Monday, August 20, 2007
Reaching the ward
I am in charge of activities in our singles ward and there are two services that we are going to try out this next week to help inform people of the many activities that we have going on. You see, with singles wards and activities, there is always the problem of making sure people know about what is going on. You can make flyers, you can make phone calls, you can make announcements, but will people actually remember and will you actually have the time, even with your entire committee helping out? We have also recently had the issue of someone planning an unofficial activity on short notice, fully willing to invite everyone, not having time to call everyone, and so only some people find out about it, and others are hurt or offended that they did not know. These two services can help us out with this.
1. Phonevite.com - We are going to send around a sign-up sheet where people can sign up to receive either one phone call a week to learn about official ward activities or one phone call a week to learn about unofficial things that people are doing and are willing to invite everyone to or both (two phone calls a week). Then I will enter the phone numbers of those that sign up, save them as a phone book list, and then each week I will record a phone message and send it out at the beginning of the week on the official ward activities. Towards the weekend, I will send out a message on all of the happenings, unofficial activities. Each person on the list receives a phone call with the recorded message. If the person doesn't answer, the system is smart enough to leave a voice mail.
2. http://www.textmarks.com/ - Txtmarks allows people to send a text message whenever they feel like it, to a certain number, and receive back what information I have input into the website. So, at any given point, someone could be sitting at home, wondering what is going on in the ward. They send a text message to this number and receive back that people are invited over to so and so's house. It is like the previous, but via text message and on demand. This service also allows subscriptions, which means that the subscribers all receive a text message when the message is changed. But I don't believe we'll be using the service like that, because it negates the whole on-demand thing.
I will let you know how it goes.
1. Phonevite.com - We are going to send around a sign-up sheet where people can sign up to receive either one phone call a week to learn about official ward activities or one phone call a week to learn about unofficial things that people are doing and are willing to invite everyone to or both (two phone calls a week). Then I will enter the phone numbers of those that sign up, save them as a phone book list, and then each week I will record a phone message and send it out at the beginning of the week on the official ward activities. Towards the weekend, I will send out a message on all of the happenings, unofficial activities. Each person on the list receives a phone call with the recorded message. If the person doesn't answer, the system is smart enough to leave a voice mail.
2. http://www.textmarks.com/ - Txtmarks allows people to send a text message whenever they feel like it, to a certain number, and receive back what information I have input into the website. So, at any given point, someone could be sitting at home, wondering what is going on in the ward. They send a text message to this number and receive back that people are invited over to so and so's house. It is like the previous, but via text message and on demand. This service also allows subscriptions, which means that the subscribers all receive a text message when the message is changed. But I don't believe we'll be using the service like that, because it negates the whole on-demand thing.
I will let you know how it goes.
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