Mass Communication

My stake president has asked that I send out an email to all those in the stake that have an email address uploaded into LDS tools. I have never done this before and wondered if anyone has any ideas on this? Is there somewhere to go that I can just send 1 email and make it come from an account that shows it is from the church and not my personal gmail email?

Thanks!

Only certain callings have that ability in LCR. I'd think you'd have to be in the stake presidency, clerk, or secretary to do that.

I think there should be some effort on the part of the Church to figure it out, since it was suggested this morning that we will be sending an email to all ward members each week beginning in January.

lajackson wrote:since it was suggested this morning that we will be sending an email to all ward members each week beginning in January.

That should be interesting. I'll bet enough members flag it as spam such that it will have trouble getting to the faithful. The church is going to need a "Tier 1" game plan to make this work.

If I recall correctly, it was "highly suggested" but not required. It may be left to each bishop/branch president to sort out the best way to communicate given their unit's specific situation.

This might be a compelling reason to have a unit social media page where they could post information on the lessons (we used this method in a serviceman's branch I was deployed to with the military).

Thank you everyone for your responses. We are still looking into what our best option would be. I am our Stake Technology Specialist so I am able to see email addresses in LDS tools. We recently had someone move into our stake that told us of a service their old stake and ward used. It is signupgenius.com. Is anyone familiar with it? If so, what do you use it for? By what I have been able to find, it looks like it would work great for ward relief society presidencies to send out requests for certain items to be brought to a funeral luncheon, or bishops to use for tithing settlement sign ups, etc. However, I get worried that a) not everyone has an email address. b) If you do have an email address and it's not your work address, how many times per week do you check it. c) I really worry about the widows, widowers, etc that have no clue how to run a computer. Thoughts?

davesudweeks wrote:If I recall correctly, it was "highly suggested" but not required. It may be left to each bishop/branch president to sort out the best way to communicate given their unit's specific situation.

This might be a compelling reason to have a unit social media page where they could post information on the lessons (we used this method in a serviceman's branch I was deployed to with the military).

Our stake has a Facebook page which I monitor and post to multiple times per week. We have also instructed each auxiliary (stake and ward), and each ward on how to create and properly monitor Facebook pages. But the stake president also wants an option that we can send out a mass email, etc if needs be.

Our ward Sunday School announced this week that they will be using WhatsApp to provide lesson schedule and topic reminders, and that they would show us how to use it next Sunday. I have heard of the app but never used it. Any thoughts?

And as STS, I wonder what that will do to our WiFi load on Sundays.

jsto03 wrote:I really worry about the widows, widowers, etc that have no clue how to run a computer. Thoughts?

This points to a non-electronic solution. I'm remembering a time many years ago, back when only a few geeks had emails, when things were announced in the Sunday program or on the bulletin board. Events would have to be announced at least 1 (if not 2) Sundays in advance. Somehow, even before folks had word processors and fast printers, this got done. This does require a certain amount of planning ahead by the leaders, but it certainly seems do-able (because it was how it was done).

lajackson wrote:Our ward Sunday School announced this week that they will be using WhatsApp to provide lesson schedule and topic reminders, and that they would show us how to use it next Sunday. I have heard of the app but never used it. Any thoughts?

In that scenario, I would remain blissfully disconnected from the reminders. If someone asks me to install a new app so that they can communicate with me in their preferred way, there has to be enough benefit to me to overcome my resistance to installing Yet Another Messaging App.

lajackson wrote:(WhatsApp) Any thoughts?

• It's owned by Facebook - those who highly value their privacy may avoid it. I'd suggest reading the privacy policy as it indicates that you agree to surrender the list of contacts on your phone, including ones outside of the app.
• Minimum age for use in the US is 13 (16 in Europe)
• While Sunday School announcements isn't a concern, if the scope grows, I'd be concerned about keeping the list of users up to date to remove those who have left the ward.
• It appears that you may get ads for other Facebook services. Currently 3rd party ads against their policy, but that could change.
• The modern day corollary to "There's no free lunch": If you're not paying for the product, you ARE the product.

you agree to surrender the list of contacts on your phone, including ones outside of the app.

I would remain blissfully disconnected

Well, that was fast and easy! I love this place.

I visited a city this past week where there are a few bulletins on a small table at the entrance to the chapel, along with a QR code to scan if you prefer an electronic copy of the bulletin. Most use that option. They seem to have it figured out pretty well. There are only one or two bulletins remaining on the table after sacrament meeting. And everyone was included and felt at home in their ward.

My Mom was in Relief Society recently when they were having the discussion that everyone needed a smart phone. She pointed out that she did not have one (she still has a land line), but that they were welcome to email her, and she knew how to retrieve the messages. The sister sitting next to her piped up to say she didn't even own a computer.

We live in a wonderful world. My smarter-than-I-am phone dumped me on several apps this past week because I am still running Android OS 5 and they have "enhanced the app" to require 6.0 and above. And yes, I know that both of those numbers are rather archaic.

