Broadcast Message Hack: Offer a Log-In Option and Track Member Engagement

[JFarrow]

Here is a quick tip from a pretty cool discovery I made last night for my land surveyors support network.  I'm going to show you how to not only create a way for your members to log-in strait from the broadcast message, but also give you a way to track these log-ins to see how many of your members are paying attention to your network.  Of course most of us have seen Jen's awesome method of customizing the broadcast message header by adding HTML.   This tip goes along the same lines except for we are going to add an option to Log-In to the network from the bradcast message itself.

 

Lets get started.  Create your custom graphic to be added to the header of message in HTML. 

Here is mine.

 

 

Next you'll want to turn that graphic into a link which you can do by using Jen's HTML Editor here or by adding it to a text box, selecting the entire HTML for the image tag and then turn it into a link.  Which Link?  The one for signing in of course.  It looks like this:

http://xxxxx.ning.com/main/authorization/signIn?target=http%3A%2F%2...

 

Now go to your language editor and find the block for the message "A message to all members of %" without the quotes.   But when we go to add this new HTML to the language editor we get an error, because it will not accept the log-in URL..  Hmmmm

Here's the workaround:  Head over to Siteo.us (or Bit.ly if you want to track log-ins from message) and shorten the log-in link to a shorter, friendlier URL.  Now go back to your HTML that you placed in the language editor and change the part with the log-in URL to the new shortened link and push save.  

 

Now you are offering a way to track log-ins from the Broadcast messages and more importantly, see how many of your members are truly paying attention to your network.  Enjoy!

[Garfield Creator]

You keep spilling all these secrets you'll have a pack of ninjas dispatched to dispatch of you. Real cool I did the same myself. However in my broadcasts I try to have the messages be bullet point teasers and use the bit.ly link to link back to a forum discussion.

Cool.

[JFarrow]

funny you should mention ninjas...in my former life i was one.  (shhh...google "Loftninja")  thanks Garfield