IT Tech Corner

New ideas and brainstorming shouldn’t be reserved for resolutions in January. How about
breathing new life into things in the summer? What are your hopes and dreams for technology in church? Here are some things I’ve been noodling on.

How can we more effectively reach our audience with our message?
Every week we send an email newsletter to our mailing list, 277 subscribers and if the
software can be believed, 150 subscribers open and read the message and 12 click on
links. When I put the content together, my hope is that the format appeals to readers such
that the content is consumed in a meaningful way. But I still wonder, how could it be better? What tools or links or format would be
easier to manage and integrate into systems that you prefer to use?

When I flip the viewpoint and think about the email newsletters I receive from organizations, I find myself with some wishes.

I often wish there was an easy way to get content from an email message into the calendar program I use, not just the title and date,
but also the description and documents so when I go to my calendar program, everything about the event is there already.

I also wish that the fonts were readable. Some email newsletters come to my phone in a font so small I just delete the message
instead of trying to tap the right buttons to make it fit the screen. Or the message is an embedded image with text that’s too small to
read on a phone or distorted when viewed on a computer. Or the message is just a link that goes to a newsletter somewhere else
and I have to decide if the link is safe or a scam so I just delete that message too. And if you just send me an attached PDF as the
newsletter, that also gets deleted if I’m not into resizing and dragging the viewport around on my phone.

Back to NUMC’s 277 subscribers, this summer I’ll be working on ways to keep the 150 readers happy and how to reach the 127
non-readers with content interesting enough to open the message and read it.