How this works
You have something your organization wants the stake to know about. This is the whole of what you have to do about it. It takes about two minutes, and there is nothing to lay out, format or write up properly.
The first message you were sent has a link in it that is yours. Opening it signs you in and asks you to choose a password — that is the only setting-up there is. After that you sign in at this site with your email and that password, like anywhere else. If you forget it, the sign-in page will email you a fresh link; you do not need to ask anybody.
One box. Write it the way you would say it out loud — a single sentence is fine, and so is rambling. Or press the microphone and just talk; it writes down what you said. You do not need a headline, and you do not need to say things twice.
Dates are the one thing worth being plain about. Say Thursday the 20th at 6.45 rather than later this month, and it will pick that out and put it in the list of what is happening this month at the top of the newsletter — which is the part most people read.
Photos and PDFs both. If somebody sent you a flyer, send the file itself rather than a picture of it on your screen — it will look far better. You can add as many as you have.
Send the photos of your children, your class, your program. There is nothing to arrange first: a photo with people in it goes in the PDF that is sent round each month rather than on the public website, and that takes care of itself.
That is the end of it. You will see what was made of your words, and you can change it or take it out any time before the issue goes out. Nothing is published until the editor publishes the whole issue.
It goes in the PDF — the printed version of the issue that gets sent to the stake each month, the same way the newsletter has always been sent. It does not go on the public website. You do not have to ask anybody, or name anybody, or do anything at all: just send it.
This is why: the website is a public address that anyone can reach, and a photograph of somebody’s children should not sit at one without their parents agreeing. Getting that agreement for thirty faces in a Primary program was never going to happen, and the honest choices were to publish children without asking or to stop running photographs. The PDF is the way round it. It reaches exactly the people the newsletter has always reached.
If you do want a photo on the website — a missionary’s head shot, two adults at a service project — name them and each of them gets asked themselves, by a message you send from your own phone. Until they say yes, their initials run in the same square instead. If anybody in the photo is under 18, that has to be a parent or guardian, not the child.
A flyer, a poster or a drawing has nobody in it. Say so when asked and it goes on the website as well.
Nothing bad. Anything that arrives after the close day goes into the following month instead of being lost, and nobody will chase you about it. If it is urgent, tell the editor and he will decide whether it still fits.
Tick Use my words exactly as I wrote them. Your writing is then left alone, and only the dates are picked out of it. That is what the stake presidency's message uses.
Yes, as many as you like, on different days. They all gather under your organization in the issue, in the order you sent them. You can change or remove any of them.
Yes. There is a month to choose at the bottom of the form — a year ahead if you already know the dates, or a month or two back if something needs correcting in an issue that has gone out.
You do not have to, and mostly you should not — the newsletter looks the same for every organization on purpose, which is what stops it turning back into fourteen pages. If something genuinely needs emphasis, say so in the box and the editor will set it.
Then email it. Tell the editor what went wrong while you are there — if this is awkward for you it is probably awkward for somebody else, and that is worth knowing.