A few nights ago, I was at a meeting called to come up with ways to match a $75,000 grant to repair our church tower, designed by a renowned early 19th century architect.

The consensus was a "quiet" fund-raising campaign, approaching a few parishioners with deep pockets, and offering the rest a chance to "buy" bricks to help meet the goal.

The head of the fund-raising effort held up a brochure used in a church campaign seven years ago.

"We are designing something like this, but we're using the Power Point on my laptop and will send them as attachments on e-mail," she said. "No design or printing costs will be involved."

Technology has made fund-raising, and just about every other need to communicate, so easy, even in just seven years. Our monthly church newsletter is available on our website as a downloadable PDF file; the week's events are an e-mail blast every Friday; the volunteers' schedules and Sunday readings are sent as Word attachments.

While it often involves going head to head with corporate Luddites, more and more businesses and organizations are turning to technology.

The more conservative enterprises -- newspapers, for example -- have come to it so late that they find themselves locked in a death struggle with web sites that are based in spare bedrooms rooms and depend on links, rather than reporters, photographers and editors, for their content.

While you might think that real estate agents have been in the forefront of embracing technology and all that it entails, I've found that it is more of a pick and choose situation. Cellphones, email and basic Websites, yes. Blogs, multimedia, videos and podcasts, no.

Or maybe just not yet. There's a fear factor involved here, or at least a wariness inherent in a profession that, cellphones aside, would be easily recognizable in basic form to a real estate agent 80 or 40 years ago.

Here's a warning. The longer it takes you to embrace technology, the lower are your chances of standing out in the crowd. Creating and maintaining a stand-out blog will consume a lot of time, but, in a growing number of cases, especially when dealing with savvy Generation Xers and younger markets, it is worth the work.

For a good look at the world of real estate blogging, pick up a copy of Realty Blogging (McGraw-Hill, $18.95) by Richard Nacht and Paul Chaney. Chaney appeared as part of a panel of technology

I set up for the National Association of Real Estate Editors spring summit in Charlotte, N.C., and the stats he provided convinced me that agent blogs will be as necessary to the bottom line as cellphones.

Need an example? Just ask my Realty Times colleague and NAREE member Frances Flynn Thorsen for her blog addresses.

It isn't just about blogging, but about multimedia -- from the printed word to video podcasts that your clients can download from iTunes and check out at their convenience.

It's surprising how easy it is to get technological, and how little it costs to get started. None of my three blogs costs me anything, and I've recently been able to being embedding video into one of the blogs, thanks to the free video upload available with a free Google account.

Investment in equipment is minimal as well, if you already have a laptop or desktop computer with lots of memory and a backup hard drive. If you've been reading the ads lately, you know how many deals and bargains there are in the computer world. Just make sure you shop carefully (availability of service should be your primary concern).

A solid digital camera with an editing program costs about $300; a good-quality video camera runs about that much (movies and photo shows are easily assembled on the movie-maker program that comes with Windows.

Want to produce regular "newscasts" and interview programs on your website? The downloadable VlogIt program lets you design it for about $50 (A Web cam or your video camera works perfectly).

Podcasts? A stereo-quality digital tape recorder (Olympus about $100). Editing it is easy with the $39 MusicCreator 3 program, then compressing it with Windows Media Encoder for easy upload to your Web site or as an e-mail attachment.

One more newbie on the tech shelf. PureDigital's Point and Shoot costs about $100, is available at the pharmacy, and is downloaded directly into its own program on your PC. From there, you can create a high-quality movie on a Windows Media file.