Church Magazine Tracking Info

Does anybody have any solutions for tracking magazine subscriptions among members of the ward? A locally managed tool would be acceptable. Ideally, I would think, we could download the data from Church Distribution -- they have the addresses, the meetinghouse locator tool can parse the addresses to each ward, and then the Executive Secretary / Magazine Representative would have up-to-date information to track and encourage subscriptions in the ward.

Any suggestions?

Aaron wrote:Does anybody have any solutions for tracking magazine subscriptions among members of the ward? A locally managed tool would be acceptable. Ideally, I would think, we could download the data from Church Distribution -- they have the addresses, the meetinghouse locator tool can parse the addresses to each ward, and then the Executive Secretary / Magazine Representative would have up-to-date information to track and encourage subscriptions in the ward.

Any suggestions?

For my personal magazine subscriptions (not only church mags),
I would use a spreadsheet with dates of what would be the last issue.
With conditional formatting, and the function that returns the current date,
you can then have it highlight magazines whose subscriptions are about
to run out.

For a church magazine spreadsheet, you could login into your ward website
and download a csv of the members in your ward, open it, and add columns
for each of the Church Publications ( Ensign/Liahona, New Era, Friends, Church
News, etc.)

One thing you did mentioned above that I hadn't heard before was that you
could download data from Church Distribution - Do you mean that they allow
you to download subscription information of ward members ? Because I would
think that would be a privacy issue that the church would want to steer clear of.
But if so, it could greatly make it easier to track the magazines that's for sure.

- Atticus Ewig

atticusewig wrote: One thing you did mentioned above that I hadn't heard before was that you
could download data from Church Distribution - Do you mean that they allow
you to download subscription information of ward members ? Because I would
think that would be a privacy issue that the church would want to steer clear of.
But if so, it could greatly make it easier to track the magazines that's for sure.

I was just informed that the local units do indeed have access to what Church magazine subscriptions members have. News to me.

atticusewig wrote:For my personal magazine subscriptions (not only church mags),
I would use a spreadsheet with dates of what would be the last issue.
With conditional formatting, and the function that returns the current date,
you can then have it highlight magazines whose subscriptions are about
to run out.

For a church magazine spreadsheet, you could login into your ward website
and download a csv of the members in your ward, open it, and add columns
for each of the Church Publications ( Ensign/Liahona, New Era, Friends, Church
News, etc.)

Thank you for the suggestion.

atticusewig wrote: One thing you did mentioned above that I hadn't heard before was that you
could download data from Church Distribution - Do you mean that they allow
you to download subscription information of ward members ? Because I would
think that would be a privacy issue that the church would want to steer clear of.
But if so, it could greatly make it easier to track the magazines that's for sure.

- Atticus Ewig

To my knowledge, the functionality doesn't exist. I was just wondering out loud about the possibility of reducing duplicate effort. If church distribution has the subscriber data for the ward, it seems redundant for magazine representatives to try to get ward members to periodically answer surveys regarding which magazines they subscribe to. That's all.

mkmurray wrote:I was just informed that the local units do indeed have access to what Church magazine subscriptions members have. News to me.

Really? Where do we get this information?

Aaron wrote:Really? Where do we get this information?

I'm not sure that the distribution center provides this information and/or if it is even public. mkmurray was probably commenting on a PM I had with him about it where I was commenting that I'd seen a list in previous wards of subscribers. However that may have been generated at the local level and may not have been sent from the Church. I should have been more clear about the situation. Sorry.

Tom

tomw wrote:I was commenting that I'd seen a list in previous wards of subscribers. However that may have been generated at the local level and may not have been sent from the Church.

It's been a very long time, but I seem to remember such a list and it was generated at the CHQ level and somehow it got into the hands of the Magazine Representative, probably by being mailed to the Bishop. I have no idea if they still do that, but I can't imaging trying to fulfill that calling without such a list.

I hope it is ok to revisit this topic. I have personally held our ward's subscription list, mailed from Salt Lake. It listed all of the households in the Unit who were subscribed to the church magazines. I last saw this list about 2 years ago, and I do not recall how up-to-date it was, but it did exist.

I was just asked by my RS president if it is possible to find out who was not receiving the Ensign, so that she could make sure the Temple Special Issue could be delivered to those sisters who do not have a subscription.

May I suggest that Bishopric members be able to access these data lists through new.lds.org > Tools > Leader & Clerk Resources.

From the above discussion, it is still unclear if magazine subscription data for a specific unit is available.

Can we download member magazine subscription info from MLS, lds.org, or somehow get it from distribution services?

sraymond wrote:From the above discussion, it is still unclear if magazine subscription data for a specific unit is available.

Can we download member magazine subscription info from MLS, lds.org, or somehow get it from distribution services?

