June 17, 2007
Technology does not an audience create
Technology, no matter how neat, does not create an audience. Lots of technology gets implemented but never used. So, how do you create services or content that people will actually use?The key is to find an existing process in the congregation and find an application that’s actually useful to the people involved without changing the process. After a great deal of effort, we now have an online calendar that the administer uses which also generates tons of dynamic content for the website. But the process is essentially the same as the paper process that she had in place before.Some time ago, I implemented an online calendar several year ago but it was soundly ignored. I could not get anyone to use. And because it was not accurate, no one used it. The problem was a process/social/requirements issue not a technological one.
It turned out that we had three different calendars going in the congregation - an events calendar, a room calendar and a print calendar for the newsletter with three owners. I could not find an application that satisfied them all. Good night for a year. When we hired a new administrator, I jumped at the chance to get all the calendars handled by her.
The administrator was very happy. She could enter the information ONCE and also generate a print version for the newsletter (a critical requirement).
I was very happy. Once the information was in the calendar, I used the feeds independently on the website in a variety of ways - Upcoming Sermons, Committee meeting, Concert Series, Choir schedule. No more stale pages and a lot less work!! I no longer had to update the site on a weekly, er…, monthly, well, quarterly?, basis. No more complaints about stale pages!! See
- http://chaliceuu.org,
- http://www.chaliceuu.org/serviceTopics.htm,
- http://www.chaliceuu.org/calendar.htm,
- http://www.chaliceuu.org/eventsub.htm
- http://www.chaliceuu.org/serviceTopics.htm,
All of these are driven by the same backend calendar.There are other calendars that are hidden that are used to generate email reminders for groups. For example, the choir has a mailing list that sends out a reminder every week about the upcoming rehearsals/performances. Again, this is all done through Trumba.We implemented a room-request form and people can check the chapel for availability before they submit the request. Now certain people (not the whole congregation) go to the site regularly.
So the calendar made a huge difference to the administrator and to me. It created dynamic content that kept the website from getting stale.
After all that, about 50% of the congregation only uses the print calendar that comes in the newsletter. But at least it was generated from the online calendar!! So I can say that everyone in the congregation uses the online calendar ;-). Everyone who visits the site gets a great idea that things are happening at the congregation.
Dean
PS. Two other bits:
1. I recently implemented a members-only site using wiki technology. We have had it up for about 2 months now and by all accounts it has been quite successful. The nice this is that several people have gotten the idea and are starting to populate it with information. JUST DON’T CALL IT A WIKI!!
2. I have just recently started playing with wordpress to implement a blog so that we can publish news stories. Again, DON’T CALL IT A BLOG. Basically I am feeding it news stories from our print newsletter. Always good to recycle content. This has been up about a week now. I’ll let you know how it works.
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