Who wants to read a notice sheet?
Notice sheets. They've been a mainstay of our church services ever since photocopiers became commonplace in offices. They are invaluable tools for getting the word out to your congregation about what's going on in your church throughout the week, for advertising upcoming events, for sharing prayer requests, even for giving people something to read during the sermon.
But how does a printed publication relate to your web site? Does it need to? What's the best way of getting it there?
If it's worth saying, it's worth putting online
Consider what actually gets put into a notice sheet. More often than not, they're important bits of news that your congregation needs to know. It includes dates and places, contact information, service times. Without a notice sheet, your congregation may not know what's happening and will miss out on valuable support. But here's the rub - if it's important enough to photocopy all those times, surely it's important enough to make its way onto your web site?
Think about who visits your web site. Some of your regular congregation who were ill that week may go to your web site as a source of information. Irregular church-goers might look at the web site to find out whether there is anything worth coming to. Curious non-Christians will look to see what you're doing that might be relevant for them. You need to make sure the information is there for them.
What about privacy?
Printed sheets of paper are easy to control. If it's only printed and handed out in your church service, the only people who are likely to get that information are your congregation. Putting it online makes it available to people across the world. Obviously there are serious privacy issues here when thinking about people's personal contact details and prayer requests.
There are solutions, though. One solution might be to place the news sheet in a restricted part of the site, where you only give access to members of your congregation (how you enforce that is up to you). Or you could put an edited version of the notice sheet online, removing any details that might not be suitable for such a global audience. In short, don't let privacy worries prevent you from putting those important dates on your web site.
How to put the notice sheet online as a download
If your church is anything like mine, the notice sheet will be typed up by someone who isn't a professional graphic designer, probably on Microsoft Word or even Publisher. It's deliberately designed to be easy to maintain on a weekly basis, so it just has to be printed off and photocopied in time for Sunday.
However, it's important to remember that there is a difference between creating publications for print and for web. You can't necessarily rely on everyone having exactly the same piece of software as you to be able to open it. We certainly don't recommend putting notice sheets (or anything, for that matter) online in Publisher format, because a large proportion of people won't be able to open it. Word documents come with their own potential issues too; we don't all have the same version of Word, nor do we all have the same fonts installed on our computer. In essence, you cannot guarantee that the notice sheet will look right on everyone's computer if you put it online in Word or Publisher format.
What you need to do is export the file as a PDF. PDFs are generally held to be the most portable and reliable sort of files for web downloads, simply because they are pretty much guaranteed to look exactly the same on whatever computer you are using. They also have the benefit of being read-only, so that other people can't change it, deliberately or accidentally.
If you have the joy of being able to create the notice sheet on a Mac, you'll find that saving as a PDF is built into the operating system, so you'll be able to save as a PDF easily. On a PC, you'll need an extra piece of software to help you, because MS Office probably won't export as a PDF itself (some versions might, have a look at yours first). Bullzip PDF Printer is an example of a clever bit of software that looks like a printer driver; rather than saving the file in PDF format, you print it instead, but when the print dialog box comes up you choose this nifty driver and it prints to a PDF file. This is very clever, and means you can create a PDF from any program that can print! As an alternative, there are online tools such as PDF Converter that allow you to upload a Word file, it'll do the conversion for you and email it back to you.
Technology is your friend
Of course, providing your notice sheet as a download isn't very 'web', is it? These days there are much more elegant solutions that keep the information online rather than having people download anything.
If your site has a news area or blog, you can use that to tell people about important church news. Yes, it requires a little extra work, but it could just be a case of copying the text from your in-progress notice sheet in Word and pasting it into your web site as you go along. And if you have an RSS feed set up for the news area, it means people can subscribe to it and be told instantly when a new bit of news is published, so they never miss those important dates even if they skip church one week.
Another useful bit of technology you find on the web is a calendar. Products like Google Calendar are easy to maintain and can be integrated into your web site too. There's an example of this on the Diocese of Chelmsford web site. This provides another way of getting those important dates out to everyone in a presentational format they'll be familiar with.
To sum up...
Your notices are important. You dedicate a slot to them in your service. You print them off in their hundreds to give people as they walk through the door. Just think how effective those same notices could be if they were put online too! It's not difficult, it's not expensive. So get to it!
Written by Matthew DawkinsOriginally published on www.chapternine.co.uk.
Copyright © Matthew Dawkins 2010
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