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Hi I've got a little bit of a complaining to do here today about our broadcast messaging and hoping that we can make some changes in it. Since the new 3.0 has chosen the new follow button I send out a Diary of all of the discussions that have been posted in the past days or week, depending on how many posts were posted because "nobody" and I mean "not anybody" does the follow button.

When I send out my broadcast message, I call it Rose Moon's Diary, people come on the site. But that's really all I have to get people to know the site is there unless someone posts a message on someone's page. There's very little sent out so that members of the site knows that Rose Moon is here. A few of us ning site owners have even sent out broadcast messages, "check this discussion out"  and so forth for people to know something's been added to the site.

But anyway, back to the broadcast messages sent out. Since it's the only way that I have to get my member's attention besides posting on their pages so they get an email notification and they know the site exists, I send out the diary. It takes a long long time to get this diary out, I have to go through the activity feed and go through to all the discussions posted which are mainly me because no one follows in the groups, I do have a few other members posting discussions, I feel it's important for the broadcasts to look descent. 

When I owned my Hoop.la site, there were no broadcasts but a nice pop up that would come on when a member first came on the site. They could mark it as read, and then they wouldn't see that again until I sent out a new one. It was lovely.  Since it wasn't sent out in our home emails it wasn't so wide that it took up the whole screen. I could also choose the color of my text, fonts and post a video that actually worked. In our broadcast messages if I post a video it doesn't show up when the broadcast is sent out. We could also add photos. But the whole pop up was only about ten inches wide so it didn't take up a full page, it was a nice size and my pop up broadcast were lovely. Here they come out looking so badly even if I add my broadcast somewhere else on another site and use the html in the broadcast. The font is still the same as if I didn't use the html. It was a waste of my time. It usally take me between an hour to an hour and a half to send out a diary of what was added to the site and it's tiring.

I also liked Hoop.la's way of sending out notifications in our home emails when anything was added to the site. I send out a Rose Moon's Diary because that's what Hoop.la does. A member has a choice of a weekly diary or a daily diary. That way everyone got to see what was posted on the site but it didn't clog up our emails like on the 2.0 if there was a lot of activity on the site in a day.

I hope that you all that work on the sites will consider what I've posted and asked here. I really like these ideas. But in the meantime the broadcast messages being sent out really don't get members on the site like they did on the hoop.la sites because it's not nice looking at all. The site is beautiful but these broadcasts are awful. Sorry to complain but there are needed changes.

Helela

 

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  • And I know about the diary for the emails. Nobody cares about that or does it. When someone gets an email they like to know about it right away and members don't even consider using the diary for the email so please don't post "oh well we have a diary for our emails". I would like to hear some real feedback.

  • I have not tried hoop.la but will consider it. On site notifications is something most script platforms need. Some have built it very well, such as PHPFox for example. Others, not so much. Having a perfect balance between email and on site updates would be ideal, especially if they're taylored to the specific user.

    Message broadcasts are hit and miss. Send them too frequently and they show up in spam. Send them too rarely and people come on to a relatively dead site. Unless people remember to visit every day. Needless to point out, the good, the bad and the jist of things using broadcast messages, is that people who unsubscribe from them, can't get new ones. I've found that out in my email settings. So I would suggest using something like Mailchymp for automatic subscribing preferences. It does have Ning integration to some extent. It may help you with your broadcasting template issue.

    If that fails, use an RSS to Email service. You could use the assistance of groups.io or Google groups to help you get the RSS feeds (unbranded) pure content to the users. Then, or, if you are willing to spend the extra money, get a cheap shared hosting solution and use mail man and create a list of members you want to send notifications to. Be sure you include the address of the list that has the RSS content in it, and copy the member emails for group activity to the other list. It may work for you as well.

  • Hello!

    Thank you for your detailed feedback! You are right, follow button is not that obvious for the members, and not everyone cares to check the notification settings on their profile. This is why we took a step forward towards the notification improvements and have implemented a MailChimp integration. We are still working on additional updates and planning future optimizations, so, for now, we can offer you to try using MailChimp services, it may suit you more than broadcast messages. 

    Bets regards,

    The NING Team

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