(a .pdf of this letter is available here)

Technology makes the world go round! (or so it seems these days) In the last couple of weeks we’ve gotten our hands on some new updates and interesting facts about what our Information Technology Group (ITG) does. We enjoyed being reminded of some of the magnitude of our ministry to our staff and to you and thought you might enjoy seeing a bit of it, too!

Did You Know That ITG has…

• 233 servers
• 3,562 network ports
• 70,000 messages received per day
• 534,000 Spam messages received per day that are filtered out! Meaning 88% of messages received per day are spam! (Can you imagine the loss of man hours if each staff member had to sort through all that each day!)
• Two 9 Megabit per second Web links
• 66 Gigabytes per day of data transmitted over the web links
• Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) Telecommunications (think Vonage on a grand scale, which translates into fantastic savings for the ministry)
• 42 Terabytes of Disk storage ( I asked what on earth that meant. Translation: our computer room alone has about the equivalent of 1000 home computers’ storage space, not counting all the individual computers our staff use!)
• A data backup consisting of 18 Terabytes per week, which is the equivalent of 18 million copies of the Lord of the Rings!

Sorry for those of you, like me, who don’t know a gig from a byte, but I still thought it was amazing to see the magnitude of the work my husband has his fingers in on a daily basis. The foundation for many of our ministry functions could not be done without all this technology. It frees up countless man hours, speeds up communication and saves money to be used for reaching others with the love of Jesus.

After all, why go to all this effort and have all these systems to maintain if we lose sight of why we do all this? We want everyone in the world to have a chance to know how much Jesus loves them and begin a relationship with Him. This technology and the people who do it are a big part of expanding our reach around the globe. I’ve also attached a clip from an email update that may affect you. Our technology is here to make the lives of those who contribute to Campus Crusade for Christ easier, too!

EFT (Electronic Fund Transfer) Giving online goes Live!

At 7:30 AM yesterday morning (Thursday Sept 14) EFT giving went live at give.ccci.org.

• Donors can now give by bank account transfer (EFT) for single or recurring gifts.
• Donors can use Checking or Savings accounts
• They can now give recurring EFT or credit card gifts on the following cycles – monthly, semi-monthly, quarterly, annual and semi annual.
• Bank Account Gifts incur no credit card transaction fee

We have had a number of you request this kind of information in the past, so I was excited to share with those of you who like this kind of convenience that you can do it anytime you want to now! Thank you all for everything you do to keep Karl and me serving. Without the finances and prayers and encouragement, we would literally not be able to do our jobs. God bless you!