Ticketing Events (@asaltbde)

Do you run events for a charity or organisation? If so, you might want to read on and find out how you can leverage the power of EventBrite to make your life a whole lot easier and more productive.

In 2013, we have a large women's outreach event at St Paul’s, with around 500 tickets. There are also regular talks on morality and public life, where well known speakers are invited. Traditionally tickets are made available by advertising someone’s phone number, and requesting people make contact for tickets. This person has to maintain a list of people attending, and number of tickets available, which can be an arduous task. I’m also conscious that this method  isn’t the most effective, as it doesn’t reach a widest possible audience, and relies on someone being available.

What’s needed in this switched on world of social media, is an easier way of making tickets available, which self-administers itself and doesn’t cost a fortune, well, let’s even say is free, and hooks up with MailChimp for mailshots and social media. I choose EventBrite, and I’m looking forward to using it for some of our events in 2013. EventBrite is free to use if your ticket’s are free, but otherwise they make a charge per ticket.

The App

EventBrite boasts two Android apps. One is to view events in your area, and obtain tickets. The other, Entry Manager, is to manage tickets for your own event. Each ticket has a QR code, which the app can scan, checking in attendees using your phone. Of course you can also print of a paper list and go old skool too, but the sheer power of an app to do the grunt work, and potentially speed up check-in has to be tried out.

I’d love to hear how you manage tickets for events. Do you use a 3rd party system like EventBrite? What is your experience?

Previously published on bigbible.com

Network Mail: Spreading the word

After reading this article on Catholic Tech Talk, I was inspired to try out MailChimp (not just because the monkey is cute, but he does remind me of the Curious George movie).

I found listening to Alex Balfour (Head of New Media, London Olympic and Paralympic Games 2012), on the Guardian Tech Weekly podcast (21.30 into the show) very inspiring. Of course social media was important, but direct email was the core way of getting the message out, sending 83 million emails.

Social Media is cool, and a great way to engage, and interact with a community. But email has a far bigger following. To quote ‘The Church and New Media’ by Brandon Vogt, “Email is a New Media staple. Almost everyone uses it”. The point is to reach people where they are, and so email is an important channel, given a large percentage of the population are not on social media. With the busy Christmas period approaching fast, now is a good time for you to consider this approach.

If you’re a small church, you’ve probably never explored email services that provide list management for special interests, and allow you to create a professional look and feel HTML email (which is very tricky to do on your own, to ensure it is rendered correctly by all email clients). You might be simply relying on your church office to maintain a list, and send out plain text emails.

I’ve just started exploring Mailchimp (as used by BigBible no less), which provides a free account that will store up to 2,000 subscribers & send up to 12,000 emails per month (other service providers do exist). I’m very impressed so far with the flexibility, the look and feel it provides, and the reporting statistics. But one of the major benefits is that it takes the headache out of list management. People can to add or remove themselves, and even choose the sort of information (group) they would like to subscribe to.

List Management

For example, you might create groups or lists for these three categories:-

• Weekly updates -  your church might have a weekly newsletter, sermon podcast and perhaps even a blog post or two.
• Special events or services – Christmas, Easter, Harvest Festival, Mothering Sunday, Carol Concert, Christingle Service …
• Children’s events – Halloween Alternative, Christmas Party, Holiday activities

If you place a signup form on your website, you can have check boxes, so people can choose between one or more categories. Your subscribers then get the information they want, without getting spammed.

Automation – RSS Feeds

The ‘Weekly updates’ I mentioned in the ‘List Management’ example can be automated. All the items in the example have an RSS feed associated with them at St Paul’s. Mailchimp composes the email from RSS feeds. Once you have setup your template outlining which feeds to include, and how you would like them displayed, then each week, Mailchimp will do the rest. This redistribution of existing content, comes at no cost to you (in terms of weekly workload), but ensures your existing content gets exposed to a wider audience.

