Improve relevance of Branch News page
The Branch landing page presents a newsfeed (blog) over which the branch has little control and does not make a very useful "home' or "welcoming" page for branch.
Ideally,branches should be able to design/manage landing pages to their liking, but that's another story.
Short of that, I request a better way to prioritize the blogs that appear on that page. As it stands, the page intermixes blogs submitted by the branch with blogs submitted by staff and others. The problem is that the volume of blogs originating from others overwhelms those originating from the branch, causing them to scroll off the page too quickly. The result is that most of the time the preponderance of blog entries have little branch relevance, while the ones that the Branch wants there have scrolled off.
A couple of ideas come to mind. First, procedurally, staff could stop using the branch tags except for unusually important cases. The blogs so-affected do appear on the Mountaineers home page, after all (and it's sort of branch-diminishing to also usurp the branch blog with that stuff).
A more sophisticated approach would be to programmatically give branch-originated blogs priority, at least until their expiration dates.
Managing the blog posts and events branch pages is a team sport. We don’t tag everything to the branch pages, but with organization-wide things that are important for our members we do post them to the branch pages. We do so because assume some people visit only their branch page and don’t always visit our home page.
The design of the branch pages was requested and approved by all our branch’s leadership. Changing their design requires the same level of consideration and approval. At this point, we don’t see a desire for making changes from our branch leaders, but please do send any suggestions to your branch chair so they can bring them before their fellow branch leaders.
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Kristina Ciari Tursi commented
Managing the blog posts and events branch pages is a team sport. We don’t tag everything to the branch pages, but with organization-wide things that are important for our members we do post them to the branch pages. We do so because assume some people visit only their branch page and don’t always visit our home page.
The design of the branch pages was requested and approved by all our branch’s leadership. Changing their design requires the same level of consideration and approval. At this point, we don’t see a desire for making changes from our branch leaders, but please do send any suggestions to your branch chair so they can bring them before their fellow branch leaders.