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Use a Blog as a News Feed

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When I say “blog” to some church folks, what they seem to think that means is either “opinionated editorials” or “narcissistic what-I ate-for-breakfast-reports”.  But blogs can be a great tool for non-profits.

A blog can be editorial or inane, but more basically, a blog is a special kind of website (or a specific function on a website), usually managed by blog software like WordPress (what this blog uses), Blogger, or others.  Articles (aka “posts”) on a blog are arranged on the blog home page in chronological order, with the most recent on top.  Each post also has it’s own stand-alone page too (usually accessed by clicking the title of the post).  Most blogs also allow readers to comment or question in response to the post, but this feature can be turned off.

Develop a “Feed”

I regularly coach churches and faith communities to develop a “News Feed” by using a blog for all their dated, time-bound content.  Most blogs allow multiple authors, so several staff or leaders can contribute.  Posts can be:

  • news about the organization (“We’ve just received an award”)
  • educational (“Here’s what we do to help”)
  • promotional (“Attend our big event”)
  • seeking help (“We need furniture donations for a family”)
  • prompting action (“Come serve at the soup kitchen on Saturday”)
  • and probably a dozen other ideas!

Each piece of news needs to have it’s own separate post.  Don’t aggregate all your news into one big post.  This way you can send people to specific articles or pieces of news.

The real power of the blog as News Feed is when you link it to your other media.  The blog posts can be longer and have more detailed information than is really practical in a single email, an email newsletter or in social media like Facebook.  With the News Feed, you have a location for that longer info and you can put links to it in those other medias.  For example, a short “teaser” couple of sentences in an email newsletter, concluding with a “Click here for more info” that is a link back to the specific stand-alone post page of that topic.

A best practice would be to use the URL of the stand-alone post page in your link (instead of the chronological-order home page of the blog), since by the time your reader gets to the home page, you may have made other posts, so what they are looking for won’t be on top any more.

Simplifies Content Management

This strategy of using a blog for a news feed greatly simplifies dated content management on your website:

  1. The person putting content on the site doesn’t have to think about which page of the site it goes on — they just create a new post for each piece of news, and it goes into the chronological structure of the blog/news feed.
  2. The person managing content never has to take old news down, only put new news up!

Number two is an important plus: You don’t want to have past-dated content on your site, but you also want to let potential visitors have an idea of what kinds of things your faith community has been doing.  With a news feed, the date-stamped posts give you the best of both worlds– as long as you keep making new posts at least every other week.

Space out Facebook Auto-Posts

If you have set up your blog-as-a-news-feed to post automatically over onto your Facebook Page, then be sure to schedule your posts so that they don’t all publish at one time and “overwhelm” your fans’ FB newsfeed.  Not only might they “unlike” your page, part of the power of the posts onto the FB page is that they will appear sporadically in your fans’ news, and keep reminding them of the things that you are doing.  In this case, a drip is a lot more effective than a flood.

A blog may already be a part of your established website, or you may be able to easily add a blog.  Having your news feed be a part of your larger site is ideal, but if it’s not feasible, WordPress.com and Blogger and other blogging sites offer free (but limited feature) blogs.  Most of those services also allow you to buy a domain name to use with that free blog (this can be less than $25 per year).

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Avoiding Image Copyright Issues

Most people know that it’s easy to find images by searching Google Image Search. But not all the images you find through such a search are legal to use. Here are some tips and tools for avoiding copyright issues.

When you find an image that seems perfect for a page or post of your website – say, a mouth-watering picture of pancakes for that article about the pancake breakfast fundraiser – look at the website where the picture is being displayed.

Obviously, if the picture is from the IHOP website, it’s going to be copyrighted. But sometimes, other people have violated copyright law to use IHOP’s photo, so just because it’s on someone’s blog doesn’t mean that it’s fair game.  You (and your organization) are responsible for the images you use on your site, and the fines can be thousands of dollars.

