Recently, one of our members requested we consider adding a Prayer Requests page to our site, where members may submit prayer requests for other classmates, family members, faculty and staff personnel, and themselves. The requests would be limited to life-altering issues.

Members would submit the request to an administrator who would add it to the page. We'd ask submitters to let us know when the prayers are no longer needed.

Does anyone else have a Prayer Requests page, or have you thought of adding one? Any thoughts or suggestions?

I have seen other sites do this as well. I believe that some of them opted to set up a Forum in the User Forums for this purpose. The Forum can then have a new topic for each Prayer Request so that all the replies in that topic are for that individual prayer request.

I have a Prayer request link on my www.efhs1973.com site. I didn't check before creating this reply--but I believe the page is password protected. You can view it by using the system password of: petunia

Irma
www.efhs1973.com

Scott Moore, I was going to recommend the same as Scott Mastenbrook.

To Scott Moore:
Do your classmates use the forums or might you be using a page because they do not?

I have a page set up entitled Class Health asking for prayers for certain individuals that people can request or I add if told about.

If prayers for death, etc. I enter at top of Announcement site which is on top of my Homepage.

Gwen,

We do not use the Forum pages. We used them many years ago when we launched our site, but then no new topics or comments were added for two or three years, so we inactivated them.

Irma,

I enjoyed looking at your Prayers page.

Oops - this post may reflect our church website but it really pertains to our high school website.

At one of our past reunions we had a meeting, not a part of the reunion, but during the same weekend, that was for the purpose of presenting a religious element for those who desired it. The result was a collection of email addresses for those who either desired more information or who had prayer requests.

This resulted in a fairly loose organization of emails among those who originally signed up. It has basically worked but there was really no way to always be sure that everyone was included or email changes were accounted for by using the "reply to all" method.

About the same time or a little later I was asked to have something on the website to accommodate prayer requests. I set up a forum as indicated above called "Sharing and Caring" but by that time all of those interested were using the email system and basically nobody is using the forum.

My suggestion is to set up the forum first and really try to get people to use it rather than the email system. I think the key is getting people to subscribe to the threads. The problem is that most everybody uses email and they don't want to learn how to use a forum.

We don't have a prayer page. Each time a prayer request is made we insert it on the announcement section upper part of home page ( log in to view) ; usually leave it for a short time period like ( death announcements)or prayers for healing / terminal illness and longer like fires, floods, mother nature disasters,,,Seems to work.

Thelma,

We have a Latest News page. I hadn't thought of posting a prayer request on that page, but you're giving me a nice alternative.

We keep Latest News items up for 60 days, so this might be a better option rather than a dedicated page for prayer requests.

Update on 8/5/18: Our prayer request feature is now active on our Latest News page.

Great!

Good idea. Thanks.

Hi Scott,

Could you provide me with a few examples of this feature?

And maybe list the steps to accomplish this task?

Thanks

Hi Paul,

If you go to our Latest News page, you'll see how we handle prayer requests, including how to submit them and the criteria for submission. Examples of prayer requests we've had in the past days are:

Prayers are requested for the family and loved ones of Rick Willard, who passed away on ...."

Prayers are requested for classmate Doug Goodrich following the loss of his wife, Linda on ...."

We've only had two prayer requests since we activated the Prayer Requests feature, at the request of a deeply religious classmate, 3 1/2 months ago. I'm thinking requests will be few and far between, but we're keeping the feature active for now.

Yes, I’ve been to your website. Is that the same as what Scott is describing?

Scott Mastenbrook is describing using the User Forums for prayer requests, instead of the way we do it on the Latest News page. I think you have to do what you think will work best for your class. We do not have User Forums activated, due to low interest.

We have a lot of traffic on our Latest News page, so we figured it would be a logical place for prayer requests.