Archive for news feed

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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Send Posts Automatically to Facebook (and other social media)

facebook logoIf you are using the blog of your WP site as a news feed for dated content, you might want to set up having your posts go over onto your FB page automatically.  There are a number of plugins to help with this, but you can take the load off your website by using IFTTT, a handy service that integrates two separate online apps or services.

On IFTTT, any action that happens on one app/service can trigger an action on another/service. These triggered actions are called “recipes”. Here’s how to set up WP posts showing up automatically on your FB page.

  1. Start by creating an account at ifttt.com.
  2. The different services that can be integrated are each called “channels”. Search the channels for “WordPress”, And click the big blue “Connect” button.
  3. Set up the WordPress channel by putting in the requested information. “Blog URL” is a link to your domain name, including the HTTP part at the beginning, something like: http://mychurch.org.  (Only include “www” if that’s how your site appears on the web.)
  4. Search the channels again, and choose Facebook pages (not just Facebook). You must be an administrator on the Facebook Page you want posts to be published on. Enter the requested information for your personal Facebook page. Facebook will ask you to give some permissions, and you can feel free to check everything except the top option, which will be required.
  5. On the second FB persmissions page, it will ask you “IFTTT would like to post to Facebook for you. Who do you want to share these posts with?”  It’s ok to leave this setting as “Friends”.
  6. The next page will ask to manage your Pages, simply click through with an “Okay”.
  7. If you are an administrator on more than one Facebook Page, the next screen will ask you to choose which page you would like to let IFTTT manage. Be sure to choose the correct one.
  8. Now create a recipe with two channels: click first on “My Recipes” at the top of the page, then on the blue button for “Create a recipe”.
  9. Click on the link for “This”, to add the trigger channel – in this case WordPress, and choose “Any new post”.
  10. Click on “Create Trigger”, then on the “that” link, and choose Facebook Pages.
  11. Choose “Create a link post”.
  12. A new page will open where you have some options about how to configure what you want to display. By default, the FB link URL will be set as the “PostUrl”, and you won’t want to leave this as is so that your post has a link back to the website.
  13. The “Message” box is what you want to display in the FB area ABOVE the link.  Click on the blue flask to see some options, but to start with, we recommend you leave the Message box blank. This will post the link to your Facebook page, along with any image in the post, without a message above the post.
  14. If you would like to have a bit of the content showing on FB, then in the “Link URL” section, click the blue flask, and add “PostContent” after “PostURL”.

Once you get into IFTTT, you will see that you can use it to share your organization’s content automatically in a variety of ways.  Let us know in the comments if you find or create a helpful recipe for faith communities or nonprofits!

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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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Content Should be “Forward-facing”

calendarEffective websites keep their site content “forward-facing” – that is, any dated content should only be dealing with the present and the future.

Keeping past-dated content on your website makes it seem like you’re not keeping your website maintained, which conveys that you don’t have much interest about informing newcomers. Old, past-dated content just does not convey hospitality.

Certainly, if your church or ministry just won an award earlier this week, that’s present-tense news.  Put that up on your site! But in another couple of weeks, this information is old news, and should be taken down.

On church websites, the information on static (not changed very often) pages should be current. The days and times for regular group meetings or info for contact persons may be posted on these pages, but should be updated whenever there are changes – even if that means changing this information at the beginning of the summer (when groups might be taking a break), and then changing it back when the fall programs kick off again.

There are two exceptions to this:

The first is that you don’t need to take down any past dated information from a grid-style calendar on your site. Most of our ACWP participants use Google calendar. Leaving up your old events on Google calendar is fine because users will intuitively know that old events are already over.

The second exception is similar: you don’t need to take down old content is if you are using the blog function of your site as a newsfeed. Because these blog posts normally have a “posted on” date, they don’t convey the same inattention to hospitality that content on static pages can convey. The key however, is that you have to keep making new blog posts, so that your most recent news feed post is always within the last week or two.

The added benefit to leaving these “old-news” items up in these two locations is that the website user can scroll back through your news feed posts or calendar to see what your church has been up to in the recent past.

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Websites & Email Newsletters

old newsletterWhen publishing both an email newsletter and website, make sure the website is the “hub” of full information that serves the newsletter, and not the other way around.

Churches often come with long histories (sometimes 50 years!) of publishing print newsletters, which have been the center of publicizing events. That print newsletter mindset sometimes tries to carry over to the email newsletter, rendering it less effective.

Email newsletters cannot effectively be digital versions of print newsletters. Instead, they function better as a “vehicle for links” to more information, most often info on your website.

Recipients don’t really “read” emails, they scan them, usually only one or two “scrolls” down, so putting long blocks of text in an email means they won’t see much besides the first article or two. The “vehicle for links” strategy makes your newsletter more easily scanned, and the recipient can quickly see things that are relevant to them, and click to read more.

You may still publish a print newsletter, particularly if your congregation has a number of people who don’t access digital media, but if you hope to reach digital folks (which includes most people under age 50), then you will want to make sure that you don’t just put downloads of your print newsletter on your website.  Only publishing your newsletter PDF on your website is making (attempting to make) your print newsletter the hub of information.

These PDF downloads are increasingly unlikely to be opened. If I am accessing my email on my phone, I may not want to try to “pinch and scroll” through your PDF that won’t resize itself to my small screen.  And if your recipient doesn’t open your attachment when they first see your email, they are far less likely to open it later.

Also, while Google (and other search engines) CAN index your PDFs, they don’t like to—it confuses them.  And even if search engines DO index your newsletter, when someone searches, it will only take them to the PDF download link, then they will have to scan through your entire PDF newsletter to find the one thing that they were looking for.

Conversely, think about how easy the user experience would be if the website had a post about the “Chocolate Festival” fundraiser that my friend has told me about, but I want to check the time. I’m likely to Google your church name and “chocolate festival”.  That search is likely to take me directly the information I’m looking for, which makes it more likely that I actually attend—instead of giving up when I’m faced with a whole newsletter to wade through.

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