So I turned off my phone and played with my children and grandchildren. After all, that's what the new Come, Follow Me curriculum is really about, isn't it?

lajackson wrote:There are only one or two bulletins remaining on the table after sacrament meeting.

That's well done. The ideal number of left overs is one - because that means everyone who wanted one, got one.

lajackson,

I was recently approached by my bishop to find a way to provide the bulletin information in an electronic format. As the ward bulletin guy for my ward I am intrigued by your experience regarding the bulletin and QR code. Can you provide any additional insight on that and how I might be able to go about implementing something similar? Or direct me to the unit you visited so that I might reach out to their leadership to get their suggestions.

The QR code is probably just a web link to the bulletin. Perhaps a document stored in Dropbox. There's any number of sites that can create a custom QR code for that.

If the bulletin is limited in scope (less than 2953 characters) it could be stored in the QR code itself.

parkerjames wrote:I am intrigued by your experience regarding the bulletin and QR code.

It worked as russellhltn suggested. The bulletin was saved as a pdf file and posted at a website (I do not know which one). A QR code opened the site and the person could access the pdf file there. Most downloaded it to their device.

The QR code went directly to the location of the current bulletin which also contained a link to a set of previous bulletins going back a few weeks or so.

Of course, if the bulletin is posted on the internet, it raises a question if there's any restrictions on what should be in the bulletin. (Such as otherwise private contact information). On one hand, it's protected only by "security though obscurity" but on the other this is the same security that many people use to limit the shares of various files.

This is a topic that our ward is now discussing. Since we have less time in Sacrament meeting and we don't have YM and YW opening exercises to talk about or remind people about events, and there's significantly less time in the Primary, we would like to make something that is more available and easy to share. We are starting a website (got approval from the Stake) but we were informed on this topic here: https://www.lds.org/pages/online-resour ... b-internet
Examples of Inappropriate Uses
The following are some examples of inappropriate uses:
...
A stake creates a website with a calendar of all upcoming meetings, activities, and events.
Reason: Websites, blogs, and social media profiles should not duplicate tools that are already available on LDS.org.

Our goal is not to duplicate the LDS calendar, but to give better information and an easier way to remind people what the events are - so they can go to a page that shows the upcoming activities during the week or month. We also want it to be a method to advertise to friends of the church in our area. We use the LDS calendar to reserve the chapel between 3 wards in 3 different stakes.

We have found that Facebook is cumbersome as well. Plus being on Facebook causes a lot of distraction and several people don't have or want Facebook accounts for them or their kids.

I'd like to hear any thoughts on this topic.

For upcoming events, I'd have a harder look at using the calendar. Far too many units seem to use it as a "building reservation" app instead of what seems to be: designed as a member-facing communication system of upcoming events. The calendar is available to everyone with an LDS Account and appears on-line and in LDS Tools. There is sync capability that allows adding selected calendars to one's personal calendar.

It does require the units to spend some time thinking about how they want to set up the different calendars. I personally think two calendars for every organization would be a starting point - one for activities and one for just the leadership meetings. The latter would be set to "private", not because we're hiding anything, but to cut down on confusion among the membership. As I say, it's just a starting point to add more or prune unneeded ones from there.

But not everyone has a computer. To reach those, it's going to be necessary to put all the announcements into the sacrament program. I've posted my thoughts on that up-thread.

Then there are people like me (us) who have email, are computer literate (obviously), but do not, nor will, use Facebook, Twitter, texts, or have a "smart phone". I guess this shows the truth of the phrase: "one size does not fit all".

Thank you all for the input. I personally am not a fan of multiple sources of information. It sounds like many units have a similar issue as our,, that being either inadequate use of or ignorance about how to use LDS.org for calendars and event details beyond scheduling a building or room. As I have contemplated this request of my bishop I have come to a couple of conclusions:
- There is no getting away from having a weekly program per guidelines
- Online data sources for units outside of LDS.org are inherently risky due to concerns about security and rights to privacy

I don't know what to propose to him as I am not as tech savvy as I was in the nineties. But thank you all once again. Feel free to post additional suggestions or thoughts about this challenge. I will check back periodically to see what the community figures out since this is an actively explored subject it seems.

I have been a quality engineer for many years. The problem that often occurs is folks forget who the "customer" is. From a ward bulletin perspective, who is the customer? Certainly not the bishop and not the ward council. If the customers of the ward bulletin are the ward members (which I believe is the case), the next question is, how can the ward leadership get the information to them in a manner they want to receive it? Good customer service requires you to understand the customer and meet their needs, not make them conform to your methods.

The problem with the person who is good with a hammer is they tend to see everything as a nail. But a good mechanic will use different tools for different situations to get the best outcome.

In our ward, we would miss a significant group of "customers" if we eliminated a printed ward bulletin. I suspect that is not the case in many wards. We have a ward facebook page, a printed bulletin, a mid-week email of upcoming events (like a calendar list), and the LDSCalendar application. This seems to be working well for us to meet the different demographics in our congregation, but your mileage may vary.

It isn't always easy, but nothing worthwhile ever is...