A very helpful tool is TinEye.com, a reverse image search. On their site, you can either upload an image file, or paste in the URL of the photo that you found on Google Image, and TinEye will show you all the places on the web where that picture occurs.  Then you can look for indications that the image might be copyrighted. For instance, you should be able to see if an image is a stock photo being sold on a service like istockphoto.com or gettyimages.com.

One helpful tip is to sort your TineEye.com search results by date, displaying the oldest results first. This should give you some indications about where the photo might have originated, but should not be taken as definitive, since stock photo sites might have been reorganized and changed their URLs, so you might not see this particular photo appearing on the stock photo site until later in date.

TinEye Makes browser add-ins for all the major website browsers, which makes searching images even easier. Once you have the added installed and activated, you only need to right-click on an image and then choose “Search Image on TinEye”. The search results will open in a new tab or window.

Have questions about copyrights for images? Leave your question in the comments.

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Use Secure Usernames & Passwords

loginBecause WordPress is open source (free), it is more vulnerable to being hacked. Hackers are less interested in taking your site down than they are in using your server to send spam emails without being detected. Your first line of defense is a secure username & password.

WordPress websites are attacked every day by hackbots trying to guess usernames and passwords. Because WordPress is open source, they know exactly how to log in. These automated hackers can make hundreds of guesses per second.

For a very long time, the default username when WordPress was installed was “admin”. That’s the very first username that hackbots will try on your site. It’s vitally important that if you have a username “admin” that you get rid of it as soon as possible. Create a new username with administrator level privileges, log out, login with the new username, and delete the “admin” user.

Your password should never be – or even contain – your domain name or username. Those are too easy to guess. A secure password contains lower and upper case letters, numerals, and symbols, and is at least 8 characters long – the longer the better.

While most people try to use a word or phrase that they can remember, you can create more complex passwords (even strings of random characters) – and have more help in creating and remembering them – by using a password manager in your browser.  Three that offer their base level for free are: KeePass,  Passpack or LastPass.  Others with a paid level are: OnePassword, RoboForm.  (Personally, I use LastPass, and pay the $12 a year so that I get access on my mobile device.)

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Annual Content Review

website contentOnce a year you should review the content on your site to make sure it is up to date.  If your site is very active – for instance, more than six posts per week – you might want to do this twice or even four times per year.  This post contains some things to look for.

First of all, note that you do not need to make any edits or changes to your old blog or news feed posts. Because these posts live within a dated structure, people will understand that they are potentially out of date.

Focus on the static pages of your site, which your users will assume our current information for your organization. Go through each page looking for the following:

  1. Outdated Content.  This is content that is past-date or otherwise no longer valid. An example might be a page that says the youth group meets on Wednesday nights, when they now meet on Thursday nights.
  2. Outdated Images.  This is not so important for your newcomer/potential visitor site users, but you want your organization members to feel like the site is being kept up and has valuable information on it – which can be hard to do when the pictures on the site show young kids who are now teenagers.
  3. Eyes of the Newcomer. Look through each page trying to view it through the eyes of a newcomer. Are there mysterious acronyms or insider language?  Remember that you want your website (especially the homepage) to be a “welcome mat” that offers newcomers hospitality and invites them to visit your faith community.
  4. How Content is Displayed. Look through the site not only for whether information is up-to-date, but also how the information is displayed. Is it easy to skim through? Is it organized well? Are there ways that you can use fewer words and more images?
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Get Google Apps for Nonprofits for Free

Google Apps for Nonprofits

You can use domain-based email (office@mychurch.org), as well as other great Google services by applying for a free Google Apps for Nonprofits account.  Google offers verfied 501(c)3 nonprofits free Google Apps accounts.  Normally, you would pay $5/month per email address or $50/year, so this is a great value.

You can find more info here, but the short story is that you will need to complete an application process, then setup Google Apps (verify your domain, and then set up accounts).   Verifying your domain can be a little tricky if you are tech-challenged, but Google offers several ways to do this.

