi-campus collective stats, in all sorts of words normal people don’t understand.
3 Tech Teams
3 Actor Ensembles
112 Channels of Audio
768 Router Points
10 Computers
6 LX66 Projectors
4 Plasmas
3 Network Switches
21 Analog-Digital Converters
4.5 miles of video cables
7.9 miles of audio cables
243 miles of Cat 5E cable
We used the iChat server service in OS X server with Open Directory kerberos authentication to ensure traffic was isolated on our private network instead of going out to the Internet. The traffic passed over our 100mbps Metro Ethernet WAN links between all three buildings.
SO if that didn’t make sense to you, don’t worry about it because it doesn’t make sense to me either. But I’m oh so glad it makes sense to our tech staff.
That’s it from the land of KidStuf. We’d love to hear about anything new you’re trying to use to reach families. Cause you know, we got nothing for February!!
Holly Delich, KidStuf Creative Director
October 10th, 2011 at 3:52 am
Unfortunately, for most cloud computing platforms the vehicle example you allow doesn’t work out. If you see an auto as a means to an end, and all of you value is getting there, then you need an application platform like Google’s AppEngine. Here you just add an app, and the rest is resolved. If however you run ec2, you’re no longer stressing about computer hardware, but still about instances and virtual servers. They all run OS’s that need to be maintained; it’s like taking taxi’s but still having to know everything about the taxi’s engines. I predict that down the road we’ll move towards AppEngine like models or ‘managed clouds’.