Flannel Friday News!

Hi all!

Here is a super long repost of the announcement I placed on Facebook at the beginning of the month!

tl;dr: Flannel Friday is transitioning to a new method for collecting and sharing ideas!

Believe it or not, Flannel Friday is turning seven years old this year! That’s about five more years of storytime ideas than I ever expected us to gather and I’m incredibly grateful to each and every member of this community who has helped keep us together for so long.

You may have noticed that I haven’t posted a Round Up schedule for January or February. That’s been deliberate on my part while I have been consulting with our Flannel Friday Fairy Godmothers–our moderators, schedulers, and question-answerers. Our anniversary seemed like a good time to take a look at where we are and to think about what’s next.

Don’t worry, Flannel Friday isn’t going anywhere! But changing patterns of engagement both within FF and in the larger social media world have meant that it is a good time to adapt our process a bit. We still have a group of regular volunteers to host Round Ups, but fewer folks are able to serve as Fairy Godmother. We still have entries (almost) every week for the Round Ups, but smaller Round Ups every week than in the past. In the big picture, Pinterest, Tumblr, and Facebook remain very active platforms, while blogs in general have become a little less central to the social media universe.

We very much want to keep this amazing community going! We want to keep supporting our Flannel Friday bloggers, and we want to make it easier for those of you who don’t have blogs to share your ideas, and also make it a little easier on our Fairy Godmothers to stay on top of things week to week.

So I’ve decided to run with an idea of Anne’s, and replace the weekly blog-based Round Ups with a rolling submissions form on Tumblr. You don’t have to have a Tumblr to participate! You don’t even have to have a blog to participate!

Instead, we will pin a link to a Tumblr submissions form to our Facebook page and the Flannel Friday website. When you have an idea to share with Flannel Friday–at any time, not just on Friday–all you have to do is click on the link and fill out the form. You’ll be able to choose to share a link to a Flannel Friday post on your blog, as we do now, OR you’ll be able to choose to just upload a photo of your flannelboard, and add a caption with any info you’d like to share.

The Fairy Godmothers will take turns keeping an eye on the Flannel Friday Tumblr, approving the posts, and sending them to Pinterest (which just takes a couple clicks right from Tumblr). You’ll be able to scroll through the Tumblr to look at ideas, or browse Pinterest as usual. Instead of a “This Week” board, we’ll have a “This Month” board, so you can check all the newest pins as they come in. And of course, we’ll pin to the theme boards as well.

Again, you won’t need a blog OR a Tumblr account to do this. You won’t need to wait for the Placeholder post to go live, and the Fairy Godmothers won’t have to organize hosts and pinners. My plan is to continue the Round Ups as usual for another month or so, to give everyone a chance to find this message and get ready for the transition. We’ll have plenty of time to try the new form and ask questions before we bring an end to the weekly Round Ups.

I think this will be a great way to include even more Flannel Friday-ers, while still supporting our regular bloggers.

Let me know what your thoughts and questions are! Just comment or ask questions here on this post, or on this announcement on our Facebook page, or send a message to flannelboardfriday @ gmail.com. If you want to jump right in and test out the new system, here’s the link to our Tumblr and here’s the link to our new submissions form.

I’m posting a Round Up Placeholder for this week here.