Ideas for sending out announcements

[tubaloth]

With the changes coming to second hour our ward council was discussing the need to handle announcements outside of classes.
What do your wards do?

It would be nice to have one place were all ward activities could be viewed. One source of truth.

There seems to be some limitations with the church's send message option. Can only send out 20-30 text messages. We are not sure emails are sufficient any more.

There was some discussion about using some text apps that allow to send out bulk text messages, and uses can't reply to them. It's only one way. But each president would need their own account.

I was hopeful that the gospel living app would have more options. The only text option is just copying the message and send from your phone's text app. Members need to download the app.

Any ideas to keep the ward connected? Thanks

[russellhltn]

How about using the calendar for events?

It's accessible on the web, via Member Tools, and you can even sync selected calendars with your personal calendar on your device, MS Outlook, or whatever you use that can accept a .iCal file.

It's not going to work for sign-up calendars, like missionary meals or seminary security. But it's a start.

[garystroble]

Unfortunately it has been our sad experience in our ward and stake that the option to send out notices from the calendar doesn't always function correctly.

[russellhltn]

I wasn't referring to the email notification feature, but to using the calendar as a means to place activities where the members can find them.

[tubaloth]

It's worth looking at again. Recently it's more for reserving the church. It's confusing from some family pickle ball to real activities.

What does your ward use?

[russellhltn]

It's worth looking at again. Recently it's more for reserving the church. It's confusing from some family pickle ball to real activities.

It's not uncommon for it to be misused that way. It's all a matter of placing the right events on the right calendar. Family events should be places on a private calendar that's not visible to the membership.

Yes, it also schedules the building - and that's a good thing so that the building schedule changes when the events are added/changed/canceled. But it's primary purpose is to communicant to the members. Otherwise it would have been locked up in LCR and available only to leaders.

[BrianEdwards]

Announcements do not equal activities, and there are many important announcements that would never be calendared. And beyond simply stating an announcement during "opening exercises", there is a lot of service-type of coordinating that the RS & EQ need to do (as well as YW/YM), that many orgs now do during the first few minutes of class, and will not be able to occur during the new Sunday block.

Not really answering the O.P. , more of an acknowledgement that while the new schedule will be a blessing in many ways, other important things currently done during class time will be lost or reduced. And I suspect most units will struggle a bit more to effectively communicate in September, even if they use the calendar and send out regular messages using various means (social media, circles, whatsapp, texts, printed bulletins, etc.).

Your desire to reach out and solicit additional ideas and experiences is a great approach. Getting a lot of feedback hopefully helps identify what would be best suited for your local unit, since even in the same stake each ward's composition can vary wildly regarding how they engage in communication.

[russellhltn]

True, the calendar isn't everything, but it helps. What it's really good for is reaching those that weren't able to attend that Sunday.

Another thought is to put things into the Sunday program.

For some things, there's Circles. I've seen my ward EQ use that to fill the schedule for seminary security.

I don't think there's any magic bullet for this. No one thing is going to reach everyone.

[tubaloth]

I approached this as two parts.

1. Where can ward members go to see announcements or upcoming activities?
The Ward calendar is a start, it looks like if you set it up the correct way it will link to each ward's website.
Here is a YSA ward in Kaysville I found. They have a lot of activities, they have taped into using their tools.
https://local.churchofjesuschrist.org/e ... ward-18-25

Looks like when setting up a calendar item it needs to be linked to the website. Ward members wouldn't need to go directly to the calendar anymore.
Also the calendar will send out reminder (emails) automatically. Does take some set up from the ward and user to subscribe to them.

That would in theory help a lot of the issue wards have.

2. Sending out announcements or reminders. As far as communicating announcements that seems to be harder especially because our ward seems to want to use text messaging more then just the church's send a message option which goes through email.

Trying to find any app or website that can send out a blast text message is eventually going to cost something.

I found one website call https://gloo.com/for-churches that offer messaging for churches. I did sign in but never set up an account. Looks like there some limited free version haven't investigated that enough.


I would like the ward to use the Gospel Living App more to send messages, it has groups/circles for any all groups in the church -- a group for a primary class, but also a group for parents of that primary class.
Users have to have the app installed -- That seems to be the biggles obstacle, and the app sending out a notification when a new message comes. They did implement some share feature that allows a user to copy any message and send it to a text group.

That is what I have found so far.
Thanks -- we will get this sorted out.

[russellhltn]

Since the website is public, that's more for events where you want to reach those outside of the ward or even outside of the church.

It has it's place, but I'd be leery about putting all activities there. The original calendar advised against making youth activities public.