Illinois church uses Backpack as “the perfect solution” for sharing information easily

Dave Brazzle of the Immanuel Lutheran Church in Palatine, IL explains how the church and school uses Backpack.

We had difficulty sharing information.
Our ministries (dozens operating within the church and school) needed to share their respective missions, goals, resource needs, and accomplishments online. Only one of our groups was savvy enough to create a webpage with this information. Others had no idea where to start.

We needed a solution that wouldn’t overwhelm our staff.
While we do have a Director of Technology on staff — his time is in heavy demand. The time required for dozens of ministries to each explain what they wanted to communicate on our church/school website is too overwhelming. Each of our ministries knew what they wanted to say but didn’t have a good and efficient way of publishing it.

Backpack helps us publish information on our own.
The answer turned out to be Backpack. We now have dozens of pages — each one “owned” by a ministry, board or teacher in our school. It only took a couple of hours of Backpack training... even for people who initially said that they “don’t do computers.”

Many of our ministries say that they’ve found their Backpack “pages” empowering. Updates occur daily. Each of the pages are linked-to and accessible from our church’s homepage. Guests clicking on these links don’t even know they’ve left our “normal” website.

Our teachers are using Backpack too.
Nearly every teacher in our school maintains their own Backpack page. The student’s parents can see what is happening in the classes — almost in real time. Teachers post pictures and videos without involving our technical staff. It is amazing, and we believe it is a competitive advantage in the school marketplace.

Does your company or organization use Backpack in an interesting way? Let us know.