This SOP outlines the process for using the announcement request feature at Tent Apps, allowing staff or congregation members to submit announcements. It includes steps for editing, approving, and publishing these announcements across various channels.
Hey everyone, today I'm going to be going over our announcement request feature. This allows your staff, or if you'd like, your congregation to be able to submit announcement requests. And then you as the admin will get emailed and notified about them. You can then go in and edit them easily and then publish them to all the channels that you'd like. So, let me show you here. Uhm, I'm logged in right now, but this could be to public to somebody who's not logged in. We could also show you how to set up a password on this so that somebody on your staff only would have the password to be able to view. There's a few ways we can set it up, but in general somebody would come to this page and they'll type in their announcement request. So let me type one in here. Alright, so I put Youth Group Pizza Party at 7pm after church May 5th in the youth room. Go ahead and help me generate that announcement. It will then use some AI to help you come up with a great title. Description, excerpt for newsletters and bulletins, social media posts as well. So you'll see it has all of that here. Now that person can edit all of this right away. On images and video, as somebody on your staff, they may not be gifted with graphic design. So they can say, hey, I need help with my graphics, and you'll be able to do that. Maybe they're an amazing graphic designer and they can upload a featured image. They can even upload a video. They can TV-specific slides or videos here with QR codes or different things like that. So I'm going to say, hey, I just need help. Now, publishing options, they can sort of ask. Now, you as the admin can say, no, you don't get to go to all these platforms. But they can say, hey, I'd like it to be on the youth page. I want it in the print bulletin, on ProPresenter, on sign-up and events. I want it on social media. I would love it on the TVs. So they can, they can select where all they want it to go. And then, does this have an end date? Yes, it does. It's actually going to be May 5th, is the end date. And then, uh, the next thing here too is you can say, do you need any building or resources or requests? Yes, I need the youth room with tables and eight chairs at each. Four tables total. So, maybe you have a system where somebody in your staff needs to be notified if there needs to be a room request or something like that. And they can follow up. And we'll show you in the settings how you can set up who's going to be emailed on that. Now, we also are going to put in the submitter's information. Uhm, so we'll put that all in here. And we'll type in a phone number. Now, we're going to go ahead and say submit for review and what that is going to do is it's going to email the submitter and say, hey, thanks for submitting this for review. It'll also, and I'll show you in the back end here, whenever you're logged in, you can go to AI Content Generator and click on settings right here. It's going to bring you to this page. And on this page, you're going to be able to come in and change, uh, who's going to get emailed announcement request approval email. So, who's being asked to approve these. And so, Evan at 10apps.com is going to get an email saying, hey, Zach just asked for youth group pizza party to be announced. Click here to edit it. Uhm, here's an option where you can do the building approval emails as well. You can also update the submitter email template and then you can adjust the prompts here as well if you want to adjust those. Now, one other feature we have. I was going to show you, we have a feature to change and sort of override. This is the default. Who's going to get it by default? You could override that with a little piece of short code. So let me show you. If you're wanting to create a page for this to have it on, you can just go to pages, click on add new, and then you could say, yes, I want to use Divi, and now on here, I'll just show you we all we have to do is put this piece of short code that we'll have in the help tutorial, but it's AI underscore content underscore generator underscore volunteer. And then it'll typically be in bracket. But if you want a specific person on this page only, so maybe you have a school and a church difference, what you can do is you can put the approval email in there of who you want this specific if on this page. Somebody submits it. So maybe you have different people for approval processes, one for your church, one for your school, one for your preschool. You could create as many pages as you want here. Now, just a technical setup here in the background. A few other things you can do here. If you want to lock down a page, you could go to pages and find your existing one if you have one created. And if you want to, you can change it from public to password free. And you can type in a password there. And that way, only your staff could access it. And it could be something as easy as password or something. Maybe not that easy. Bots might be able to guess that. Maybe put in 1, , 3, 4, password or something. Make it up. You can put, change that password, protect that there. Now, one caveat. If you do password protect it, you do also need to come down here to Lightspeed and say disable that. The reason why is we don't want, what Cache does is just load, would load the same password protection page over and over again because it wouldn't dynamically change to what's password protected behind that. So, a little bit of a technical thing, but if you need to do that, go for that. Now, let me show you a few other things about what's going to happen as soon as that goes off, is you're going to get an email. It'll bring you back here to post your church announcement. And it'll actually bring you into the actual post that you can then edit. So let me show you what that looks like here. So here it is right here, there's Youth Group Pizza Party, and again, as the approval email, you'll get an email that says, hey, you need to approve this. So you could then click on that, now once you click on that, you'll be able to edit everything on this page. So you can come in and add the title, the description. You can also see who you submitted this, so hey, this is Zach, here's his information. You can also see his building request information, his social captions, the Pizza Party Instagram caption, you can see the excerpt. You can also see it has that future date enabled to trash it on the 15th. Uhm, and also, because it was checked social media, uhm, it has auto-share turned on, and it will be like, hey, I'm ready to share this to social media. Now, different churches have social media auto-share turned on and off on different ones, but just a heads up on that. So really, all I need to do is set the featured image, and we're good to go. I can go ahead and publish it, I can check all my categories are correct, or say, hey, you actually don't get any TV time, you don't get to do that, or ProPresenter, but everything else is good. And once you feel good, you can go ahead and click on publish, and it goes everywhere. So, we just went over, uh, a little bit about how to use the announcement request, how to set it up, how to configure it for different approval emails, uhm, and how to also allow password protection, and how to disable the cache to allow password protection to work. So, that's really all you need to know for the announcement request form. If you have any questions at all, have some new ideas for us on how to make this more useful for more churches. and yourself, feel free to reach out to us at support at tenapps.com.