My apologies for the radio silence on this so-called daily site. A family vacation took my attention away from most things Quaker and getting caught up on back work is keeping it away a few days. I should be up to speed by the weekend.
During that time the domain registration for QuakerQuaker turned due. I must have missed the deluge of email that its domain registrar usually sends. I’ve paid the domain bill for another two years and it should be back up for everyone.
The December theme of Friends Journal will look at the juicy topic of Friends’ relationship with Christianity. I wrote up an “Editor’s Desk” post about the kinds of articles we might expect. Here’s an excerpt:
It’s a series of questions that has dogged Friends since we did away with clergy and started calling baptism a “sprinkling,” and it has been an issue of contention in every Quaker schism: Are we Christian? Are we really Christian? Does it matter if we’re Christian? What does it even mean to be Christian in the world?
One reason we began publishing more themed issues beginning in 2012 was so we use the topics to invite fresh voices to write for us. While we’ve long had regulars who will send us a few articles a year on miscellaneous topics, themes allow us to tempt people with specific interests and ministries: reconciliation from war, climate activism, workplace reform, mentorship, ecumenical relationships, the wider family of Friends, etc.
More recently I’ve started these “Editor’s Desk” posts as a way of sharing some of the ideas we have around particular upcoming issues. The post also gives us a URL that we can share on social media to drum up submissions. I also hope that others will share the URL via email.
The absolute best way of reaching new people is when someone we know shares an upcoming theme with someone we don’t know. There are many people who by chance or inclination seem to straddle Quaker worlds. They are invaluable in amplifying our calls for submissions. Question: would it help if we started an email list just for writers or for people who want to be reminded of upcoming themes so they can share them with Friends?
Over the years I’ve noticed various communication breakdowns among Friends that have made me worried. It’s often something relatively little. For example, I might be talking to an active Philadelphia Friend and be startled to realize they have no idea that a major yearly meeting across the country is breaking apart. Or someone will send me an article bemoaning the lack of something that I know already exists.
I’m in this funny position where I have a quarter century of random Quaker factoids in my head, have access to great databases (like instant searches of Friends Journal’s 60+ years of articles), and have good Googling chops. When I’m in a discussion with Friends face-to-face, I find I often have useful context. Some of it is historical (I geek out on the Quaker past) but some of it is just my lived memory. I’ve been in and out of Quaker offices for 27 years now. I’m entering this weird phase of life in which I’ve been a professional Quaker staffer longer than most of my contemporaries.
And ever since I was a kid, I’ve had this weird talent to remember things I read years earlier. When the topic of clearness committees recently came up, I remembered that Deborah Haines had written a piece about Rachel Davis DuBois in the long-defunct FGConnections newsletter (yes, groaner of a name but it was a great publication in its heyday). Thanks to Archive.org I could resurface the article and bring it to the discussions.
And so, I’ve been quietly been changing the idea of Quaker Ranter from a classic old-school blog to a daily email newsletter. I’ll still collect interesting Quaker links, as I’ve been doing for years with QuakerQuaker. But now I’ll annotate them and give them context. If there’s a side story I think is interesting I’ll tell it. I have a long train commute and writing fun and geeky things about Friends makes it interesting.
I think that something like this could help bring Quaker newcomers up to speed. Our insider language and unexplained (and sometimes dated) worldviews create an impediment for seekers. We kind of expect they’ll figure out things that aren’t so obvious. Learning factoids and histories a day at a time can give them some context to understand what’s happening Sunday morning. If that’s not enough, I also have an Ask A Quaker feature where people new to Friends can ask questions. I’ll be liberally pitching Friends Journal articles and QuakerSpeak videos because I think we’re doing some of our best Quaker media work, but I’m also all about spreading the love and will share many other great resources and blogs.
As with all my projects I also hope to get people contributing so it becomes a community watering hole. If you want to get involved, the first step is to sign up for the free daily email list. At some point, this will probably outgrow the free tier of the email service I’m using, and I will start to have to pay to send thesee emails out. For those of you with a little extra to give, Quaker Ranter Membership is a way to help offset these costs.
And let your friends know about it! Just send them to quakerranter.org/email to sign up.
