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Archive for newsletters

Arc of Technology Adoption: What Comes First?

October 20th, 2014
arc of adoption

The Arc of Adoption

Nonprofits in general, and churches in particular, tend to be late adopters of new technologies. There’s a good reason for this: we don’t usually have money to experiment with technologies that may or may not be helpful for our particular situation. Sometimes, churches and nonprofits have benefited by their delay because they could skip a technology cycle, and thereby save money.

Today, the proliferation and rapid deployment cycles of new communications technologies and platforms (websites, email newsletters, social media, texting, etc.) make it really difficult to decide where to invest precious resources in terms of getting your organization “up to date”. Some of these technologies and platforms are interrelated in terms of their effective use however, an understanding those relationships can be helpful when making decisions about technologies.

As we work with churches and nonprofits (and also many small businesses on a budget), we see a logical rational pattern in effectively utilizing newer communications technologies. This pattern is represented in what we call the “Arc of Adoption”, graphically represented on this page.

The place to start (if you haven’t already) is with a website. You might start with a static website – that is, a website whose content doesn’t change very often. A static website might say on its homepage: “Worship is at 10 AM on Sunday morning”. The next step would be to move to a dynamic website, where the content changes more frequently, usually in terms of dated material. A dynamic website might say on its homepage: “Worship is at 10 AM on Sunday morning, and this week’s sermon title is…”

After a dynamic website, generally we see organizations begin to develop either a Facebook page or an email newsletter, and then develop the other soon after. These communications channels come next because to make effective use of them depends on a dynamic website. You can certainly use either of these channels without a website, but the most effective use of a Facebook page or an email newsletter comes when you are able to put short bits of content in either of those channels, with a link back to the full content on your website.

This level of communication – dynamic website, Facebook page & email newsletter – is where most churches we work with find that they are maxed out in terms of either people resources (staff or volunteer) and/or financial resources.

Churches with additional resources of either people or finances might go on to look at blogs (generally by the senior pastor or other clergy staff), Twitter (although you will need to assess whether Twitter will actually be helpful for you), and very infrequently SMS text messaging.

I am interested in a dialogue in the comments around how your church has made decisions about new communications technologies. Did your church consider something like our Arc of Adoption? What were the limitations and/or hopes around the decisions for one technology over another? What factors play into your church’s decisions about using or not using these new technologies?

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Open a PDF from a Menu Link

June 17th, 2014

wordpress menuSome churches want to have a link in their menu to the latest issue of their newsletter. This is probably not the main level menu item. Ideally when you do this, you want the newsletter menu item to directly open up the PDF – not go to a page where there is a link to click for the PDF. Adding that extra step to get your content is never a good idea.

So here’s how to add a PDF link directly to your menu:

  1. First, go to Media –Add New.  Upload your PDF, and when it’s finished uploading, click on Edit.
  2. When the Edit page opens, put your cursor inside the URL box, right-click, and choose Select All (or, what your cursor inside the box and type Ctrl+A). This makes sure that you have selected the entire URL.
  3. Right-click again, and choose Copy (or, simply type Ctrl+C). This places the URL for your uploaded PDF on your clipboard.
  4. Now navigate to your menu. In the WordPress dashboard, this is under Appearance – Menus.
  5. On the left side of the Menus page, the Pages section will probably be opened. Look underneath this for “Links”, and click on the small arrow on the right side of that box to open the Links section.
  6. In the URL box, highlight the “http://” (so that you don’t end up with two of those, since the link on your clipboard already has its http://) and paste the link from your clipboard into this box.
  7. Type the word “Newsletter” in the Link Text box.  Rather than making this label date-sensitive, I recommend a more general and simple label, which you will not need to change each month.
  8. Click the Add to Menu button, and your new menu item will then appear at the bottom, of your menu on the right side of this page. If you have a long menu with lots of sub pages, you may have to scroll down to see it at the bottom.
  9. The top of the menu section represents the left side of your horizontal menu, and indents pages represent sub pages. Drag-and-drop your newly created Newsletter page to the desired position in your menu.
  10. Don’t forget to click the Save Menu button, located at the top and bottom of the menu section on the right side.

Do check the front of your site to make sure that the new menu item appears properly.

When you click on this menu item, one of two things will happen, depending on how the user has set up their browser to handle PDFs:

  • The PDF may open immediately as a webpage, and the user can save or download from there.
  • The user may get a prompt to download and save the PDF. After they do this, then they can open the PDF on their desktop with Adobe Reader (which almost everyone has on their computer at this point, so there is no need to make links to download Adobe reader).

As the website manager, you cannot control which of these two things will happen, since this is set entirely within the user’s browser settings.

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Email Newsletters & Church Websites

February 11th, 2014

email newsletterIf you have a church website, maybe you also send out an email newsletter (or you are thinking about doing so). Think carefully about how these two media can be used together effectively.

Sometimes we see churches creating email newsletters that are quite lengthy. But just because you no longer have to worry about if it will fit on the printed page doesn’t mean the best practice is to stuff “everything and the kitchen sink” in an email. In fact, research shows that most your email recipients will only go about three scrolls down in your email. That’s maybe three or four very short paragraphs. All that stuff you’re putting in after that? –it’s not getting seen.

The biggest barrier to effectively using email newsletters is imposing older print-newsletter practices & expectations.

 An effective email newsletter has content that is short, short, SHORT! Recipients of your email are generally not reading every word, but rather skimming for relevant content. Your content needs to be short and to the point, and laid out for skimming rather than in-depth reading.

For the email newsletter, think haiku over prose.

But often, you have a lot more information than can be contained in a haiku. That’s where your website comes in!

We coach our churches to use the blog function of their website as a newsfeed, so each item or article gets a separate post. Each post has its own unique URL (web address). Put the haiku/very short content in your email newsletter, with a “Read more here” link back to the post with full information.

Beside other advantages for simplifying content management, this strategy also gets your email recipients back to your website for reading the full article, where you can try to make it easy for them to see other articles they might also be interested in – for instance, a “Recent Posts” widget in the sidebar, with all your recently published posts in it.

 Do you intentionally use your website to support your email newsletters?  Share any insights or questions in the comments!

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