Using the Blog
TRANSCRIPT
Blogs are a great way to increase member engagement and get important and timely information to the members of your organization. This video will get you started.
First, you should make some administrative decisions. Who's going to be responsible for writing the content for your organization's blog? With a blog, only an admin user can create new blog posts or threads, although anyone can comment. If you want members to start their own threads for new topics, you'll want to use the Forum, not the blog. Consider how often you'll post content. Who's invited to add comments and join the discussion? You can change your settings down the line, but when working with volunteers, it's important to be clear about who's responsible for what.
Next, review your settings. You'll find these in Content > Community > Settings > Blog. Set your archive period. Generally, the less often you post, the longer posts should stick around before moving to the archive. The maximum posts option will keep one person from taking over the conversation, as this limits the number of comments someone can make in one go. You can also choose how many posts to display on your blog before someone clicks to move to the next page. You can also choose whether your main blog page shows the full post, or just a summary with a Read More link.
The comment options are the most important here. You can allow comments from the general public, but we recommend moderating the comments in that case. This means that when a comment is submitted, an email goes to your moderator, and he or she will log into the admin area to approve the comment. Only then will it show up. Before that, it's not visible on your blog. Most organizations will only allow comments from members, though. If you allow logins from non-members, then choose Logged-in Users instead. And of course, make sure to save your changes.
If you're going to have a lot of material, you may want to create a few categories for your blog posts. The Categories tab has categories that can apply to articles, blog posts, calendar posts, and forum posts. Our blog may have some member highlights that are blog-exclusive, and maybe also some legislative updates that are explored more in articles we're posting.
Once the configuration is set, we'll go into the Blog area and create a new blog post. We can automatically publish this post on a future date, and automatically archive it. The archive date here is coming from the blog settings that we configured earlier. We can also set a custom link, or override the comment preferences for this particular post. We can also categorize the blog post and restrict it to a particular group of members. For more information on that, please check out our resources on the Group Manager.
After setting up things in this screen, we'll enter the post details, like an associated icon. If I'm highlighting a particular member, I'll put their photo here. The excerpt will be the snippet about this blog that would appear before the Read More button. Next, we'll enter a title and content for this blog post.
On the final summary screen, we'll review the details, make edits if needed, and click on the Publish button if everything is ready. Or we can wait for the post to publish itself.
Now, if our blog was never linked up before, we'll need a way for visitors to get to it. In Content > Page Manager > Navigation Manager, I'll update the main nav and add a link. That link will point to our blog page.
I'll jump into the front end of our system to see how it looks so far. Our visitors will see the link, but if you'd like a little extra attention for your new blog post, you can go through Email Manager to send it out.
Let's switch roles and look at this from the commenter's side. I've found this post and now I want to comment on it. I'll submit my comment here. An email will go to the moderator, who will log into the admin area.
We'll see a Comments button for every blog post. Inside, we see the comments that were posted and we can approve a comment to post it, decline a comment to tell the system that it should not be displayed, or add a reply to the comment here.
And that's all there is to it. Did you know StarChapter itself has a blog? Check us out at StarChapter.com/blog.
