Ending your presentation on time

Missions Mentoring: Ending your Presentation on Time

This short under 2 minute talk is about missionaries ending their presentations on time. While what this fellow says is true, it can give the wrong idea. Just because you end on time doesn’t mean that the church will give you support. The opposite may be truer though. If you go over your allowed time, your chances greatly decrease with the more time you go over. Ask the pastor, and try to stay within that time limit. I would also point out that you need to clarify what time you are to stop speaking, and what time the service is over. Many pastors stop before 12 AM and have an invitation and closing hymn, so you only have until like 11:50. Good ole U.S.A., getting at the beginning of the feed-line at the restaurant after Sunday morning church is more important than getting anything spiritual from the message. Yep! That’s about it!

Read more

Using Color correctly in Slide Prentations

First of all, these principles are basic art class principles. Color is extremely useful in presentations, but note that there are some rules to observe.

Most missionary presentations use very few title slides, but some use a background kind of effect with an image within that “frame”, and a title. The frame and title would be where you would apply the principles in this post.

There is a very useful and nice program called VideoScribe that allows you to make a whiteboard type video, where a hand actually draws the image. These color balancing tips come from their website (you don’t have to use their program to follow this tip). I will use there images and add logos of companies to illustrate what they say.

http://www.sparkol.com/blog/captivate-your-audience-with-these-pro-colour-tips/

I will summarize the rules here.

Read more

Missionary Software Recommendations

Note: This page will be updated regularly with new recommendations.

I (David Cox) have been a missionary for about 28 years now, and if you count the years on deputation, around 30 years. In my lifetime, I have gone from nothing electronic to speak of to using powerful desktop computers now. When I was in my schooling years (1964-2002) computers hit the scene and are now common. My education (much after school was self-taught about computers, and I even taught myself Foxpro relational database, and programmed my own software) has spanned both no-computer, and computer. So let me start off by a couple of much needed points that people need to understand.

Read more