The Social Pinpoint Learning Centre
The News Feed tool lets you provide dynamic content updates to your participants during the lifecycle of a project. It is a powerful tool to continuously engage your audience throughout your project, keeping them involved and helping to build familiarity, buy-in and trust.
Developing a practice of using the News Feed and providing regular
updates is one of the most important things you can do to achieve
mastery of digital engagement.
You can use the News Feed in a variety of ways, including:
The News Feed tool works in conjunction with Social Pinpoint's 'Follow' feature (if available in your plan), allowing you to notify your Followers via email when you publish a news item. This feature provides an easy, automated way to communicate back to your Followers, saving you considerable time and effort.
You can add the News Feed tool at the project level to any page. However, the content of the feed will always be the same for each project, even if you add multiple News Feeds to that project.
The News Feed can also be configured to aggregate news items from multiple projects showing items from related projects, locations or categories, or even pulling items from all projects into a single feed on your homepage.
To add a new item to the News Feed, you must create a News page in the project. The News Feed then finds all the relevant 'News' pages and displays them in the feed. You can configure several settings in the News Feed to control how the News Feed appears to your participants.
You can add any content you'd like to a News page, even participation tools. This gives you the flexibility to be creative. For example, you could send out a news update containing a Quick Poll to get feedback on an event you recently held or add a Conversation to drive discussion around a particular announcement.
💡USER TIP: Both the Project and News Page needs to be published in order to be viewed on the News Feed.
Here's some examples of how you can configure the News Feed:
This is a 'Panel - small' style with image thumbnails turned on. It also uses the 'Progressive' loading setting to allow user to view more items.
This is a 'Carousel' style with the description field turned off so it appears clean. Users can scroll the carousel to see more items.
This is a simple 'List' style that aggregates news items from around the site. The 'Display Project Titles' setting is enabled to show the name of the project.
Settings you can configure in the News Feed:
Before you get started posting news to your projects, you'll first need to add a News Feed to a project page.
To add the News Feed:
You can modify the visual style of the News Feed and its news items by adjusting several settings located in the 'Display' tab of the Block Settings.
The 'Display Type' setting provides five different styles for the News Feed:
You can control how many news items will appear in the feed by adjusting the 'Display Items' setting. You can show a set number of items, such as showing only the most recent 5 items (Fixed), or show a fixed number of items and allow users to see more by clicking a 'show more' button (Progressive).
If you want to control what information appears in the news items of the feed, you can choose to show or hide the 'Title', 'Description' and 'Call to action' links.
If showing the 'Call to action' link, you can also customise the call to action text if required. Typically, this will say 'read more', 'learn more', 'see more', etc.
To add a news item to a News Feed, you must first create a News page and publish it under your project. The News Feed looks for relevant News pages that match any 'filters' you have set and displays them in the feed.
To add a news item to a News Feed:
💡NOTE: Public Date/Time is not the actual publishing date of the page but serves to display a specific date in the news page header.
You can add images to your news items to provide visual interest and capture your participant's interest. This setting adds a small image thumbnail to each news item.
To add an image to news items:
The image's size and position will depend on the 'Display Type' you select in the News Feed settings.
If you do not add an image but enable the 'Image Thumbnails' setting, a placeholder image will show instead.
To delete a news item, simply navigate to the relevant News page, click 'Settings' from the Toolbar at the top of the page, and select 'Delete Page'.
If you have the 'Follow' feature enabled on a project, you can easily notify your 'Followers' when you publish a news item to a News Feed.
To notify your Followers when a news item is published:
The email campaign generated through this method will not send straight away. Instead, there is a delay of 3 hours (subject to your site's configuration) to prevent email campaigns from being sent if a user accidentally publishes this page.
If you want to cancel the campaign from sending during this period, you can manually cancel it via the Emails area of the Dashboard or simply move the News page back to Draft.
You can only send one email campaign to your Followers per News page and cannot send a campaign after the page is published. If you want to notify your followers of the update but have already published the page without sending an automated campaign, you can still send a manual campaign via the Emails area of the Dashboard.
The News Feed gives you the option to control which news items appear in the feed. By default, adding a News Feed to a project page only shows news items associated with that project. In other words, only news pages published under that project in the Sitemap will appear.
If you want your News Feed to show more than just the updates from a single project, you can apply various 'filters' to pull in news items from multiple projects. You can also filter by other attributes, such as the status of the project or the date range.
For example, you can use filters to show all news updates from the 'Climate Change' category or even show all recent news items from around your site on the homepage.
Filters are located in the 'Filters' tab of the Block Settings and allow the News Feed to be filtered by: Project, Project Status, Project Type, Project Category, Project Location and Date Range.
Filters use the 'and' operator, meaning all conditions you set in the filters must be 'true' for the news items to appear.
For example, if you enable the 'Project Location' filter and select 'Location A' as a value, and also enable the 'Project Category' filter and select 'Arts and Culture' as a value, only news items from projects associated with both 'Location A' and 'Arts and Culture' will appear.
If all filters are disabled, then all news items from across your site are shown. You can use this to create a sitewide News Feed on either the homepage or a designated news page on your site.
To further elevate and innovate our focus on creating the best-in-class software solution dedicated to community engagement, we have decided to rebrand The HiVE as Social Pinpoint with an exciting update to the Social Pinpoint brand to match!
Community engagement is an ongoing process of collaboration and co-learning. When we evaluate our community engagement initiatives, we give ourselves the opportunity to measure our deeper impact and make improvements for future projects.
With the right action plan in place, we can ensure we are connecting with our community on an appropriate level to enhance public decision-making.
