Hello and welcome to this week's
edition of The Connected Church News for leaders of nonprofits, churches,
and faith-based organizations. I'm Natchi Lazarus. This week, we
have news from Instagram, Facebook, Loon, Google, and news about political
advertising on social media. This is the show where we bring you the
Top 5 news you need to know for this week, in less than 5
minutes. Let's get started. Our first big news of this
week is from Instagram. Instagram will now allow nonprofits to
add a 'D
onate' button on their Instagram profile. So if you have an
Instagram business account, you will be able to add that 'Donate'
button right next to your email and other contact information. And it will be a button that permanently
sits on your profile so people can click on that and they can donate.
It's a good tool for fundraising. Apart from this, from
the house of Facebook, we also got two more fundraising tools. One is 'Fundraising Stickers' that will
be on Facebook and also fundraising info
being added into Facebook Gaming platform. When people have gaming live streams, you can add fundraising
stickers right there. If you are a nonprofit that is looking
to raise funds in this season and are looking for tools to help you,
do check out this article. I will link to it in the show
notes. It has all the details. Our next news is about the Loon project
of Google's parent company (Alphabet). Loon is a project that
offers balloon-powered
internet to remote locations, places where you are u
nable to get
your fiber-optic or any other source of internet. Google's vision is to get people connected
using a balloon which will carry the necessary equipments to give
internet access to that region. Now, the Loon project has announced that they
are able to connect Amazon rain forests in Peru using balloon-powered internet. This kind of news excites me. I'm a big follower of the Loon project
and Internet.org (by Facebook) right from the beginning. Because I believe,
as ministries and nonprof
its, we all have something good to share with
people and we need to reach people in places that are remote and help them
and serve them through the internet. Especially if you're into online ministry
or are using digital and social media to announce news about your nonprofit or service
that could benefit people. So, whenever I hear news about connectivity
being improved in areas like this, I get very excited because the entire
world is going to be connected and even the remotest parts of the wor
ld is
going to be connected with projects like this. Check out this news. It's a great development and it could
be important for the people in Peru because that region
has, earlier this year, been hit by natural calamities. Very exciting to hear this
news from the Loon project. Our next news is about political
advertising on social media. Last week, Google announced its own rules for
political advertising on its platform. It is going to allow political
advertising, unlike Twitter, which has comp
letely banned political
advertising. Google will allow it, but it will restrict the way you can
target people when you're releasing political ads. For example, one can target people based on
their gender, their zip code, their age and so on, but they will not be able to target
people based on their political affiliations. It's interesting what is
happening with social media ads, when it comes to politics. Facebook has also released a series of
comments about how they are dealing with this. Snapc
hat released a comment
last week about political advertising. In one way, it's good to see how social media
channels are rising up to the occasion and releasing their rules to make sure that
political advertising is not making people do something that they don't want
to do. It's a good trend to watch out. I will link to it in the show
notes, check out the stories. Our next news is about Facebook. Facebook seems to be testing a new tool
that will allow you to publish your Facebook Stories to a
sp
ecific group of people. You can select a list of people, Facebook might call it 'favorite'
friends list or something like that, where you can select a group of people
and show your Facebook Stories only to them. Instagram has something similar to this
called 'Close Friends' list where you can select, say a group of family members, and then when you do Instagram stories
you can select the 'Close Friends' list and make that Story visible only to them. Now this is coming to both Facebook
and to Mes
senger, which is good. What I want to bring to your notice is
how important Stories as a content is becoming. When Instagram
and Facebook are doing this, this means more people are
going to be using Stories. Already more people are using it, more
than 500 million users on a daily basis. You as a ministry,
nonprofit or organization, if you're not using Stories as a form
of content to promote whatever you're doing, your message or your cause, then this is something that you really
want to consider
in the coming year. Because it's going to be a big, most popular type of
content in the days to come. Our final news of this
week is from Google. Google has launched a new
product called 'My Storytime', which is part of Google Assistant. It's a very interesting feature which
allows you to read bedtime stories to your children even when you are
traveling and you're out of home. It does that by helping you record the
bedtime stories and it will connect it with your Google smart speaker at home. A
nd when your kids are
going to bed, then they say, "read out my bedtime stories", Google Home Mini or one of those speakers
will read out that story in your own voice. That way Google wants to bridge
that gap that is at home where the kids are not able to listen to their
parents read them bedtime stories. It's a very simple application, but I wanted to bring it to your notice
because it shows how you can be very sensitive when you develop solutions to
real world problems using technology. Well,
that's all we have for you
this week. Thank you for joining me. I really appreciate it. If you'd like to dig deeper into
any of the stories we talked about, we've got all the source links and
details in our News page natchi.net/news. Do check it out. I will see you next
week with another set of news items. Until then, stay connected, stay
blessed. God bless you. Bye.
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