Guide 3 - Engaging Community

Running a HOPE2008 local site is all about reaching the community – not just a resource for the churches involved. One of the most effective ways you can reach the community is by building online community – and the website has some great tools specifically for this purpose.

Introducing Membership

You’ll notice that your website has a Register option – clicking on this link takes you to a page which asks for some basic information in order to apply for a membership account. This same page is visible by selecting Register for Update Emails under Get Involved from the menu.

Membership applications need to be approved in the web office before access is granted. When you have outstanding applications to process you will see a

symbol in the left-hand pane. To process these applications:

Click the root group – this is usually labelled Hope 08 **location** and appears at the top of the folder tree in the left-hand pane.
Click the members tab – the applicants section will contain new registrations. Click on any name to view their details.
At the bottom of the record card use the give this person access to the web site task to approve the application.

You’ll notice that most of the folders in the left-hand pane also have a members tab – so you can add people to any folder to represent a particular interest group. For example, the get your church involved folder (under get involved) could also represent the people who are church leaders; this is useful for creating content which is only visible to those people as well as sending mailings to specific groups of people (more about this later). To add a person to a group:

Click the get your church involved group in the left-hand pane.
Click the members tab.
Use the Add another person task; in a pop-up window you’ll be able to browse the database of names in the root group.
Click the names you wish to add then press the select records button.

The members tab will be updated shortly afterwards with the new additions.

Forums

Discussion forums allow people to leave brief messages to which people can respond. Under the Home menu of your website you’ll see a forums option – by default there are three forums:

A guestbook – this general purpose forum is visible to everyone visiting the website and anyone can add a posting. You can find this forum in the web office by going to the get involved folder and clicking the forums tab.
A Prayer Needs forum – again, this forum is visible to everyone visiting the website and anyone can add a posting. You’ll also find this forum in the get involved folder.
A Church Leaders forum – designed for church leaders to share information this forum this forum is only visible to the members of the get your church involved group (see the section on membership above for more information on this).

Both the guestbook and prayer needs forums have spam protection enabled. This requires non-members to enter characters from an image before they are able to submit a message – preventing spam messages from being entered automatically. In addition to this any message may be flagged as “inappropriate” by any member – after which you will need to “release” the message before it becomes visible on the website again.

You can of course create as many forums as you wish, use the add a forum task in the forums tab in any folder to begin the process.