Using RSS in the church- where do I begin (part 1 of 2)

Earlier this year Church Marketing Sucks generated a list of how a church could use RSS feeds. Here are some of their suggestions.

  • Announce Events
  • Announce Prayer Requests
  • Send Out Devotions
  • Weekly News Updates
  • Series Announcements
  • Encouraging Messages

This is a great idea, but where do you get an RSS feed?

Create a blog A blog can be about more than just someone giving their opinion to people who never asked (like mine). If you used the right program you could create a blog that looked like a regular website but contained dynamic information (like I am trying to pull off here at dizzysoft.com. I am using a program called b2evolution (as you can see off to the side) to create this entire site. Not only do I get an easy way to put content on the web, but it automatically generates an RSS feed for me. I always thought this would be an incredible way of hosting a church website (hire me to do it for yours). With a little tweeking you could create categories for each ministry in your church and dedicate a unique RSS feed to each. This could be used to announce events in advance (with the simple change of a single variable) so everyone could hear about the event at the same time. After the event has passed, the information would be left on the site for people to comment with their own stories from the event and even upload their own photos. All this could be passed on to your congregation through a few simple RSS feeds. How cool would that be?!?

You can do something similar even if all you have is a old, boring web 1.0 website (that one of your middle school students created for you). You could use some of the tricks I talked about in my article Put someone else’s information on your website with RSS to create an RSS feed based on static information on a webpage. Since you will have created (or someone close to you) this website yourself, the regular expressions should be easy to created. If you use the site I suggest in the comments, you will find it even easier.

Create a static feed Sometimes you don’t need a “history” to follow the information you are trying to convey. For instance, BibleGateway produces a verse of the day which it makes available through RSS (and uses RSS to make it available through many different means- but that is for part 2). Since it really isn’t important to know what yesterday’s verse for the day was, it only has one item on the feed at any given time. The same might be true about your volunteer schedule- all you need to tell them is who is on the schedule this week. You can use all sorts of pre-existing programs to create a static RSS feed for this purpose (without any programming at all). You can use the Free RSS Feed Writer to create a feed and an item for every ministry to show who is volunteering for what this week. You just have to copy and paste the generated RSS feed into a text editor and upload it to your website and your RSS feed will make sure a volunteer never misses their week again (yeah, right).

You can do the same thing from another site. The RSS Headliner allows you to create a feed with a certain number of items (that you have to cut-and-paste as well). You could create a perpetual RSS feed from its companion program, the RSS Updater, by adding items to the previously existing feed (even editing out some of the old information). This would allow you to create a feed for your volunteers and update it each week while only allowing for 4 weeks of history (see who has served for the last month).

E-mail to the feed This method requires even less programming than the cut-and-paste of the last method. You can use a service such as mail2rss or MailBucket to set up an address that anyone can send an e-mail to and everyone else can read it through RSS. Although this can be very useful (for prayer-requests, for instance) anyone who receives this feed knows what e-mail address to send it to (so if the pastor set up a feed to convey messages to the congregation anyone could send an e-mail to the address, pose as the pastor, and everyone would receive the message without knowing any better). The potential for spam infiltrating this list is also high, which is why the MailBucket option is better because it has a built-in spam filter. Of course, you could prevent many of these problems by programming this yourself using the MailFeed php script or Pop2RSS.

So now you have an RSS feed for your church website. How can people get the messages? You’ll have to wait for part 2 for the answer to that question.

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