Mail shots

From time to time, when you have a special event or service, you may wish to send out a mail shot. Mailchimp provides sample templates, making it easy to get a professional look and feel (graphics and fonts). So for example, I’m writing one right now for our Christmas services (a work in progress, but you get the idea).

The App

Of course, there had to be an app involved, and Mailchimp has one, to monitor your campaigns (how many people opened the email, what time of day, did they click on a link, or retweet). Yet more stats to monitor. The app also has a signup form, allowing people to register for a list straight from your phone. Quite nice if you’re chatting over coffee.

 

I would love to hear about your experience of using mailing list software, and any hints and tips you have.

(also published on bigbible.org.uk)

What do you Tweet with?

With  a stream of social media conferences throughout the year, any smartphone application that saves typing, whilst providing me with the maximum of information, in a visually attractive way, has to be worth checking out.

I use a variety of #Android apps to post updates across social networks, and the nearest I’ve come to one app that does all, is Multipost. Not an all singing all dancing app, but more of a launcher. You register your social media apps with it, and it will then launch them, inserting your post. You just then hit the button to submit your post. Simple, but effective, and does the job well, enabling me to post to GooglePlus, Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook, all at the same time, should I so desire. I know there are two camps for posting the same update to multiple networks, but I’m in the ‘Yes’ camp. That debate will run and run I’m sure.

What application you choose next depends on your requirements. For example, I like Seesmic because it enables me to post to a Facebook page, as well as twitter. That’s handy for my daily usage, allowing me to cross-post interesting tweets to the church Facebook page. Seesmic also is unique in having a range of shortcut icons for lists, searches and timelines, which enable quick access. Really useful for checking lists I find, or monitoring multiple hashtags in conferences (why do most events have more than one?).

TweetCaster is my all time favourite. Whilst it has Facebook profile support, it doesn’t support posts to pages. TweetCaster is more of a twitter power app, with excellent list support, trend analysis and the ability to post tweets at a scheduled time. I also like the idea of the ZipIt feature, a mute for noisy tweeple, because sometimes you still want to follow someone, even when the are sending out an usually large number of tweets you aren’t interested in today.

Slices is from the same company as TweetCaster, but it’s their next generation application. The look and feel is exceptional, so well worth checking out. I’m sure it would work well on a tablet.

Both TweetCaster and Slices have a great feature that’s going to save me time at events, the ability to set a default hashtag to be posted with all tweets. No more copy/paste for me!

I would love to hear about your favourite social media apps. What is unique or most useful about them?

Google Plus on HootSuite (@asaltdbe)

At last, HootSuite have made G+ more useable for churches, charities, any anyone with a page. Recently, they added the G+ network to the web version of their social network application. This means that if you use HootSuite to post to your social networks, you can now post to your church G+ page, schedule posts to G+, or post to multiple networks, including G+.

HootSuite (or any other android app provider) are yet to enable this network on their Android application, but perhaps that will be HootSuite’s next step.

For those who haven’t tried the network since my earlier post Google Plus – The Application on Android – using it as a #digidisciple then it’s worth revisiting. The Android application has a much richer look and feel, with more integration, including ‘local’ and ‘events’. In my opinion, G+ is superior to Facebook, and implemented in a much cleaner way. What google don’t have is the critical mass to pull enough people away from the Facebook network that they know and love.

G+ has the potential to be a ‘Facebook Killer’ but I don’t believe it’s a ‘faith killer’ as Jonathan Blundell mooted in his post Google+ – The faith killer? . As more tooling emerges, G+ becomes an increasingly viable network with which to outreach to. I don’t believe it yet has the power of Facebook or Twitter, and it isn’t on the top of my social media strategy, but well worth keeping an eye on.

