Does your organization have a blog or XML feed to get out news or other information? Why not display your most recent two or three posts inside Patron Edge Online? It will help boost readership of your blog and potentially increase your number of patrons/donors as well. It is super-easy using a free online tool, and you won’t be doing ANY double-entry.

Interested? Here’s how to do it:

1. On the Admin Site, create an HTML screen part with a Name and Filename called Blog on the screen or template where the feed will display
2. Go to http://www.rss-info.com/en_rssinclude-simple.html and enter the URL of your feed
3. For Max entries, choose how many of your most recent posts you’d like to display
4. Make the Table/Iframe width the same as your screen part width
5. For the three color fields, I recommend setting them all to the same color as your site’s background
6. Open Links in a new Window refers to the behavior that you want if a patron clicks on a post title or link. To keep the patron from having to leave your ticketing site to read the post, check this box
7. For Integration, use IFrame. It works on all modern browsers and we can stick it in right into our screen part with no extra work
8. Now click Create HTML and copy the code
9. Highlight your screen part on the Admin Site and click Edit Free Text Field
10. Click the button that says TEXT; this puts you into HTML mode
11. Clear out anything you see here and then paste in the code you copied from the RSS-Info site

Et voilà! You now have your most recent blog posts displaying in PEO real-time. It takes less than 10 minutes to get working and just a little longer to tweak sizes, positions and colors to make it blend perfectly into your site.

Do you currently have a blog at your organization? What other ideas are you using to increase readership? Leave a message in the comments.