How to Notify Ward Members of 2nd Hour Links?

For our Sabbath day Worship meetings (Non-Interactive), our stake uses the Church's Webcasting system. We bought the domain paysonworship.com so that our stake members would have an easy URL to remember when they want to watch our Sunday morning worship meetings.

But now we need to solve the same problem for Priesthood, Relief Society, Youth, and Sunday School meetings. Is there a formal way to communicate this to ward members beyond using the messaging/email features in Leader and Clerk Resources?

I have some wards asking if there is a way to post URL links to authenticated users in the Ward information on the churchofjesuschrist.org ? Do you just create a meeting in the ward calendar and put the link inside the meeting details?

Trying to see how others are doing this and what you have learned works well and doesn't work well.

hicksticks2001 wrote:Is there a formal way to communicate this to ward members beyond using the messaging/email features in Leader and Clerk Resources?

You can use the ward calendar. That and LCR send a message is about the only church resources available.

FYI, recently the Calendar was upgraded to support hyperlinks in the event description. If your members are willing to use the Calendar to access meeting links, this likely will be helpful:
viewtopic.php?f=110&t=33696&p=217681&hi ... nk#p217681

Locally for us, having things in the Calendar would not be as useful, given that our members here seem stridently opposed to using the Calendar...

Thank you Brian and Russell.

One thing I wonder about is how well something like Google Docs would be. You don't really need a website, just need a static place to park a link that you can update every week.

I just don't know how well that would work under the load of the membership hitting it all at the same time on Sunday.

But failing that, you could do a website. Just note the rules on such.

russellhltn wrote:One thing I wonder about is how well something like Google Docs would be. You don't really need a website, just need a static place to park a link that you can update every week.

I just don't know how well that would work under the load of the membership hitting it all at the same time on Sunday.

Google Docs is very robust and able to handle many thousands of hits to the same doc without breaking a sweat; especially if those hits are mostly read-only. The drawback versus a website is the doc's rather unwieldly URL compared to an easy-to-remember website domain name. Of course, once bookmarked, they're both just a click away.

Mikerowaved wrote:The drawback versus a website is the doc's rather unwieldly URL compared to an easy-to-remember website domain name. Of course, once bookmarked, they're both just a click away.

Is that something that can be fixed with a URL shortener?

russellhltn wrote:Is that something that can be fixed with a URL shortener?

Sure, that would tame the length of it, perhaps helping some (older) email clients keep from breaking it into multiple lines.

Our stake uses the free Google Sites to host a permanent webpage with links to all Sacrament Meetings on youtube and all Second Hour Classes on Zoom. The link everyone uses for Google sites is pretty short, for example "https://sites.google.com/view/YourStakeName/home". Links for the unpublished/unlisted Sacrament Meetings are updated each week by the Stake Clerk and links for the Zoom classes never change. See attachment.

I was able to set all meetings as recurring, this way there is only 1 link for each meeting type. It took me a while to figure out how to have them all prescheduled with the odd interval of the second hour meetings. What I did was create recurring event for Sunday School as an example, set to reoccur weekly. In zoom once the meeting is scheduled edit the calendar and delete all the occurrences that are not needed. Repeat for each meeting.
Doing this I now have 1 link for sacrament 1 for Sunday School 1 elders quorum 1 relief society these links will stay the same throughout the end of the year at this point.
Now that I have 4 links that do not change they are posted in the weekly email (program now sent by email) the links have also been sent out by the ward clerk as well as being posted on our ward facebook page.

Using the supplied pro zoom account, we just use 1 account for all classes. We simply use break out rooms for each of the classes. We have someone who acts as the "gatekeeper", ensuring that people know how to mute themselves, and that we know who are in the rooms. You can pre-populate the breakout rooms by logging in on the website under the account and pre-creating rooms. This saves a lot of time.