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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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Change the Order Posts Appear in WP

If you use the blog function of your WordPress site as a news feed, or if you are using the Recent Posts widget (like we do in the sidebar, below signups), you might occasionally want to change the order of the posts – either in the blog or the widget.

The ordering of the posts in both of these locations is automatically controlled, and determined solely by the date of publication. Older posts automatically appear at the bottom, while the newest post automatically appears at the top – a “reverse chronological” structure.

To change the order where a post appears, you need to change the date of publication for that post – making it earlier in date than the posts you would like it to appear below, and later in date than the posts you would like it to appear above.

Published on

To change the date of publication for post, go to the post editing page, and on the right sidebar, immediately above the blue “Update” button, look for the “Published on:” line.  Right beside that will be a blue link to “Edit”.  Click this link, then select a new publication date.  Be aware that you may have to select a time as well as a date of publish to get your post exactly where you want it.

While changing the order of the posts in the blog or widget might be something you need to do once in a while, you don’t want to end up micromanaging this order too much.  Changing the order more than once a month or so might mean that you need to take a look at creating a publishing schedule to be more organized in the order you originally publish posts.

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Think: “Conversation”

conversationWe need to think of our web, email and social media less as bulletin boards and more as conversations.

Many of us use our church websites, our social media (like Facebook) pages, and our email newsletters as little more than bulletin boards on which we metaphorically tack up wordy informational announcements. Sometimes we dress up our bulletin boards with nice graphics, or link to an article, but we tend to think of these media as one-way communication tools. They’re not. Or at least if we only think of them that way, we are missing their vast potential for expanding our mission.

While the content for our churches’ web and emails will still need to be somewhat information-based (what is the date of that fundraiser?), we need to shift our thinking more toward facilitating conversations and building connections between our readers/users. This is a shift away from a monologue by leaders and toward a shared dialogue by both leaders and members.

This shift has some demographic weight to it: younger readers/users will expect this kind of interaction and view not providing a way to access it as outmoded.  [Just an aside: Pastors, this paradigm shift has HUGE implications for preaching, which will need to find some way to become more interactive or conversational— although not necessarily in the worship service itself. Monologue is on its way out!]

One way to start moving in this direction is simply to invite dialogue and model it. If this is a foreign concept for your organization you may have to coach a few folks to grasp the vision. It’s easiest to start this on a social network like a Facebook page, and most people have already “gotten” the conversational ethos there, although you may still have to encourage them to post conversationally on an organization page, even when they do this all the time with friends and family. State explicitly that you are hoping for discussion. Toss out a question for response. Ask for an opinion. Gather ideas for a program or study. Remember to reply to all or most posts (especially at first), even if it’s just to say “thanks for posting”.

You can also invite people to (briefly?) tell stories or experiences. Posting pictures is also a powerful way to invite conversation. Invite members to post photos from events (with permissions, of course!). Most website hosts now have some sort of blog capability built in, which can be used by pastors or other staff. Or, perhaps the staff blog needs to be on a blog site separate from the church website.

Again, the real power for churches in a blog or news feed is in the interaction of the comments. Think about a blog as less of a monologue-like journal, and more of a guided conversation: here’s the topic and what I think; now what do you think? Even your email newsletters can be a part of fostering conversation, although mostly you’ll have to invite conversations there, and point them toward your website or FB page. (I guess you could invite people to email you back with responses, but that would limit the conversation to one-on-one, and the real aim is a broader conversation.)

Churches, of course, are not exclusively online communities. They have real live, face-to-face interaction too. Getting conversations going on your website or social media pages will never be a substitute for that, but online interaction can deepen and widen the potential for member connections and strengthen the organization. I’ve sometimes been surprised at how introverts will jump into an online conversation when they are far less likely to do that in person, and then having “met” someone through that conversation, they have an easier time connecting in person.

So in the spirit of fostering a dialogue…. how are you using your media to create conversations? How has it worked for you? Or, if you’re not doing that yet, what kinds of ideas come to mind for getting more interaction going online with your members?

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Dealing With Spam Comments

no-spamIf you use the blog of your site for a newsfeed, or even just as a blog, you will get spam comments.  Here’s how to best deal with them.

Of course, you can eliminate spam comments by turning off the comments on your posts.  To do this on your WordPress site, look on the left menu of the admin dashboard under Settings for Discussion.  Under “Default Article Settings”, uncheck the box “Allow people to post comments on new articles”.

But leaving comments turned on can generate some conversation about your posts, which is a good thing.  We advise leaving our default setting that before a comment appears on your site, that “Comment author must have a previously approved comment”.   This means that the first time a commenter writes a comment, a notification will go to the post author (by default in WP this is set to the site administrators, but in ACWP, we notify post authors) to approve.  After that, comments from that person (identified by their email address) will appear without needing approval.

You can lock down comments a little tighter by requiring that all comments must be “moderated” or manually approved before they appear on the site.

All our ACWP sites use Akismet, a spam filter for blog comments.  It catches quite a large percentage of spam comments.  But sometimes, you’ll get a notice asking for you to approve a comment that is clearly spam.  Your post was about your church’s upcoming pancake breakfast, and the comment thanks you for all your pointers regarding buying used cars.

You might be tempted to just delete (“trash”) this comment, but it’s important to instead mark this comment as spam.  Akismet is a dynamic filter, and can “learn” to better identify spam comments when you mark the comments that escaped its filter as spam.

We are discovering that on our church sites we occasionally get comments that seem “too personal” to be approved– not inappropriate, but things that should probably get handled through more private email channels, not out in public on the website.   Like someone requesting a refund on an event ticket…

All in all, what we really see is that there aren’t really very many comments at all on the blog-as-a-newsfeed type posts.

What is your experience with blog comments?

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