Envisioning healthy congregations
engaged in effective

Christian Ministry
locally AND globally.

• No image with name, no solitary image even without name, of a child (or minor of any age) should be included in the Newsletter. Parental permission does not alter this. (There is some movement in the legal profession and court system that is questioning whether parents can "sign away" their children's rights for legal responses just by signing off on a "permission slip.")

• All adult persons who are pictured (or included in video) in the Newsletter and/or web site with names given (other than ministerial staff) need to have signed a "release" to give you permission for such. Don't assume you have "implicit permission" to do so.

• Do not publish the home phone, address, or e-mail of employess or pastoral staff.

• **Never publish a Church Directory online in any form, newsletter or web pages. There is no such thing as absolute security even with secure servers, secure transmission, usernames and passwords. (For more on this, read the news each day. Also, those organizations who do publish sensitive material like this for an audience who have permission and corresponding passwords and usernames have either a contracted service or in-house tech department, many of whom do nothing but upgrade, troubleshoot, and protect those "secured" pages. These departments work on this and monitor these pages 24/7/365! Even with this security is often a problem.)

• Churches need to write, officially adopt, and publish a "Privacy Policy" to inform members and all users what will be posted, how information will be used, and whether or not use of the web site - including access to the posted Newsletters will result in technologies placing something on their computers (e.g. "cookies").
  See http://www.abcgrr.org/privacypolicy.htm for an example of a Privacy Policy.

** This is the considered recommendation of the Staff of the Great Rivers Region following research into trends and reflections on experiences of churches and individuals.

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