Google does not ask for your IRS 501(c)3 letter, but instead asks for your EIN (IRS Employer Identification Number).  The snag for most local faith communities is that their EIN may not be in the IRS database of charitable organizations, even though they have a letter as a 501(c)3. Most local congregations are however, covered under a group EIN from their denominational body—as long as the “deductability status” of that organization in the database is “Group”, which extends to subordinate units.  Obviously, you shouldn’t use the denomination’s EIN for paying employees or filing taxes, but this seems to be the best way to work within the Google Apps for Nonprofits system.

Google Apps offers a really great tool for migrating all the emails from your old email hosting over into Google Apps. Contacts and calendars can be exported and imported in.  In addition to email, calendars & contacts, Google Apps includes Google Drive (for sharing/collaborating on documents & spreadsheets), and many other tools.

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Managing Menus in WordPress

wordpress menuYou have successfully created a new page for your WordPress website, now how do you get it into the menu?  Since WordPress released version 3.0, menus now have a drag-and-drop functionality, making it simple to add and delete pages from your menu.

Just follow these steps:

  1. Find the menu management page by looking under Appearance – Menus in the dashboard.
  2. Look for a new page that you have created under the “Pages” section of the narrower left side of the Edit Menus page. In the Pages section you can search for pages, but the default should show your Most Recent pages. Usually, any new page that you have created is the topmost item in the list.
  3. Place a check in the boxes for the pages that you would like to add to your menu, and click the button “Add to Menu”.
  4. Now look at the bottom of the section titled “Menu Structure” – the wider main part of the Edit Menus page. The page(s) you just added should now appear at the bottom.
  5. Drag-and-drop the pages you added to the location you would like them to appear on your menu. (The top is the left side of your menu, and the bottom is the right.) To make a page a sub-page, simply indent it from the main level page items – it should snap into place as indented.  You can also add sub-sub-pages in the same way.
  6. Remember to click the “Save Menu” button, then go back to a friend-facing page of your website and refresh. You should see your new menu item.
  7. To delete a page, open it’s item by clicking on the down-arrow on the right side.  You can “Remove” the item there.  This will not affect the actual page, just the item for that page in your menu.

Tips & Troublehooting

  • If you don’t see your new menu item immediately, try a hard refresh of your page by holding the Ctrl key and pressing F5. To eliminate any caching issues, delete your browser cache and/or check your menu on another device.
  • If you still don’t see your new menu item after eliminating caching issues, check to make sure that you edited the correct menu. It is possible to have more than one menu, and perhaps you are changing the one not in use. (If this is the case, once you have everything fixed, it’s best to eliminate any unneeded menus to avoid future confusion.)
  • You can have the same page appear more than once in your menu, simply added a second time in drag-and-drop it where you would like it to appear. For instance, if your site is very large, you might want your “Contact” page to appear both as a main level menu item and as a sub-page of About.
  • If you have a long page title that you would like to shorten, or if you have another reason for changing the menu label, you can do this by opening the menu item (click the down-arrow on the right), and editing the “Navigation Label”.
  • You can create a menu item for a PDF or for the page of a separate website, by opening the Links section on the left side of the Edit Menus page (right under Pages). The URL for your uploaded PDF or the page you would like to send people to (don’t forget to include the http://), and add the text for the menu item label.
  • If you are using Categories on the posts in your site, you can create a menu item for a single category. For instance, if some of the posts in your site have a category of “Youth Ministry”, in the Categories section of the menu editing page, you can create a menu item for this category.  When clicked, the user will see only posts with a category of Youth Ministry.
  • Avoid menus that are too long! You definitely don’t want to have any of your menus wrap onto a second line – that looks tacky. And having more than seven or eight main level menu items becomes overwhelming for the user. Keep your menu streamlined!
  • You also want to keep your main level menu items “main level” – in other words, the most general categories, in order to help your site users navigate around your content.  Resist the temptation to promote events in your menu– use the sidebar for this.
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