In which we discuss our mission statement, de-brief our social media communities and shell out plenty of thank yous.

By Celeste

I wanted to take a break from our regular scheduled programming here on the blog to say thank you to all of you readers and supporters.  Also, to give a little de-briefing on the progress and direction of this blog.  I consider you all my staff, so it’s like a staff meeting.  And who doesn’t like staff meetings??

---

MISSION STATEMENT

Hello.  Welcome to our meeting.  To start off, I thought I’d remind you all of our mission statement here at A Thing Called Love Blog.  And by remind, I mean share for the first time since I’ve just recently written it.  We’re going to try to hone in and focus on our mission statement for all future posts and projects.

The mission statement is three-fold:

1. To help people remember that they love their spouse.
2. To build a community of people helping and encouraging each other and who are dedicated to strengthening marriage.  And
3. To make of this blog whatever God wants it to be.

So that’s it.  We’ve got some exciting upcoming projects in the works to help us accomplish these things.  I’ve decided to write one post a week coming out on Wednesdays (I realize this is a Thursday- don’t hate me if the post of the week comes on a Thursday 🙂 ) except during series.

Also the communities listed below are really going to help accomplish our goals:

---

I’ve discussed in the past my problems with MailChimp, but I think we’ve settled our differences and I would like to really make my email subscribers my priority from here on out. My email subscribers are going to be my A- listers.

We’re looking to my email subscribers to really be the nuts and bolts of how we plan to accomplish our mission statement. First off, to help people remember they love their spouse.  We all want happy marriages right?  And we all love our spouses right?  Its just that in the day to day it’s SO easy to forget to prioritize our marriages.  Think of these bi-monthly emails as a little whisper in your ear saying “Remember how much you love your spouse?”

I’m going to send out an email every other Friday discussing a marriage “win” I had that week and basically journaling out any thoughts I’ve had regarding marriage.  I’ll also be asking questions.  Questions to ponder and questions to get your opinions on marriage successes and problems. I always want to know what you’re struggling with and what is going well.  I promise I will try my best to respond to everyone who replies to my questions and email posts.

As you know, one of our primary goals is to form a tight community and to interact one-on-one in a meaningful way with readers.  Bi-monthly emails are going to be a great tool to help us do this.  Get started below!

---

PINTEREST

To everyone who has been supporting us on Pinterest- THANK you!!  Most of our site traffic comes from Pinterest, so I always really, really appreciate when you pin our articles.  And if you don’t already, you can follow us on Pinterest (for lots of other great marriage articles) here:

Here are our most popular pins to date with the links:

---

FACEBOOK

Another HUGE thank you to all those who have been supporting us on Facebook!  Join the fun here:

Just a quick note here:  Facebook changed its algorithms for “business” pages a while back to make it harder for followers to see the business’s posts in order to encourage them to pay Facebook to “boost” their posts.  So basically, usually only a small fraction of a page’s followers will see any of their posts unlike a friend’s page, where if you are their friend, their posts will show up in your feed automatically.

My point here is if you want our posts to show up in your feed, you have to be actively liking, sharing or commenting on them, otherwise you’ll never see them (because I am unwilling to pay $5 every time I write a post.  You’re welcome finance department).

---

SURVEY

HEY!!  WAKE UP!  This is a staff meeting!!!

Just kidding, you can go back to sleep.  Just try not to slobber on your keyboard.

Thank you SOOOO much to all those who answered our site survey a few weeks ago here. (and if you missed it, it’s not too late- you can still fill it out! <– exclamation point because I know how exciting that news must be to you!) We got way more responses than we were expecting and everyone’s answers were SO helpful.  They helped us think of many more post and series topics.  Looks like many of you/us share the same marriage problems and concerns.  By far, the most common reported marriage problems were:

• Lack of time and energy (almost every response hit on this!)
• Children
• Too much distraction/screen time
• Intimacy

We hear you and we’ve got posts and resources on these topics coming your way!

---

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT

We’ve had some exciting guest posts recently.

• Just yesterday, this post 4 Things That Keep Me From Repenting Properly was published on mormon.org!!
• Familyshare recently re-posted two of our posts:  6 Ways to Strengthen Your Marriage When You’re Really, Really Tired and Supporting a Spouse Through Depression
• Also I give my best blogging advice on this guest post I wrote for BlogChickaBlog

In case you missed it, we just did a big ole series about Celebrating the Family Proclamation with one post on each topic in this sentence:  “Successful marriages and families are established and maintained on principles of faith, prayer, repentance, forgiveness, respect, love, compassion, work, and wholesome recreational activities.” The posts and topics were excellent. Here are individual links to each of the posts:

• FAITH   by Jessica Wiest
• PRAYER  by Shauna Maylin
• REPENTANCE   by Celeste
• FORGIVENESS   by Celeste
• RESPECT  by Rich
• LOVE   by Celeste
• COMPASSION   by Amber Anderson
• WORK   by Lea Child
• WHOLESOME RECREATIONAL ACTIVITIES   by Kerry Smith

Thanks to all who shared and participated in the series- it was a big success!!

And this concludes our meeting.  For those who slept through it, here’s the take home:  a HUGE THANK YOU for supporting our work here at A Thing Called Love!  We really, really, really, really, really appreciate it 🙂