(also published on BigBible)

Charity Events & Social Media (@asaltbde)

Nearly two months ago I wrote about how one of my friends was going on a 390 mile walk to raise funds for his church, from Camberley in Surrey, to Lindisfarne in Northumberland. Well, Rev’d Bruce Nicole from St Michael’s, a.k.a the ‘Roving Rev’, has completed that trek, and used social media every step of the way. Each day he blogged, Tweeted, Facebooked, uploaded photos to Flickr, videos to YouTube, audioBoo’s and even started using Storify. Each day of his walk was a fascinating insight into the lives of everyday people he met, and the places he saw. Social media allowed him to capture all of that, and share it live. His own church could monitor his progress, and he could even be tracked on a live map. His walk wasn’t just about fund raising, it was about connecting with people in real life, and social media is very good at that.

Back at HQ, we used social media to contact press and radio stations along the route, and to hook him up with some interesting people along the way. Twitter in particular allows one to contact famous or influential people directly, which is wonderful when arranging things. I was often surprised by the positive responses we got.

So did ‘Roving Rev’ carry a camera, video and array of other devices? No, he used a HTC Desire HD running Android. He has shown that a large number of social networks may be covered using a single device - a smart phone. He did carry a dedicated GPS, and had a netbook for writing his blog in the evenings, but whilst on the road, his phone was the piece of social media kit.

If you are thinking of organising a charity event that takes place over a period of time, be it a walk, cycle, drive, or whatever, I recommend you take your smart phone, and start recording your experiences. People will then start to connect with you, and they might even follow you on social media too.

Setting up the infrastructure can be relatively quick (website, social media accounts and connecting them all together). Supporting someone is a full time role for a social media officer. After a month of research, tweeting, coaching and technical trouble shooting, I’m ready for my holidays! It’s been a great experience, and the walk raised over £5000 so was a great success.

You can re-live the ‘Roving Rev’ on his journey at http://www.stmikesopen4all.org.uk/

À bientôt Tilley Dog

Very sad to announce the death of ‘Tilley Dog’ today, 17 April 2012. She died at the grand old age of 17, as the onset of arthritis in her back legs disabled her and she began to deteriorate.

Tilley Dog – 1995 – 2012 (picture taken 2007)

In Tilley’s last two weeks she was largely immobile, requiring assistance and care. She still had a good quality of life, and was very alert and interested in everything. Only a few days ago she was barking at the delivery man. She had all the time in the world for the children, even in her last days.

My first memory of Tilley as a young dog was of her running at high speed straight towards me, aiming to buzz past me within centimetres. She wasn’t a ‘doggy’ dog. She didn’t chase balls, hold her paw out, or do any of those funny things humans like dogs to do. She was just her own free spirit, very dainty and very loving.

We will miss her deeply. Over the years, we have shared many milestones in our lives with her, not least the birth of our two children. Tilley was a great friend, a playmate and a very special animal. She may be gone, but she will not be forgotten, and I look forward to seeing her again one day.

À bientôt Tilley Dog

How to add a profanity filter to Twitterfall @twfall

Ever wanted to use a Twitterfall in a public place, using a well known event hashtag, but put off by the risk of people swearing or using rude words?

  Worst feeling ever, such a **** result! now onto thursdays game! #justkeepscoring 'Nemo quote'

I have a requirement to use a twitterfall in a sensitive environment, where the event hashtag could be well publicised. The tweets will be seen live on the wall, in front of a large group of people of all ages. Seems like a highly desired feature to me, yet @twitterfall haven't yet implemented it, despite the suggestion back in 2009.

So my attention turned to Greasemonkey, as there are several scripts for this I could use in my browser. However, my browser is Google Chrome, which doesn't fully support Greasemonkey scripts, even when used with extensions like Tampermonkey (which is supposed to support greasemonkey scripts).

The obvious next step, was to find a Chrome extension to do the job, and I recommend Simple Profanity Filter. Once installed, I just updated the default profanity list from an online dictionary of profanities (not pleasant, but had to be done), and then fire up twitterfall. Within minutes, the filter could be seen doing its job, replacing rude and unpleasant words with ***. It’s not perfect, but it’s good enough. I also realise no filter is ever going to do the job 100%, but at least this is a good start.

Caggie is such a mind ****. Poor spencer #madeinchelsea

If you know of a better solution, I’d love to hear it.