by Zebadiah Demorest, Publications and Promotions Coordinator
This month we are focusing on our revised communication methods. In an effort to expand our connections with you, our alumni, we have been working on creating different platforms for communicating information such as news notes, memorials, and monthly articles featured in the Falcon e-newsletters. So, we want to take this opportunity to briefly introduce you to our new and improved communication channels!
Our first and main method of communication is our website. To make this easier and more convenient to use, we have updated and reorganized its homepage. We hope that this new format will help you find the information you are looking for more quickly and easily. Remember that our website is the foundation of all our other communications with you.
When you visit our site, you will notice some new and some updated tiles on our homepage. This first new tile is for the Fruit from the Vine blog. While this blog is not new, it was rarely updated, and the design was outdated. We have revised the design of the blog and intend to use it to post the latest articles and interviews from this e-mail newsletter. Our staff is also in the process of uploading previous articles from our main website to the blog for your convenience. These previous articles will be organized by date and made easily accessible from the Archives category in the menu. You can visit our new, redesigned blog here. Also, to make the articles in our e-newsletter more convenient to read, we have linked the title of this article (highlighted in blue above) to the same article on the blog. This will make the main article easier to read, due to the bigger text and the better formatting options the blog offers for mobile devices. Whenever you are reading the feature article in your e-newsletter then, be sure to click on the blue-lettered title to go straight to our blog and read the feature in this upgraded format!
In addition to this blog, we have also created two new sites, one for news notes and another for memorials. These sites will be updated with new posts as soon as we receive a news note or a memorial. Since we now have a site dedicated to memorials, we will no longer be posting them individually on the Fort Wayne Alumni Connection Facebook group as we were doing previously. Instead, the Fort Wayne Alumni Center staff will be posting the memorials directly to the new Memorials website.
How do you access these sites? There are two ways easy ways to access the news notes site and the memorials site. The first is to visit fwalumnicenter.org and click on the tile labeled “News Notes” or the tile labeled “Memorials.” These tiles are located directly below the “Fruit from The Vine” tile. These tiles will take you immediately to the new sites where the latest information will be displayed. The second way to access these sites is through the blog fruitfromthevine.org. Once you arrive at the blog homepage, click the menu button in the upper right-hand corner and then locate either “News Notes” or “Memorials” from the menu. Click the title of either one and you will be taken to the sites.
We have attempted to make the news notes and memorials sites as easy to navigate as possible. For your convenience, we have tagged the news notes and memorials according to decades (e.g. 1950s, 1960s, etc.) and categorized them on each site. There is also an archive feature that allows you to browse the posts by the month they were posted. In addition to these organization areas, there is a search feature that allows you to quickly find what you are looking for.
Although we will no longer be posting memorials to our Fort Wayne Alumni Connection Facebook page, there are still many reasons to stay active in the group or join. (A link to the group can now be found on both the main website and the blog). While we love putting energy into our publications, we know that Facebook is a great place to connect with fellow alumni, share memories, and stay up-to-date with friends from the college. The Alumni Center will continue posting Wednesday in the Word once a week in addition to other content, but we want the Facebook group to be a place where alumni come to reconnect and remember the common ground of the Fort Wayne Campus. We encourage you to keep posting memories, connecting with fellow alumni, and sharing important life events.
Our main theme over the past year at the Alumni Center has been common ground. No matter what school you graduated from, whether it was FWBC, SCC, or TUFW, we all shared the same common ground on this Fort Wayne Campus. More importantly than that, we serve a God who is unchanging and is still as present in our lives today as He was in our college years. Although the campus no longer exists, the most important part, the people who made up the Fort Wayne Campus, continue on and spread its legacy throughout Fort Wayne and the world. We hope that through these new platforms we are able to further forge this idea of common ground and create connections between alumni no matter what decade you came to the Fort Wayne Campus. Thank you for your continued support and partnership with the Fort Wayne Alumni Center. We exist to walk with you through encouragement, prayer, and community connections.
Fruit from the Vine 