Ben,
my understanding of this section (activities) is that it publicises Affinity organised activities. The sites you mention are more in the area of issues currently in the news. I agree that people might be interested in them, just not sure where they would fit on the site,

Jim

My last post was basically two unrelated comments. Not sure if I made that clear.

The “News and Comment” section seems to be regularly updated with things like the Affinity Theological Study Conference 2009 in February 2009.
Also looking at past items in my RSS News and Comments feed, there have been other events such as the “Spirit of the Puritans Bible” (Feb 2008), and the “Theology For All 2007 Conference” (Sept 2007). 
In contrast, the latest events in the “Activities” section is from 2006 (i.e. “Examining The Call"). 

Maybe there two sections (i.e. “News”, and “Activities") need a sentence or two at the top of the page describing what the section is for? Or maybe the two sections are better off merged into one?

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On the separate note of having links to news stories and blog items - not sure where this would go. Many news stories in secular papers of which might be worth highlighting maybe fit under the category of Social Issues - so maybe the right hand column of the Social Issues Team page
http://www.affinity.org.uk/teams/public_engagement/ could be an idea.

Examples of recent news stories on social issues in secular papers:

Pro-life charity sues Google over anti-abortion advert (14/04/2008)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/04/09/ngoogle109.xml

More children diagnosed with sex infections (02/04/2008)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/04/02/nsex102.xml

One in 23 teenage girls had an abortion (24/03/2008)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/03/23/nabort123.xml

Jim,

I know I’m very late in replying to this thread but I’ve only just become aware of the Affinity message board.  I think you need to publicise it more because it could become a great tool for Christians.

In order to make it more visible, I think you should put a link to the forum within the menu bar at the top of the screen.  Having the ‘Community Quick Links’ box is useful but most people will instinctively look on the menu bar for a link.  Also, the term ‘Community’ is perhaps not as clear as the universal term ‘Forum’ or ‘Message Board’.

It might be worth advertising the forum within the regular Affinity mailing which gets sent out - a forum only becomes useful when there is a critical mass of people using it.  You need to drive people to the forum, so you could say at the end of your magazine articles something like ‘If you’d like to discuss this further then come to our forum at… http://www.affinity.org.uk/community’

Just a couple of thoughts!

Dave

Dave,
thanks for your comments. I agree that this is a part of the site that could be extremely useful to the Affinity community. I have been meaning to add a link to the menu bar for a while and just haven’t got round to it so thanks for the push.
As you say, it is that critical mass of people using it that is needed. I wondered if perhaps a few “killer” discussions on current issues with the participation of some of the ever-increasing evangelical blogging community might kick-start its use,

Jim

Yes that’ll probably help.  Perhaps I’ll start one or two and see whether we can encourage people to respond!