What’s an email newsletter without a daily inspirational quote, right? I’ve put together a little hack that should put one front and center every morning. I’ve primed it with a handful of classics — Fox, the Peningtons, Jones. But as it gets going I’ll start including some of the great modern-day quotes that show up every week on the web. And rather than just quote a random 300-some-year-old quote out of context, I hope to find it embedded and discussed in current blog posts. We’re a living tradition.
By the time this email newsletter goes out, the March issue of Friends Journal will have fully published. After such topics as “Conscience” and “Conflict and Controversy” we’re turning our attention to “Quakers and the Holy Land.” Should be a quiet issue, no?
Also, I wrote this month’s opening column.
Quaker Ranter is an email newsletter of Quaker stories. I follow a lot of Quaker media – blogs and feeds and Twitter accounts, etc., and share the pieces that stand out to me. I usually add context and commentary to the links and provide it all as a curated daily email. Sign-up is free but if you’re a regular reader you can support the work by becoming a Member.
The primary benefit for now is the knowledge you’re helping to share a wider Quaker conversation, though in the future I’ll experiment with some interesting member-only discussions. Thanks! –Martin
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Oh dear: a few weeks ago Wess Daniels started a Twitter discussion about the new Mac app Cardhop. In the thread he asked me about other apps which apps I find essential. I thought I’d type up something in ten minutes but then the draft post kept growing. I’m sure I still missed some. I guess I didn’t realize how particular I am about my computing environment. 🙂
Okay, maybe it’s a bit OCD but I hate cluttered Mac menubars running along the top of my screen. This app was just rebuilt for High Sierra and is an essential tool. I have most everything hidden and have set up a keyboard shortcut (the little-used right “option” key) to toggle the full menubar icon set.
This is my favorite calendar app. It sits in the menubar, ready to give a beautiful agenda view with just a single tap. It can open up to a full view. Manage calendars is easy and the natural language processing is suburb.
Just released, this is Fantastical’s newest cousin, an app for managing contacts from Flexibits. It works with whatever you have set up for contacts on your Mac (I use Google but iCloud is fine too). Given Flexibit’s track record, and Cardhop’s resemblance to the discontinued Cobook, this is likely to be a winner for me.
I’ve been a Chrome user since the week it debuted but lately I’ve been trying to switch to Safari, wanting its superior battery management and syncing of bookmarks and tabs with iOS. Many of Safari’s annoyances have lessoned as Apple itinerated with each release. There are enough extensions now that I can get by. I am, though, one of those weird people whom John Gruber identified: wannabee Safari users who really like Favicons in tabs. Fortunately, Faviconographer has come along. There are occasional oddities (floating icons, icons that don’t match site) but overall it improves the Safari experience enough to make it a win over Chrome.
Uses the built-in content filtering system built into Mac Safari. Good syncing with the iOS app. “Content filtering” (aka blocking) has become an important security concern and let’s face it: the web runs so much better without all the crap that some sites throw in along with their content. You can whitelist sites that respect readers. Honorable mention in Chrome or as an alternative for Safari is uBlock Origin, a great blocker (and distinct from standard uBlock, which I don’t recommend).
Lets you remap the generally useless Caps Lock key. I have it mapped Brett-Terpstra style so that a single click opens Spotlight search and a hold and click acts as a hyper key (imagine a shift key that you can use for any keystroke).
Remap keys and key combinations. With Karabiner, I can use it to have Capslock‑C open a particular app, for instance.
I used to think VPNs were a luxury but with people hacking in on public Wi-Fi accounts and the loss of privacy, I’ve signed up for this easy-to-use VPN service. One account can power multiple devices so my laptop and phone are secured.
It’s been around for years. I currently have 13,000 notes stored in Evernote, including every issue of the magazine I work for going back to the mid-1950s. There was a time a few years ago when I was worried for Evernote, as it kept chasing quirky side projects as its main app got buggier and buggier. But they’ve had a shake-up, ditched the distractions and have built the service back up. Most of my projects are organized with Evernote.
There are a gazillion writing apps out there that combine Markdown writing syntax with minimalist interfaces (Bear, IaWriter, Byword) but Ulysses has edged its way to being my favorite, with quick syncing and ability to post directly to WordPress.
There are also a gazillion task managers. Todoist does a good job of keeping projects that need due dates in order.
You should be using a password manager. Repeat: you should be using a password manager. 1Password is rock solid. They’ve recently changed their economic model and strongly favor subscription accounts. While I’ve tried to limit just how many auto-pulling subscriptions I have, I understand the rationale and have switched.
