Audra On The City, pt. 1 — Setting Up Your Profile, Email Preferences and Groups

Today we begin a daily “helpful tips” segment for the purpose of getting Sojourners acclimated to The City… and to keep everyone from drowning in e-mail notifications!! Below you’ll find help sections divided up according to what roles you may have within The City.

The best way to do most of these steps is to open up another window of your internet browser and log-in to sojourn.onthecity.org so that you can navigate through the site without leaving this blog post.  If you haven’t signed up, you’ll need to do so at The City Kiosk. Keep in mind that we’re only approving registration from those who are members or who attend Sojourn Gathered, since this is a tool for internal church communication.

General Use

“Your Fabulous Face”

Does it look like you are a strange gray silhouette without a face sportin’ a haircut you haven’t had in 5 years?

• Click on the blue “Settings” link below your profile picture at the top right of the page. You’ll see a variety of tabs at the top that you can click on to change various aspects of your account.

• Click the profile tab, then under the gray silhouette, click the blue “Edit Picture” link.

• Click the browse button to locate a picture of you from your computer. Select that file, then click the blue “update” button. A really handy zoom/crop tool will come up so you can frame your face. If you like a picture of yourself on facebook or another website, you can usually right click (or control+click for Mac users) to bring up the option to “Save Image As”. Select this option then simply save the picture to your desktop so that you can easily access it when going through the steps above.

Who Are You?

Since we’re already hangin’ out round the ol’ profile page, be sure to fill out your profile info and decide how public or private you want your various info to be. There is an “About Me” section under the “Profile” tab that will be visible by your picture when someone has you listed as a friend. To see your current friends, click on the connections bar to the left and select “Friends”.

Absolutely put your address info in your profile, but choose carefully how public or private you want it to be. You can also click the “+Add a family member” link under the “Family” tab to add a spouse or child. Be sure to add your spouse BEFORE you add your children. They don’t have a feature for adding your brother or great aunt Helga so dooon’t even think about it! This feature is mainly for the purpose of showing people within the same household. Sorry Helga.

Mad Skillz

What areas has God gifted you in for ministry? What fun things can you share in fellowship with others? We would love for everybody to update this section so that we can connect gifted people to help with specific needs.

To do this, go to the “Skills” tab (still working within settings) and select what you are gifted in/enjoy.

Click the “Save Skills” button. You don’t have to be a pro to select something. For example, I selected Music-Vocals.. now, that’s doesn’t mean I’m going to be crooning from the stage, but clicking that could help me get an e-mail from Cosper letting me know when worship try-outs are going to be or when a song-writing seminar is going to happen. It’s a good way to get the right info to the right people.

I’m Drowning in a Sea of E-mails and Wish I Had Never Signed Up!

Do not distress dear friends… David Hasselhoff has caught sight of your fingertips above the froth and is running slo-mo to save you! (I’m not saying I’m Hasselhoff.. that honor goes to Simon Groce and Ty Thorne who first let us know how to stop the “friend request” e-mails). Be friendly—it will prevent a million e-mails:

Set your profile to accept all friend requests. Click the “Email” tab and within the top gray box you’ll see a drop down menu that lets you choose options for friend requests. I have mine set to accept all, cause I really love you peeps and don’t need to go through a 5 step process to consider you my friend If you’re choosy, or afraid of a stalker situation, select “Notify”. If you’re seriously afraid of a stalker situation btw, please notify someone who can help! If you don’t like community and prefer to be alone, select “Reject All.”

Do you see the options above that?? Decide if you want e-mails from Conversations and Status Updates and click or un-click accordingly. I personally don’t have any of the three options clicked. Additionally, you can choose just how much e-mail you recieve related to your various groups. “My Groups” tab and a lovely page will appear that allows you to decide how often you receive e-mail updates from your groups. Select whatever strategy you feel is best for you.

“Daily Digest” is where I have all of my dials… so if something happens in my cg, I’ll get an e-mail letting me know of anything new that day. If you are net obsessed and will be surfing through all your groups every single day, it might just make sense to click nothing, but that is likely the only case. Please don’t be surprised if your dial is set to nothing and you hear people talking about a sweet BarBQ that happened in Shelby Park where Nathan Ivey brought out his mad dj skills and you had no clue til it was too late. That fictitious example makes me sad for imaginary “Nothing” selecters… thank goodness it’s not real. If you have the desire to know every single thing somebody does within one of your groups, you can drag the round gray button to the “Everything” level. You can always come back and change these later.

Group Leaders

This is ESPECIALLY for you CG/Alpha Group/Service Group/Recovery Group/Learner Group leaders! The City will be the primary mode for you to get info out to your groups once we get all of Sojourn to join. We need you to get your City Group started.

1. Click on the down arrow of the “More” tab and select “Group Ideas”.
2. Under “Parent” select whichever campus your group belongs to (if not specific to either, then for now select Germantown Campus til I can change the settings).
3. Under “Name” be sure to put @ least the last name(s) of the CG leaders then “Community Group.”
4. If you lead something along a different format, (for example: Women’s Theology Class) then just be sure the Name reflects the group well so that people can easily find it in the search box.

Write a description for your group that gives someone viewing a really good idea of what your group is about. If it’s a CG where everybody is married with children, but singles are encouraged to come anyway, write that Go ahead and put what area of KY/IN you meet in or which campus’ building.

Select your group type and add the address (even if it’s just 930 Mary Street) so that people can easily view a map of the location (yay technology!). Then click “Create.”  We will approve your idea, then invite you to lead your group.

The Final Lap

Well everybody, that’s it for today. I’ll be writing more tomorrow. If you have requests for help on certain aspects of The City, feel free to reply to this thread. Also, thanks to all of you Hasselhoffs who have been eagerly helping others with their questions.

Peace & God bless you all!

Your friendly neighborhood office manager,

Audra Todd