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| What To Do With Church Bulletins |
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One of the things we're currently working on is a revamp of our email notifications system. Many of you have given us some feedback that there are just too many emails. And while it's easy to just point you to your email notification settings page where you can turn emails on and off as you choose, we realized that a big part of the issue might be with how church bulletins were designed. By default church bulletins send out an external email to all your church members for the original bulletin message, and each bulletin comment. When your church is 10 or 12 people, that may be okay. But when all 352 members are on MyChurch, not all of them need to be notified of every comment on the bulletin.. especially when the bulletin itself isn't urgent or that important to every single member. Bulletins were really meant for important and time-sensitive things. Things like.. last minute service times changes, or urgent prayer requests that are worthy of actually mass-emailing your whole church. When bulletins don't fall into this category, we think the appropriate place for them is really in the blog - where discussion can happen w/o the explicit email for every bit of activity. Furthermore, we realized church bulletins are behaving a little too much like blogs, except with the added feature of an email. So we're thinking of removing bulletin comments altogether so churches will hopefully not run into the issue of email overload (where annoyed members might just turn off bulletins altogether and eventually miss out on a really important bulletin when the church needs to reach it's members) and use their blog as the means for on-going discussions. We'd love your feedback on this. - Should church bulletins allow comments?
- Should there be emails for bulletins and comments?
- How does your church use the bulletin feature?
- How does your small group use it?
- And what about defaulting bulletins to moderator-only or approval-required?
We realize there are a lot of different things we could do here. But the goal is to help connect your church in a useful and effective way. We're still learning, so thank you for helping us figure these things out. We so appreciate each and everyone of you guys and gals!! |
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Norm |
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March 06, 2008 at 8:55pm |
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| Have the moderator approve the bulletin so that it can be used for it's original purpose. |
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Suzie |
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March 06, 2008 at 9:06pm |
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| Allow bulletin comments but make it possible for people to opt in to e-mails for bulletins while being able to opt out of e-mail comments. I'm the moderator for our church and I feel strongly against defaulting bulletins to moderator-only or approval required. Everyone uses this feature responsibly. |
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| I use the bulletin for prayer requests and upcoming events. I agree with Suzie, allow comments but make it possible for people to opt in to emails for bulletins but able to opt out of email comments. No I wouldn't want it to be 'moderator only' due to the fact that in our church there are several people who post on bulletin. Approval required wouldn't work for us because our moderator isn't always available to approve and a lot of our bulletins are prayer requests. Thanks for asking our opinion before making the changes. Thank you for your hard work on improving the site. Love my mychurch! |
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| i want them to stay only cuz i don't like change.. our church deosn't really use them. |
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We use the bulletin for morning devotion. If you make it a moderator only feature for initial bulletin, I think it will be fine. Definitely leave comments. It provides a quick opportunity for response to bulletins.
Regards |
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Our church uses the bulletin and comments for serious purposes and for fun. Personally, I like the fact I get an email everytime someone comments. I also like the fact that I can read the comment in my email without logging on. I believe that if notification of comments were removed we'd have less activity on our site. Although some of my group have said they get just too many emails, sometimes over 200 a day, from MyChurch.
What I would like to see is the option to leave it the way it is, and the option to get a daily summary email instead such as:
Bulletin: "Title"
New Comment 1 by Member Joe
New Comment 2 by Member Sue
Bulleting "Title Two"
New Comment 4 by Member Bill
New Comment 5 by Member Ellen
New Comment 6 by Member Bill
I think doing that either in a single email for all bulletins, or one email per bulletin would be less of an overload for our group.
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I know we can use blogs, but blogs don't tell you what the new comment on the blog was in your email, and the title of the blog is not in the subject of the email, rather the body, so you can't see at a glance what is generating comments. |
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| Should church bulletins allow comments? Sure. Should there be emails for bulletins and comments? No, just bulletins IMO. And what about defaulting bulletins to moderator-only or approval-required?
I might add, right now the defaults are set at receiving email notifications, aren't they? If the default was no email notification, maybe only those serious interested in receiving the notifications would end up getting them (rather than the casual user who doesn't know how the website works and is wondering even now why their email box is full of these email notifications).
