Join a network of churches and let your members buy / sell / give / share things with each other.
To ensure that listings are appropriate for church websites all advertisements placed in church communities are "approved" before they are displayed. Currently I (Norm Robins) do this for my church St Andrews. To start things moving I am happy to do this for all ads, and over time I will look to individual churches to take over approval and acceptance of ads in their own networks.
1. Choose a church community group near you
Choose which group you'd like to join from the list below. The groups below align with Across The City locations in CI. Note the subdomain name of the group, e.g. aberdeenchurches.
The feed for a group is http://subdomain name.cobini-shop.com/posts/feeds/rss.xml. You'll need this in the next step.
If a suitable group does not exist, let us know and we'll make one for you. More info about groups.
| Group name | Subdomain Name |
|---|---|
| Aberdeen Churches | aberdeenchurches |
| Belfast Churches | belfastchurches |
| Birmingham Churches | birminghamchurches |
| Brighton and Hove Churches | brightonchurches |
| Bristol Churches | bristolchurches |
| Cambridge Churches | cambridgechurches |
| Canterbury Churches | canterburychurches |
| Cardiff Churches | cardiffchurches |
| Chester Churches | chesterchurches |
| Chichester Churches | chichesterchurches |
| Coventry Churches | coventrychurches |
| Dundee Churches | dundeechurches |
| Ely Churches | elychurches |
| Exeter Churches | exeterchurches |
| Glasgow Churches | glasgowchurches |
| Gloucester Churches | gloucesterchurches |
| Guernsey Churches | guernseychurches |
| Inverness Churches | invernesschurches |
| Isle of Man Churches | isleofmanchurches |
| Leeds Churches | leedschurches |
| Leicester Churches | leicesterchurches |
| Lincoln Churches | lincolnchurches |
| Liverpool Churches | liverpoolchurches |
| North London Churches | northlondonchurches |
| South London Churches | southlondonchurches |
| East London Churches | eastlondonchurches |
| West London Churches | westlondonchurches |
| Manchester Churches | manchesterchurches |
| Norwich Churches | norwichchurches |
| Oxford Churches | oxfordchurches |
| Peterborough Churches | peterboroughchurches |
| Portsmouth Churches | portsmouthchurches |
| Preston Churches | prestonchurches |
| Sheffield Churches | sheffieldchurches |
| Southampton Churches | southamptonchurches |
| Swansea Churches | swanseachurches |
2. Connect CI to Cobini
Configure the ChurchInsight RSS viewer to display ads
- Use the layout editor to add an RSS Reader to your site
- Configure the RSS Reader:
- Set the URL to the feed URL above, i.e. http://subdomain name.cobini-shop.com/posts/feeds/rss.xml
- Configure other settings like permissions, margins, scroll-speed, etc. as you prefer
Add a Link or Button to "Post an item"
Use an image or article to link to the URL for posting a classified:
http://subdomain name.cobini-shop.com/posts/new?origin=(your-church-website-URL)Your_church_name
The format of the origin parameter is:- Your church website in parens e.g. (www.standrewsoxford.org)
- Your church name, using underscore for spaces e.g. St_Andrews_Oxford
- origin cannot contain spaces or other special characters like a comma, apostrophe, etc.
For example,
http://standrewsoxford.cobini-shop.com/posts/new?origin=(www.standrewsoxford.org)St_Andrews_Oxford
origin tells the system where a classified posting originated and provides a link back to your church website from the advertisement.
You can also add a link directly to the group
You can also add a link that takes users directly to the group iteself. Simply link to http://subdomain name/cobini-shop.com. Here is a link to St Andrew's Shop.
| Setting up CI | St Andrew's Shop |
|---|---|
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3. Tell your members about this new feature on your website
The most important thing is to get people using this service. At St Andrews it took over 4 months before it caught on, and we're just beginning to get a level of interest & usage. Some things that helped us:
- Putting it on the home page helps
- Identify a few "early adopters" and encourage them to get things going
- Post a few items yourself if necessary - an empty "shop" turn people away
- We've put a notice on our noticeboard telling people about the online classifieds
- When people give us a "paper" notice for the noticeboard, we remind them about the online version
- Making it as easy as possible especially for new users ... some handholding goes a long way
That's it! At St Andrews I'm encouraging people to donate a portion of their sales price to the church. It's working a little, though we need to develop much more volume for this to be significant.
Can you link to other churches in your area?
The more churches that use this, the better. If other churches in your area would like to join your network they can. If they are not using ChurchInsight the integration is not as simple, but it can be done. Ask them to contact us and we'll help to set them up.
More info about Groups & Shops
Cobini stores advertisements in a "shop". It is possible for each church to have it's own unique shop, and for shops to "share" adverts with other shops, thus forming a "group". However, to eliminate this "share" step for churches we have created shops that align with "Across the City" locations in ChurchInsight, so all churches in say Cambridge can use a single shop called Cambridge Churches. This means all churches in Cambridge implicitly share their classifieds with each other without requiring additional setup. Since "Cambridge Churches" is a shop, it can still share items with other shops if this makes sense, say "Ely Churches". At the moment to keep things simple, no sharing is set up between the church shops listed below. If you would like us to set it up, let us know and we'll do it.
To see sharing in action, look at St Andrew's Oxford which has it's own shop (standrewsoxford.cobini-shop.com) and it shares classifieds with the Oxford Churches shop (oxfordchurches.cobini-shop.com). Any church that joins the Oxford Churches group will automatically share listings with St Andrew's - advertisements posted in St Andrews will be visible to Oxford Churches and vice versa. We set St Andrew's up this way because it was the first church user, we may migrate it to the Oxford Churches shop later.
If you want to (though we would not recommend it at this time) you can start and run your own shop. Just go to www.cobini-shop.com and follow the instructions there. The downside of running your own shop is that you will have to administer it, including setting up sharing with other churches, approving advertisements before they are displayed, setting categories, etc. To keep things simple, we suggest that initially you use the shops/groups we have already set up for you, and we can expand later if necessary, for example if the group becomes too large or you want closer control of who you share advertisements with, etc.