A great email app for Mac and iOS that can display and sort your Gmail accounts (and others too). Almost too many options if you’re the kind to fiddle with that sort of thing but easy to get started and great with just the defaults.
The Big‑G should get a shoutout: it powers the databases for my email, calendar, contacts, and photos. All my hardware has migrated over to Apple, helped in large part by the opening up of its ecosystem to third-party apps.
What’s also useful to note is that all of the data-storing services are cloud based. If my phone or laptop disappeared, I could borrow a new one and be up to speed almost immediately. Since many of these apps run on databases run by Google, I can also switch apps or even have multiple apps accessing the same information for different purposes. There’s a real freedom to the app ecosystem these days.
I’d like to talk today about social media and nonprofits. I’ve had a couple of interesting projects lately helping nonprofits put together Facebook Pages, LinkedIn Groups and Twitter sites. I think this is an exciting way to reach out to audience members.
Today: Email Lists
Over the last few years we’ve focused on email lists. We all have big email lists – tens of thousands of users, segmented all sorts of different ways. We send out dozens of emails a week and they end up seeming not spam.
Facebook Pages
A new era is coming with social media. A big change is Facebook Pages. These are geared toward advertisers although you don’t need to have a Facebook advertising campaign to use them. In March 2009, Facebook redesigned Pages to act much more like typical user profiles: there’s a wall, there’s an activity stream, and you can associate different applications with them.
Two things about Pages are exciting. One is the activity stream. People who sign up as “fans” of your Page see what you’re putting out in their individual stream. They’ll log into Facebook and see that messages like “Jen just got engaged!” or “Joe is having a bad hair day” and that your organization is having some great event coming up this weekend. You’re seen in the association of happy news from their friends. It’s different from a spammish email because it’s coming in with the context of their friends, which is very powerful for publicity.
The other nice thing about Facebook Pages is that they’re public. A lot of portions of Facebook aren’t but making Pages public means you can point to them from your website or other social media campaigns.
I think Facebook fan groups are going to be the new email list. They are the way we’ll be able to reach out to people. I’m very excited about this because there’s all sorts of easy multimedia possibilities. You can integrate with Youtube, with Twitter, with podcasts, etc., embedded for fans of your Facebook page to see as it’s happening. This is much more exciting than some of the emails that we send out. They are also more interactive because fans can post things on your fan walls so you can have conversations on your sites.
Intimate, immediate, engaging
What the smart nonprofits are going to be doing is a lot of posting in a style that’s authentic and intimate and less worried about being slick than we’ve typically been.
What I would love to see nonprofits doing is to get serious about video. I’m not talking about fancy video, hauling in videographers for six months shooting a three minute slick commercial. Get an inexpensitve video recorder and start doing five minute interviews with the people your organization serves. This will differ depending on your organization’s focus. One advantage to simple videos is that you can convince even the busiest of your interviewees to take out a few minutes. You make these videos and post them to Youtube, Vimeo or directly to Facebook video. It doesn’t matter where they hosted but you’ll have to make sure they’re embedded on your Facebook fan page.
Building our Facebook Fan Page
How to direct? You can direct in the emails you’re sending out or through other sources. Twitter is a great way of directing people to what’s happening: you send out a 140-character “tweet” with an interesting tease about the video you’ve produced and a link to the Facebook fan page.
The whole goal is to get Facebook fans. Once you’re in as a fan, you show up in their activity streams. All the fans get to see the events you’re organizing, the videos. If you have extra tickets to an upcoming event, post about it because people will see it immediately. It’s a wonderful way to reach people quickly in a way that’s not as intrusive as email (I suspect a lot of younger users are actually checking their Facebook homepage more often than their emails!).
The New Nonprofit Outreach
I’d love to see a lot more of these intimate, almost home-made videos going up on Facebook fan pages and using fan pages as a way of connecting with people. We can think of these as the new email list.
I would strongly encourage nonprofits to use all of these these media to reinforce their message and to find new ways to reach their audiences in a much more engaging, intimate way.
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Martin Kelley is a web developer and social media consultant specializing in nonprofits. This post is a loose transcription of his video, Nonprofits and Social Media. This essay is also available on the MartinKelley.com Facebook fan page.
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