How to get ward to use LUWS

[brado426]

Absolutely agree. I am both the ward and stake administrator and I have tried almost every suggestion made here in this thread, but without the full support of the leaders, it is a constant uphill battle. I have made presentations to both ward and stake councils, I have met with the stake presidency and the bishopric and although they all express to me their desire for the LUW to be utilized more, I haven't heard them express this to the ward members. Until they do, we can only keep plugging away and make sure our sites are viable and useful.

I think we have experienced something similar in our ward. We actually had full support of the leaders and presentations were done so that everyone would know how to login and use LUWS. This was a year ago and it seems that the presentations have been forgotten and most people in our ward and stake don't bother to login to LUWS anymore.

My vision was that the Home/Visiting Teaching application would be integrated with LUWS giving members an excuse to access it when reporting Home/Visiting Teaching. The auto Emails would make accessing LUWS easy for the members and also remind them to check the event calendar and announcements. In my opinion, this would greatly increase LUWS usage in the ward. Maybe one day.

Brad O.

[scion-p40]

I live in a very tech savvy ward & stake. My observation is that the ward website calendars are overly cumbersome and restrictive. Everything posted must be approved. Fine. But once an event is approved, the poster (or an acceptable alternative) needs the authority to go back & post details, post-ponements, and cancellations when they're known without every single change requiring approval.

There is no filter available. Let whatever is happening in UT stay in UT. I don't need it on my local calendar. I would prefer to choose what info I want to see, like I can on a google calendar, most of the time.

For example: At one point, our deacons, teachers, priests, and YM each had their own calendars to which members could subscribe. YM was used for joint quorum and/or scout activities. Who was doing what was very clear at a glance. I set colors to each group to further identify them. I even added a generic US calendar that includes holidays & daylight savings info which helps avoid potential clashes. Our YW only used one calendar, which I found less helpful than the specific calendars. For planning purposes, school events and some sports events are also posted.

When I want to add an event to a calendar, it should default to a "show all" mode for my ward & stake (again, not SLC except for gen conf & affiliated sessions).

Non-members who are participating in the ward and/or stake (such as single members, boy scouts, investigators, and visitors) should be allowed some sort of access to the calendar. Right now, none is available.

I also like to set reminders to myself for some non-recurring events, such as payments due for youth conf.

The ability to sync select items to my Palm would be awesome.

As it was the last time I looked, the calendar simply does not meet most members needs or expectations because they are used to existing applications that do so much more. Therefore, even places that give it a serious try, drop it. That said, it could be a very useful tool, if it implemented tools that already exist in Palm, Yahoo, and/or Google calendars.

[mkmurray]

It would be helpful if your multitude of improvements made it to the LUWS: Feedback and Suggestions wiki page, as that is one of the driving factors for the new version of LUWS (and also the calendar feature).

[scion-p40]

It would be helpful if your multitude of improvements made it to the LUWS: Feedback and Suggestions wiki page, as that is one of the driving factors for the new version of LUWS (and also the calendar feature).

I can see the suggested improvements lists, but don't see a way to add to them. Nor is there discussion of why improvements are suggested on that site. Sometimes knowing why something is not being used as originally envisioned is helpful in setting future goals.

[aebrown]

I can see the suggested improvements lists, but don't see a way to add to them.

To add to the suggestion lists (or make any other contribution to the wiki), you need to be logged in to the wiki. That requires that you login with your LDS Account credentials.

Nor is there discussion of why improvements are suggested on that site. Sometimes knowing why something is not being used as originally envisioned is helpful in setting future goals.

The heading to that wiki page says "Please keep your ideas and comments short and to the point. If you wish to discuss the ideas in more detail, we encourage you to use the LDSTech Forums. If there are relevant posts on the LDSTech Forums, please provide links to the original forum posts for further explanation of each issue. "

Hopefully that answers your question -- where a suggestion needs background explanation, that discussion should be on the forum, and linked to from the wiki page.