Just my thoughts!
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| I think we should definitely keep the church bulletins because are useful to send out an email to all members for an urgent prayer request, event, etc. As far as the comments though I think you should only get emails if you choose: "Notify me of follow up comments via email" just like we have on the blogs. That would cut down on a lot of the excess mail I would think. |
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Chris |
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March 07, 2008 at 11:05am |
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There are some bulletins that need to be distributed broadly (prayer requests) and some specifically to a group, and some not at all. Maybe it should be a decision by the person writing it. The same could be said about adding events. Adding a month of events for the church calendar generates a lot of notifications that are not necessary, but notification of a specific event that is sent to a specific group would be very nice. |
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peanut |
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March 07, 2008 at 12:13pm |
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| Our church uses these bulletins for upcoming events that people need to know about. If, for some reason, someone is unable to attend church or doesn't receive a bulletin, they can look on myChurch to see what they need to know. I agree that the notifications add up and get a little annoying so maybe if you took the email away and made just the posting as a default then it wouldn't be so much of a problem. I think comments aren't very necessary for the bulletins. Even if someone needs to respond to the bulletin, they can send a message to the poster of the bulletin so that we can avoid the confusion and email build up. |
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| I think we should adjust the modulator in direct proportion with the sum of capitulation's square root, times four ! Hope you get it worked out :) |
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Just out of curiosity, what would it take to have an address book that the church/group moderator-only would have access to in order to create groups of email (ex. youth, deacons, staff, members, visitors, women, men)?
Could this encompass both MyChurch users (where names could be entered by moderator rather than just showing screen names) & pre-user emails?
This could be a helpful tool for churches & for continuing to promote MyChurch adoption. It may also reduce excessive emails because the bulletins would be more tailored & not as automatic.
I may be in left field but its a thought. :) |
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blimpa |
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March 08, 2008 at 5:33pm |
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I really like Rachel's idea...not only for bulletins, but also for other things like events, and others. Anyway, I think the common support here is for bulletins to stay on MyChurch, and I'll be another one to support that idea. Specially for churches that don't upgrade the service, when you have a group, it is the only way to communicate (we're upgrading the service, but I'd feel bad for the other ones that won't do it). Thank you MyChurch Team for thinking of making things better. I'm sure you'll find lots of great feedback on previous comments. Most of them are great ideas anyway. God bless you all! |
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blimpa |
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March 08, 2008 at 5:35pm |
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Also forgot to mention, how about people to select users to get bulletins from? I mean, if the other members could have a place to select certain people from the fellowship to receive bulletins and not from everyone. Let's say, moderators only and/or two or three more persons. Please, keep the bulletins open to everyone, for some people also may use it for urgent prayer requests. God bless y'all! |
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R |
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March 09, 2008 at 6:15am |
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Hi mychurch staff and family,
Is there a way to delete memo's? I like to see what new things friends write, but after a short time the home page strats getting a bit clogged.
Thanks, R... |
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| I am mychurch's moderator and I use the bulletin for special events, events that just happened, church bulletin, prayer requests, things that might need an immediate response. So I like being informed (emailed) that something is happening and needs your attention right now. I don't think that comments are necessary, if you have a question you could just contact the individual directly. Also, why not have an option for the writer of the bulletin to determine who gets the email. Whether it's everyone or a specific group. Thanks for caring to make mychurch more user-friendly!! |
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GERVIS |
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March 17, 2008 at 5:22am |
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| As far as church wide bulliten's and comments... i'm not sure... we are one of the churches with only a few members...but I just started my first church group and I like the bulliten notification option and that others can leave comments to the bulliten. I hope you don't remove that option from church sub groups. By not allowing blogs with sub groups unless a fee is paid it will make small subgroups impossible or at least difficult for the churches that don't have that many members. My sub group only has 12 members. It would not be prudent for me to pay a fee in order to be able to communicate with just my sub group. If the regular blog options had "only allow church sub group such and such to view" then you could remove the bulliten comments from the church sub groups, but right now on the blog options you don't have that choice. |
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