Tech Forum

Hello,
I am the Stake Technology Specialist for my stake. I have been asked to create a Stake Website that would have content for a few different things. One of them being for Emergency Preparedness.

Are there any guidelines or church policies for creating such sites that someone can direct me to?

Thank you in advance.

Travis

I imagine the only real place to do this within the rules is to use the Newsletter application. You could create a special category for it.

You may want to read Handbook 2 21.1.22. While you can create a website for personal use in your calling, I think the moment you say a "stake website" the following applies:

"Stake and ward Web sites may be created only by using the official Church Internet resources. Stakes and wards are not authorized to create other Web sites or blogs or otherwise have a Church-sponsored presence on the Internet."

travisgraham wrote:Hello,
I am the Stake Technology Specialist for my stake. I have been asked to create a Stake Website that would have content for a few different things. One of them being for Emergency Preparedness.

Are there any guidelines or church policies for creating such sites that someone can direct me to?

Thank you in advance.

Travis

I think the Code of Conduct prohibits us from posting any methods to circumvent Church policies. Let's say that you bring the clear directive of Handbook 2 to the stake president's attention, and he agrees that the stake should not have a web presence. Then, purely hypothetically, and for the sake of discussion, if he asks you (as a friend, and definitely not as the STS) to come up with a site that all 3000 of his friends that he sees in church frequently can use to share ideas about emergency preparation, I might suggest searching Facebook for "stake church." Because everyone has read the counsel regarding stake websites or Church-sponsored presence, I am certain that you won't find many stake-sponsored pages containing exactly the sort of information your friend has asked to you make available to his thousands of other friends.

JohnShaw wrote:I imagine the only real place to do this within the rules is to use the Newsletter application. You could create a special category for it.

I think JohnShaw may have suggested a workable solution to contain and convey "other" information needed by stake members. The newsletter app, which eventually will reside next to the directory and the calendar and the other tools on LDS.org, of course, is currently still in Beta testing. However, it may be a "very near" future solution. Anyone can look at the Beta now to see if it would do what they need:
Thread : Beta Newsletter Now Available

and try it here:

https://beta.lds.org/member-news

With help page found here:
https://tech.lds.org/wiki/Newsletter

So here is my conundrum. As a member of a Stake presidency, we are precluded from organizing or developing a stake sponsored website to provide information and resouces to stake members, specifically, and to the communuty as a whole. At the same time, a stake Family History Center Director, or a stake YM leader, or the director of a stake Christmas activity may develop and maintain seperate websites to assist them with their callings (with appropriate disclaimers about being Not An Official Church Website), yet there is no place to develop a stake site that can link to all of those sites (such links are not allowed from the "official" lds.org site). We intend to hew to the strict letter of the handbook, but we are hopeful that it will evolve over time to provide this additional oversight and functionallity to us. I would be interested how others have dealt with this situation and what might be under development to help with this.

Thanks in advance for your help and responses.

I believe the newsletter app, addressed earlier, may help, once it goes online, and people begin to use it.

pbaclawski wrote:So here is my conundrum. As a member of a Stake presidency, we are precluded from organizing or developing a stake sponsored website to provide information and resouces to stake members, specifically, and to the communuty as a whole.

In my opinion, this would be an excellent topic of discussion at the next Coordinating Council your stake president attends.

I'm curious how something like Facebook would fall. I am in a singles ward and it is easy to reach everyone with announcements on Facebook. We have had very limited success with the calendar on lds.org to communicate events.
Would Facebook be considered a church sponsored internet presence?

zframpt wrote:Would Facebook be considered a church sponsored internet presence?

If it's sponsored by the unit (sponsored here would mean that the unit leadership directs that the site be created and specifies the content or calls people to maintain the content), then it seems to me that it is pretty clearly a Church-sponsored Internet presence. But the final call would be made by the bishop, his stake president, and his file leaders.