Archive for social media

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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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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Inter-connect Your Communication

loopDon’t forget to inter-connect all your digital media efforts.  Think of all the information and content you publish about your organization as a circular information loop.

Your readers might enter that information loop through your Facebook page, but from there, they should be able to find your website or your email newsletter. Don’t forget to include in your traditional media, like print newsletters, ways to find your digital media content.  In general, the trend is toward the more dynamic digital media loop, so you don’t have to worry so much about getting folks to subscribe to your print newsletter.

Sit down and list out the different ways that your organization communicates information: newsletters (print & email), websites, blogs, Facebook page, Twitter feed.  Churches shouldn’t forget the weekly bulletin.  Does every mode have an invitation to find the Facebook page (with the specific name/acronym of your organization) and the website?  To subscribe to the email newsletter?

It might be helpful to start asking your more digitally-oriented members how they are using the different parts of your content.  It might help you see “weak links” between modes, or where you need to focus more energy in developing content. The primary reason organizations don’t inter-connect their media is that it takes a little extra time, and requires a step back for a “big picture” view.  But I do think that for most groups, the time and “big picture”  do pay off in promoting the organization. What’s your experience of inter-connecting your media?  What’s the hardest part?  Does it pay off for your organization?

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Arc of Technology Adoption: What Comes First?

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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When Not to Use Twitter on Your Site

twitter-birdSo it happened again. I was consulting with a church about their new website, and one of the church members said, “Oh yeah! We need to remember to put Twitter and Facebook icons on the site.”

Knowing that they were barely getting their website started I asked, “Are you active on Twitter and Facebook?”

“No, not really,” was the answer. It turns out they did have a Facebook page, but it hadn’t been updated or interacted with for over 2 months. They did not have a Twitter account, nor did they know of anyone in the church that had a Twitter account.

It happens again and again: faith-community folks who are not digital-natives, but are trying to learn this new media, hear again and again that they “need social media”.  And they want to “do this right”.

Here’s the crucial thing to understand: social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook are communications channels. When you create Facebook and Twitter accounts, and when you put those logos on your website, what you are saying is: “Here is a way to communicate with us.”  And when you have put this channel out there, then WHETHER you use this channel or not – and HOW you use it – communicate something about you, whether you want it to or not.

If you say “here is a channel to communicate with us”, and then ignore the channel by not using it (or worse, only using it to “broadcast” or sell your own events, but never to listen), what you communicate is at best that you are clueless about social media.  It’s like inviting someone to call you, but never answering their calls or voicemails.  Or only using phone calls to talk AT people.  At the worst, you send the message that you know people are having conversations all on these channels, but you don’t care enough to join those conversations.

All churches and faith-communities have some limit on the resources – mostly people-resources, but sometimes financial – that they can devote to social media. Be honest about your assessment of your resources and what channels you might be able to sustain conversations in.

For instance, your church may have members who are already active on Facebook, comfortable in using it, and people who are willing to invest in conversations via that channel. In that case, promote and strive to communicate well with Facebook. Your organization may not have members already on Twitter, or people willing to invest in communicating there – in that case, don’t create or promote a Twitter channel.  Definitely don’t just slap a Twitter icon on your site because all the “cool kids” are doing it.

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Photo Notices

photo-takingYou can cover your liability for using photos by posting a public notice.  Jane Quebe from JP Marketing shared a tip that they recommend to clients: when holding a public event, post prominently in a public place that photos or videos that are taken at the event may be used on websites, social media or advertising.  Be sure you take photos of the notices to document that you have posted them.

You should have your own attorneys vet the statement you use, but here’s an example of the text that they’ve used before:

Upon entrance to ____________(event), today, __________(day of week, month, day, year), you hereby give _________(hosting organization) and anyone authorized by such, the irrevocable right to use your name, picture, portrait, photograph and/or video clip in all forms of media, and in all manners, including composite or distorted representations, for advertising, trade, publicity, social networking or any other lawful purposes, without further notification or compensation. You waive any right to approve the finished product, including written copy that may be created in connection therewith. All video, raw footage, and photographs shall constitute ________(hosting organization)’s property, solely and completely.

This may not solve completely the issue of folks who need to not have photos posted, but at least it goes a little way toward alerting folks that they may need to be vigilant. How might this solution work for your organization?  I welcome your comments and stories!

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