The General Assembly’s national office recently wrote to all congregations, saying:

“We were very excited this week to have sent out to all congregations, ministers, societies and districts a new Design Programme and WordPress website template, which we hope will help congregations with their communications – including websites, social media, leaflets, newsletters, noticeboards and more. These materials and resources have been created by the team at Unitarian headquarters and a steering group of ministers and lay people from across the movement, working with design agency This Ain’t Rock ‘n’ Roll.”

The new national Unitarian website has not exactly been uncontroversial; some love it, some don’t, but it’s certainly attention-catching – and it’s worthwhile thinking about whether we want a website for existing members or potential news ones (or both!)

This is the next step, and I attended out of curiosity and interest. Newcastle upon Tyne Unitarians have just completed the purchase of our new website, which we’re pretty happy with, so what was in this for us? Quite a lot, as it happened – this isn’t only about ‘here’s how to do a new website’, but has some useful design tips and templates for modifying and improving existing websites, also posters and notices.

As we recently wrote to the Inquirer about our view that Unitarians across the UK need to advertise and raise our profile, it was good to see that our national office is taking action on this. And as ever with Zoom, it was just good to hang out and catch up with other Unitarians across the UK, and swap ideas on who might want to join us, and how we find them. We’ll think about how we might use some of the new ideas for our own communications here at Newcastle very soon!

Anyone with questions about this can contact the UK Unitarians Communications Officer, Rory Castle Jones, at: rcastlejones@unitarian.org.uk. You can see a recording here, and I’d encouraged Unitarians to view it: https://tinyurl.com/4j64sv4s