Group Communications

Hi everyone,

I hope this very long message will be taken as a technical suggestion to keep things tidy especially with our church-wide group communications.

It’s great that we are taking advantage of various communication channels like SMS, Email, Facebook, Viber, etc. But we tend to overuse them and things get out of hand.

I’ve been noticing these past few months that announcements and discussions are all over the place. Some not getting responses, updated information being missed, and it’s becoming difficult to track by those who don’t go online as often as others. Many, like me, don’t always have time to browse all past messages and connect what is being discussed with what.

In my opinion, Facebook-Groups is the best platform to communicate because you can comment and react to each post separately.

While SMS, Facebook-Messenger and Viber are all alike, which are linear message platforms, and it’s difficult to track responses and reactions if more than one topic has been opened in the thread.

Now to keep things tidy in our group communications, may I suggest some housekeeping that apply across these channels: Facebook-Groups, Facebook-Messenger, Viber, and Email.

With new post or messages, we need consistency. Can we please make sure new and updated announcements is posted across all channels at the same time?

** Facebook-Groups allows editing a post or comment, let’s do that when updated information is available.

** Viber allows deleting a message, so please delete outdated information if a new one is available.

** On Facebook-Messenger, SMS, Email, we cannot modify past messages. So we have to send again updated announcements but please mention irrelevant information to ignore so to avoid confusion.

With comments and replies, if you have an informative response to a post or message and want to share or open a discussion, please do so as usual. But in Facebook-Messenger and Viber, please try to mention which topic or who are you responding to. We can use either ‘re’ and/or ‘@’  at the start of our response.

If you just want to acknowledge somebody’s post or message, press the ‘Like’ button on Facebook or the ‘Heart’ icon next to a Viber group message. This is will help keep a Facebook-Messenger or Viber thread as short as possible and keep useful responses close to each. Therefore, please try to avoid sending stickers if you can if you are just acknowledging a message.

Now for those, like me, that lost interest browsing a Facebook News Feed which is now cluttered with ads, shares and likes, there is another app that can be used to get updates from a Facebook-Group, i.e., “FCCC Members Bulletin” and “FCCC Worship Team” groups.

It’s called “Facebook Group” and its available to Android and Apple users.

Apple Users, go to this link: https://itunes.apple.com/app/id931735837

Android Users, go to this link: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.facebook.groups

It will only show you posts from the group you are a member of. You would need your Facebook user account but you don’t need to add or have friends. If you want your online presence to be hidden and want to avoid getting friend invites, there are settings to do so. Please let me know if you need assistance.

Additionally, we also have a website http://www.fccc.org.au/ (which is different from Facebook, Facebook-Groups, Facebook-Pages, Twitter, Youtube). We can make use of it for church-wide announcements and anyone can comment on it as well. Exactly how this long message is being delivered to you. But it’s up to you how you want to deliver an announcement, please keep it consistent though.

I hope this is clear enough and this only applies to our group communications to keep information readily and easily available to anyone. If you got questions or want to discuss, just let me know. Thanks for your time.

Your fellow servant,

Eric