New Member
Like many wards, we've been trying to cut down on announcements in sacrament meeting. To help with that, I built a small web app for ward announcements and the sacrament meeting program.
Members open it from a QR code (we hand out a printed flyer) and can add it to their phone's home screen. Each Sunday before church it sends a notification that opens the current announcements, and the program shows up around the time of the meeting. It's private rather than a public website: access requires a code embedded in the QR code, so strangers and search engines can't read it. Bishopric members, clerks and others can be invited to edit, with a simple editor that handles images like flyers and maps.
Hopefully the Church will eventually build something like this into the Member Tools app. We still send a copy of the announcements by email from LCR, and the app can export them to a PDF for that. But a notification on the lock screen gets seen where an email often gets buried.
It's been working well in our ward, and a few people have asked about using it in theirs, so the source is now on GitHub. You can self-host it with Docker or deploy it to Cloudflare. If you'd rather skip the technical part, send me a private message and I'll host it for your ward for free at yourwardname.oneward.org (no ads or fees).
This is a personal project, not an official Church service. As with any ward website, check with your bishop before setting it up. I built it with help from AI tools - plus plenty of my own review and testing.
If anyone is interested, you can find source code and more info here: https://github.com/luminationlabs/ward-announcements
Members open it from a QR code (we hand out a printed flyer) and can add it to their phone's home screen. Each Sunday before church it sends a notification that opens the current announcements, and the program shows up around the time of the meeting. It's private rather than a public website: access requires a code embedded in the QR code, so strangers and search engines can't read it. Bishopric members, clerks and others can be invited to edit, with a simple editor that handles images like flyers and maps.
Hopefully the Church will eventually build something like this into the Member Tools app. We still send a copy of the announcements by email from LCR, and the app can export them to a PDF for that. But a notification on the lock screen gets seen where an email often gets buried.
It's been working well in our ward, and a few people have asked about using it in theirs, so the source is now on GitHub. You can self-host it with Docker or deploy it to Cloudflare. If you'd rather skip the technical part, send me a private message and I'll host it for your ward for free at yourwardname.oneward.org (no ads or fees).
This is a personal project, not an official Church service. As with any ward website, check with your bishop before setting it up. I built it with help from AI tools - plus plenty of my own review and testing.
If anyone is interested, you can find source code and more info here: https://github.com/luminationlabs/ward-announcements