The Guild Website is now well established and remains a good source of information for the Guild Members. However, the information is only as good as the information the Comms Team receive. Continuous efforts should be made to keep this up to date, so it is accurate for Guild members and our visitors.
The Communications Team has suffered this past year with the departure of Deb Baker and our Convener, Gary Marsh, both unable to dedicate the time necessary due to work commitments. This only left Andrew Glover as the Guild Webmaster and some Districts that have their own Webmaster or Communications Officer to post news and events on the website. More new members for the team will be required in 2020 if we are to continue to keep the website regularly updated and avoid the information getting stale.
The ‘Weekly News’ is sent out when there is sufficient new ‘news’ to inform the membership. This is distributed to 6 mailing lists and a link is posted on the Guild and District Facebook groups so receives wide coverage across the Guild. More news, events and reports are required to make this weekly publication worthwhile creating and sending out. Towards the end of the year, it was not issued at all due to a lack of new information. The Weekly News promotes engagement with the site as the items are linked through to the website. This is proving to be an effective way of reaching members with all the excellent events which are organised at Tower, District and Guild level and is in addition to the traditional use of posters in towers.
There is still plenty of opportunity for towers to make more use of the website, especially for updating information on their own tower and using it for recruitment. People wanting to learn to ring do visit the site, and if they see that a local tower is recruiting and training new people, then they know to get in touch. This is especially important during periods when bellringing is in the media.
The team is always happy to help others to become website editors so they can add their own district or tower events and news. Training notes are available on the site to simplify this process, and all Webmasters belong to a Facebook Group so that they can give and receive quick support.
Whilst a significant number of people do use the website, we are still a long way from our aim of sending a weekly news bulletin to all members and having the website as the ‘go to’ place for Guild and District information.
The various social media sites around the Guild continue to grow with a small number of new requests asking to join each month. However due to lack of Comms Team members, activity on these sites and Twitter has not been as prominent as we would have liked.
The focus of effort in the next year will be:
Andrew Glover