Jeff Rholl- parishioner/webmaster jeff@stjoan.com  |
The major goal of the St. Joan website is to create a greater sense of community in a large and busy parish. My vision is a large pool of parishioners telling stories of the various ministries at SJA. I had a lot of requests when the website opened to include reports on events that occurred at St. Joan's. Questions like: What happened at the Strategic Planning Meeting?, What was Cabaret like?, What was it like to go through the Simplicity series? I think many parishioners enjoy reading/seeing what went on at events they were not personally able to attend. You can see current examples of reporters work at Events in Review. To see pictures and short bios of our current webteam members, visit this link.
We have started to build up a pool of parishioners who are willing to write a report on an event they attend at SJA. Currently, we have about 90 people on our WebReporter/WebPhotographer list. That seems like a lot, but with a busy parish and busy personal lives, we need greater numbers. I would ideally like everyone in the parish to be on the list so we all shared our ideas with each other. However, I anticipate a pool of 200 parishioners would make for very light work for any one reporter and provide a diversity of community viewpoints. If you sign up, you may only have the time to report on a couple of events a year, but you would remain on our mailing list and help when you can. Weekly, I send out an email to everyone in the group with a list of upcoming events. The first person to respond to the email would be the writer for that event. They would attend that event as they normally might, take notes, write up a report, and email it to me in a timely manner. I would define timely as within 72 hours but am open to flexibility. I would like to be timely so that parishioners can rely on the website for updates. I would format your report into HTML and load it up to the website for parishioners to read. All you need is the time to participate an event, write a report, and email it. You are under no obligation to attend any given event. You can respond to the group email of upcoming events only when you wish.
These same reporters(you!!) would also receive, on that email, a list of suggested feature stories that parishioners would be interested in learning about at SJA. These are not events, per se, but human interest articles that involve many aspects of life at St. Joan of Arc. For examples, see the current articles on the Feature Page. This is also space for the creative writer to offer their insights, musings, or questions about life in our community. Please consider adding your personality and writing to our pages.
Both seem like a good ways to involve each other in our community. It, for you, is a low/no commitment opportunity to be involved in our parish. I have grown to love SJA more the greater my involvement with it. Besides, I know I sometimes need a reason to get involved and this reason is good. You would be providing a service to parishioners who cannot attend an event. Sounds win, win to me! If you would be interested in being on the SJA WebReporter email list, fill out the form below. I will respond some introductory information.
I am also looking for a pool of people with access to a digital camera to attend events, take pictures and email them to me in JPEG format. I will edit the pictures in Photoshop and include them with the event reports. I recognize few of us have digital cameras, but if you do you would be very valuable to this effort!! A picture is worth ... Another option would be if you have a Polaroid with a scanner??? But we need the images eventually to be electronic and available in a timely manner. If you are interested in being on the SJA WebPhotographer email list, also fill out the form below. If you can do both reporting and photographing, you are indeed valuable to us!
Jeff Rholl- parishioner/webmaster jeff@stjoan.com |