Tech Forum

I am in a bishopric for a college YSA Ward. I have responsibility over the weekly ward bulletin. I have put together a system whereby I can create a QR code that is printed out and can be posted near the entrance to our sacrament meeting room. Students can just scan the QR code and pull up a Google Doc of the ward bulletin on their phone/device. I have beta tested this but have not deployed it yet in sacrament meeting. I have a few questions? Has anyone tried that before? Is there any reason the Church would not want this type of approach. I still plan to print out maybe 30 "hard copy" bulletins for those who prefer them (typically I would print out 120). Thoughts? Ideas? Pros/Cons?

Someone in the building where my ward meets has done something similar. The QR code takes you here: http://abenjaminperkins.com/

There are some thoughts of how this could be done in this thread: Electronic Church Program

Ultimately, I think it's a viable option for YSA wards, but outside of that demographic there may be challenges.

I have done this in our ward recently and several other wards in our stake are implementing as well. I chose to put a simple Google Doc on Google Drive. This allows the document to be quickly updated for corrections/additions. I created a QR code based on the shareable link to the Google Doc. I also created a Bitly link to make it easier to remember the link. I send out an e-mail message to all ward members on Sat with the bitly link and some basic information on how to use the QR code, bookmarking the link and some 'gotchas' that some users reported with their devices. We gave some basic "training" to our ward members on the 5th Sunday in Dec on using the e-bulletin. We have been weening members from using the printed bulletin. We have gone from printing 70 programs in Dec to 20 this past Sunday and there were still 7 left over. Our goal is to only print 10 bulletins for those that don't have devices that can be used to view the e-bulletin.

A few great advantages:
* Less printed bulletins, of course.
* Can add more announcements that we'd have in a printed bulletin.
* Can add direct links to the weekly lessons for Home Centered Study, RS & Priesthood and Sunday School.
* Can link calendars, documents and other web based items from the various ward organizations (Missionary teamup calendar, Missionary meal calendar, electronic check request form, etc)

Eric - Great job! Can you please send me a link to what you do?
Thanks, Paul

What Ward and stake do you live in?

Resurrecting this. My ward currently sends out a PDF every week, but when I saw Ben Perkins' website tonight (linked above) I was pretty amazed. sbradshaw, in the Electronic Church Program thread, mentioned one big downside of a website: privacy; putting peoples' names (who is speaking, saying prayer, etc) on the page would be bad in my ward.

If we had access to the church's SSO (viewtopic.php?t=22364) then this wouldn't be so much of an issue.

mdiehl13 wrote:If we had access to the church's SSO (viewtopic.php?t=22364) then this wouldn't be so much of an issue.

Only official Church applications are authorized to use Church authentication services.

sbradshaw wrote:Someone in the building where my ward meets has done something similar. The QR code takes you here: http://abenjaminperkins.com/

This feels a bit weird for me to post, haha, but for anyone coming here in the future I wanted to clear up that the online program/bulletin is not being hosted at abenjaminperkins.com anymore. BUT I teamed up with a couple of great developers to make something even better! It's 100% free for anyone and there are definitely no ads (because who likes ads, right?), and you can set up a custom page for your ward or branch and we take care of all the technical stuff. You can find it at thefold.app on the web or download it on an Android or iOS device by searching for "The Fold" on the app store or Google Play Store. We're still very much in the beginning stages of rolling this out, and we're super open to feedback about what you find frustrating with the app (or what you really like)! Hopefully it can be helpful to someone, and clear up any confusion with abenjaminperkins.com moving forward!

We have a private group for our ward on Facebook. I post the Bulletin to the Facebook group page and then create a QR code which links to that page. I still have a poster size bulletin posted in the church entry for those who don't access Facebook (or QR codes). Recurring Zoom links for meetings are posted in the Announcements tab of the Facebook page.

Wow, you would think something as simple as this could be incorporated into the living app for each ward. While I think the resources are there for individual pages this may become cumbersome if wards all keep lots of historical records.