Guide 4 - Staying in Touch

Keeping your site up to date with lots of great news stories and content is a great first step in making the most of the internet to reach the people in your community. But, to really make your site succeed you will also need to use email to keep people informed. Before we show you how, it’s important to bear a few things in mind about using email effectively:

Nobody likes spam – always be clear on your website what people are signing up for when they complete the registration page. We’ve include some sample text which you can use as a starting point. To change this text simply go to the Settings tab in the web office and click on User Profiles.
Be wary of overuse – a regular barrage of emails will stop people reading the emails altogether. An occasional email with several brief and interesting points will nearly always produce better results.
Be brief - concentrate on making it possible to scan through your email quickly but also to read it entirely inside one minute. One good approach is to provide an eye catching summary of each of your news items then provide a link at the bottom to refer people to the site for more information.

Create a new mailing

Click on the Mailing tab in the top-pane of the web office.
Click the Create New Mail button to begin the mailing wizard.
The first step allows you to select who you will be mailing. In most cases this will be the root group i.e. the Hope 08 **Location** folder at the top of the tree, but in future you may also wish to use this tool to contact church leaders by adding them to a group. Click the Next button.
The second step allows you to set communication method; if there are less than 100 people registered you will be able to select on an individual basis. In most cases you will only be sending email – but you may wish to use the “export address label” feature to produce avery labels for a mailout.
Create and send your email. Emails can be in one of two format types:

Plain Text – your email will consist of text only (as the name suggests!). Although these are less visually appealing and you are very unlikely to encounter display problems in different email applications.
HTML email – use the Template option to select an html template for your email (a basic HOPE2008 template has been created as a good starting point – you can create more templates using the edit templates option in the left-hand pane). HTML emails allow you to insert images and links – you can even track the number of people clicking a link using the click tracking feature!

The html email editor is almost identical to the article editor – however two buttons are especially worth mentioning: the events and the articles button. These buttons will automatically insert components from your site (for example a list of articles from the homepage) into your email.

Both email formats use have mail merge options to automatically insert useful elements (such as recipient name) into the text of the email.

Click the Send and Continue button to send the emails. If you have any names tagged for receiving communication either by telephone or by post the following screen will allow you to print address labels and a call sheet.
Finally, you will be given the option to save the mailing – either in a personal “sent items” folder, or in one of the other folders of the site structure (this will allow other web office administrators to access it at a later date).

Finished!

Now that you’ve worked your way through these guides here’s a final few pointers:

Before going live you may wish to make these guides only available to few administrators. You can do this by restricting who the group is visible to as follows:

In the web office click the using this web site folder (under get involved).
On the Summary tab click the Advanced Options link.
Set the Security setting to “visible to members of ‘using this web site’ group only”.
Use the members tab to add administrators who should be able to access these guides.

Many of the features of the full ChurchInsight web administration suite are available in your HOPE2008 local site. If you would like to know more about a particular features more quick start guides are available here.