Yes. Call the distribution center hotline. Provide your unit information. They will mail your Bishop the list. I did this almost 1 year ago (about the same time I posted my previous comment) it should still be doable. I am unaware of any implementation into lds.org however.

You can also email the distribution center at help@store.lds.org requesting the information. Provided your email is listed in CDOL with an appropriate calling (Ward Clerk, Bishopric member, etc.) they will email a copy of the data to you.

(Unfortunately when we got ours it didn't seem to be of much use - many listings were for addresses outside of our ward...)

mfmohlma wrote:many listings were for addresses outside of our ward...)

That would be real nice if it was for inactive members you were about to send to "address unknown".

However, I suspect that the subscription are not tied to the membership records, so Deseret's information on who is in your ward is seriously out of date.

RussellHltn wrote:That would be real nice if it was for inactive members you were about to send to "address unknown".

However, I suspect that the subscription are not tied to the membership records, so Deseret's information on who is in your ward is seriously out of date.

LOL Actually, I have to retract my statement. I just looked over the list again and it appears there are only a few errant entries. One of a family that got "boundary-changed" out of the ward and a couple that wouldn't be tied directly to members: one to a dental office nearby (but not in ward boundaries) and one to a neighboring ward (listed as WARD, <NAME> C/O BISHOP <NAME>). The last one gave us a good laugh.

The customer service agent offered to remove the ones that were not actually in our ward, but that still leaves the question of how they get on the list...

mfmohlma wrote:. . . but that still leaves the question of how they get on the list...

If they lived in your ward when they subscribed, or if they did not identify a ward, but their address is in your ward, they are on your ward list as far as Distribution Services is concerned. You should see the list for a ward with mostly active duty military members!

Can we now download the list of members with active magazine subscriptions from MLS or lds.org at this point?

Thank you.

kylejamesryan wrote:Can we now download the list of members with active magazine subscriptions from MLS or lds.org at this point?

You have responded to a very old post. There was never a list of subscribers in MLS, and I do not believe it is available at LDS.org either.

In days of yore, Distribution Services sent a list to each ward and that is how we got the list of subscribers. I do not believe they do that as a general rule now, but I suppose if you wanted to run an old fashioned magazine drive in your ward, they might prepare a list for you and sent it to your bishop.

Considering that magazines are available in LDS tools, I'm not sure as the old magazine drive is as important as it used to be.

I signed up for a subscription to the Friend magazine 2 months ago. How long does it usually take to begin receiving the magazines in the mail?

lbainter wrote: Mon Mar 24, 2025 5:54 pm I signed up for a subscription to the Friend magazine 2 months ago. How long does it usually take to begin receiving the magazines in the mail?

I was just wondering the same thing. Back in January (I think) I realized that the distribution center hadn't been sending me magazines for a long while (despite the fact that I was a paying patron). As it turns out, the distribution no longer allows you to order them for pay, and there is only the "free" option that I could find. It was much more prompt when I had the option to pay for it. I still haven't seen the "free" Liahona show up.

ambldsorg wrote: Tue Mar 25, 2025 9:23 am

lbainter wrote: Mon Mar 24, 2025 5:54 pm I signed up for a subscription to the Friend magazine 2 months ago. How long does it usually take to begin receiving the magazines in the mail?

I was just wondering the same thing. Back in January (I think) I realized that the distribution center hadn't been sending me magazines for a long while (despite the fact that I was a paying patron). As it turns out, the distribution no longer allows you to order them for pay, and there is only the "free" option that I could find. It was much more prompt when I had the option to pay for it. I still haven't seen the "free" Liahona show up.

The magazine help FAQ points us to the online Store for contact info. If you go to the online Store, at the bottom of the page there's a link for "Contact Us", and at that page it states "A Customer Support Representative is ready to help you by telephone during the weekday business hours in many countries". So I would expect you can use the appropriate number for your country to call and have a support rep identify the exact status of your subscription(s).

BTW, I just renewed my magazine subscription today, thanks to this post for reminding me. I do have the checkbox to have an email reminder sent, but even though the subscription expires this month, I never received any email alert about my expiring subscription. I haven't heard others mention this, so perhaps it was "just me"...

It's not just you. Not only did their systems fail to notify anyone by email that their subscription was expiring, but the expiration date does not even appear on the Church magazines. And the clerk does not seem have the authority to renew subscriptions, only the members do. Big triple fail in my opinion.

Oh, and for new converts, you may remember we were told in the recent past to make sure the ward ordered a paid one year subscription for them. Well, at present the ward cannot even start a free subscription for converts. Only the converts can. Maybe has to do with data privacy in other countries, but all of these new policies or the problems mentioned above were done with zero communication to leaders and clerks.