Facebook For The Parish

The Parish Council have asked me to lead a steering group looking at how we can best use the internet for the benefit of the community. I've created a Facebook Page "St Ive Parish Council" which non Facebook users can view at www.facebook.com/stiveparishcouncil. We will keep this page updated with parish news items such as road closures, and parish council meeting agendas and minutes. Facebook users can "Like" the page and automatically receive these news items in their news feed. The Facebook news feed is a bit like creating your own personal newspaper with articles from just the sources you are interested in. We are also allowing Comments to be entered to give a more interactive experience. I think this has real potential.

Has anyone got any ideas as to how the Facebook Page "St Ive Parish Council" can be improved? I've added some photos from Pensilva Gala Day (which was great fun), and used my photo of the parish taken from Caradon as the cover photo. The profile picture was borrowed from the internet. Has anyone got better photos that could represent the parish?

The other thing I would like to do with the Parish Facebook Page is link to Facebook Groups connected to the parish. I have added a note to the Parish Page, which lists links to local community Facebook and other internet places. It is also possible for Facebook Group Administrators to share their Group Events with the Parish Page, if they are also Administrators of the Parish Page. This has great possibilities for helping community coherence, and letting groups manage information about their own events.

In order to keep improving how we use the internet my next project will be sorting out the parish web sites. I'd like to get a group of us involved. If enough people are interested in volunteering for work experience, I'd really like to form a Community Interest Company based around internet services. I think there are lots of local groups and businesses that would like a web site. See my previous blog post for more detail.