Using RSS in the church- getting the message (part 2 of2)

Church Marketing Sucks generated a list of how a church could use RSS feeds, including:

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

In my last article I talked about how to use existing programs to create your RSS feeds. Now, how do you get the message out?

There are many ways RSS can communicate its message beyond the feed reader. Many of these ways are free using already existing programs (requiring no programing by anyone in the church).

For one, you can receive an RSS feed by e-mail. Blog Alert offers this service without anyone having to sign up, and they even have a gadget you can put on your website to sign up to receive e-mails from your designated RSS feed. Even though this service promises not to spam you, you should use caution because you can never be certain (and you don’t want to propagate your people’s inboxes with dirty messages). Of course, if you wanted to insure that your people’s e-mail addresses would not get into the hands of a spammer, you can always write your own program or copy the script from feed2mail.org.

If you can’t get your people to check their e-mail, but are fortunate enough to get them to your website once in a while, you can always use a service like rss2pdf.com. Just be sure and give the service a static file name and link to that file name from your website, and this service should have a constantly updated PDF file created from your feed whenever one of your people visits the site. If you use rss2pdf.org you can’t designate a static filename (the address will be long and complicated) but it will do the same. (Both these sites offer RSS sent as an e-mail as well, but limit the number of addresses you can send to at one time).

Creating a PDF from your RSS feed could also be useful for those members who are not yet “wired.” It would take your feed and convert it into a nice, readable format which you can print and pass out or snail mail to them.

For your more internet savy or younger people, you can even send RSS feeds to them as a text message or through IM. These services require someone to sign up to a particular program, but if this is the main way they communicate it could be a great way to pass your message along. Services that do this (although I have not worked with them) include loopnote, rasasa, and FeedBlitz among others. Use even more caution with these services- if you think its annoying to receive spam e-mail, wait until the wrong person sends you text messagaging spam (which you have to pay for each message you receive)! In order to avoid this, you could always program your own service or use the Instant Feed script (written in Rudy on Rails).

For the musicians in your group you can even send them their messages as podcasts. Give your RSS feed to feed2podcast and their computer will “read” it into an mp3 for you.

To me this whole concept is really cool. You can take a single RSS feed for any purpose and convey this information to people on their terms with the vehicles they are already using to communicate with others.

Subscribe to my RSS feed to get more helpful articles like this one.

Leave a Reply