Build Community
Our new site has lots of neat-o-cool features that are designed to help us build community with youth workers, pastors, parents and even kids who are interested in short-term missions. We’ve got those magical RSS Feeds, we’ve got an email list, we have comments, and we have all those nifty social sharing widget-thingies. But perhaps the most powerful way to build community is to draw folks in with some great content. And that’s where the MA News blog comes into play.
Anyone Can Post
We’ve designed it so that all of us who have login credentials can post stories in the MA News Journal. This way you can reach a wider audience than you might have on your own site. (This should not stop you from posting stories on your site(s)!) And it allows for us to have a variety of voices online.
It Works Just Like the Outreaches
The MA News Journal works just like the Outreach Journals. So if you’ve posted an Outreach, you already know how to post a News story. And of course, that means photos and videos are welcome! Here’s some handy linkage to a nifty tutorial about posting Outreaches if you need your memory refreshed.
Every Time You Post, Tiny Gnomes on Teensy Tiny Unicorns Deliver Your News
The Magical RSS feature means that whenever you post a News story, that somehow, (I don’t think it’s Gnomes or Unicorns), interested youth workers get your story delivered to them. This is a built-in audience that is hungry for your information. So plan now to share your stories! I blogged about this the other day, and you can read it in all its glory here.
Continuous Updates
We’ll build community faster and with more better contacts if we have a nice stream of updates. This benefits you, and it benefits everyone in our Network. So consider this your call to write an MA News post. It doesn’t have to be long—in fact, the shorter ones get read more than the longer ones!
Some Ideas to Get You Started
There’s lots of things you could write about. Check out the MA News posts that are already there, and here are a few ideas for you:
- A report from the field with the Who, What, Where, Why, When, and How of an Outreach you led.
- A Testimonial from a super-cool youth worker that wants to help you out
- A testimonial from a kid who went on one of your trips
- A Testimonial from a kid’s parent who is shocked at the change that happened in their kid
- Your thoughts on a news article about a place where you go on outreach
- Your thoughts on an article about missions that you found on the interwebs
- An announcement of something nifty on your base’s site
Who Knows? Maybe Your Post will Make the eMail Newsletter
We’re also building an amazing database of email addresses, (more on this later). The idea is that we’ll send out a monthly email to everyone on the list with new info, promotions and maybe even a link to your awesome news story.
So who’s up for writing a bit o’ news?