Do you know all of the channels the Town uses to send out updates, news, notifications, and events?
The Town uses a variety of channels to support how people want to stay up to date and what updates they want to receive.
Social Media
The Town uses social media such as Facebook and Twitter to send out Town related news and events and to share relevant items from the County of Dufferin or community organizations.
- To best receive updates on the Town of Mono's Facebook, please like and follow our page. Both liking and follow our page will give you a better chance of seeing our updates. It can still be difficult to see everything we post, because your Facebook news feed may be inundated with updates from your friends, other pages, and more. We try to send out messages in different ways (photos, website shares, video, etc.) to help us standout.
- Follow Town of Mono's Twitter to get tweets that we send out. On Twitter, you can create a list where you can add Town of Mono exclusively or you can add a "things in my neighbourhood" list to include tweets from Town of Mono, Dufferin County, and any other profile that may be useful.
Whether you prefer Facebook or Twitter, please share messages that you find interesting. There are likely others within your network who would find it of interest too.
You can also engage with what we send out on Facebook and Twitter. We read all of the comments and forward them to the appropriate department/committee if it is something that requires a response. We typically only monitor our social media during our usual Town Hall hours.
Email & RSS
We follow the Canadian Anti-Spam Law Legislation to deliver our email notifications. What this means is that we need to collect your email address and confirm your desire to be added to our mailing list. We cannot add emails that we may have for other purposes. There are 3 great options for receiving email notifications:
- Council Highlights - get the "highlights" from Council Meetings. These are typically release within a few to several days after a Council Meeting. They can be delayed if the messaging needs to be tweaked. We get them out as quickly as we can, though. We also include information about upcoming events/Public Meetings/Announcements at the bottom of the highlights.
- Updates on when Council/Committee Agendas are posted. Our Council/Committee Agenda, Meeting, and Document portal has an option to allow people to subscribe to receive an email notification when an agenda is published. You will only get a link to the agenda and the meeting date, so you will have to go to the agenda to find out what topics the meeting will cover.
- The Town has a couple of RSS feeds and news items get automatically sent out when we publish a news/event item on the Town's website or send out a significant weather event. While the Town doesn't specifically have a way to send out RSS feeds via email, some email clients will let you add an RSS feed to them and there are free services to get RSS to email.
These relatively new RSS feed to email services are likely the best way to get email updates from the Town. They are pretty easy to set up. All you need is the link to the RSS feed (provided here) and your email.
Our RSS channels are as follows:
townofmono.com/news-events/rss.xml
townofmono.com/significant-weather/rss.xml
You can also get an RSS feed aggregator as an app on your phone/tablet or look for a browser extension.
Desktop & Android Phone/Tablet Notifications
We recently started offering desktop and Android phone notifications. If you're using a compatible device, you will see a bell on our website. Clicking/tapping the bell will let you subscribe to push notifications. On desktop, a little window pops up with the notification we send out and on mobile, the push notifications come through similar to other apps you are running. The difference is the notification will come from a website browser on your phone (Chrome, Samsung Internet, etc.).
This type of notification is not offered yet on iOS devices (iPhone, iPad). Apple has been gradually adding the technology to support them and with iOS 13, Apple is releasing a number of updates to support websites specifically opritmized for mobile devices. These websites are known as progressive web apps. Despite the progress made on progressive web apps, the release for web push notification on iOS devices is unknown; however, they do work on MacOS (Apple desktops).
Newletters
The Town sends out a periodic newsletter 3 times a year:
- Spring/Summer (delivery is around early May)
- Fall (delivery is around early October)
- Winter (delivery is around early to mid January)
The Town keeps an archive of current and previously release newsletters.
Newspapers
The Town publishes ads in local papers, including the Orangeville Banner, the Orangeville Citizen, and sometimes the Herald (Alliston). The Town is sometimes unable to publish in the paper due to timing or budget constraints for particular items.
Word of Mouth
There is no better or faster way of spreading news than by word of mouth. Hearing about something from a neighbour, a friend, a relative, or a reliable acquaintance is powerful, because it is personable and usually attention is placed directly on the source. Word of mouth can be in digital format too, which is why we include links to share our news and events on Facebook, Twitter, and email directly at the top of our releases. Sharing what the Town puts out in whatever format is most comfortable to you: talking, email, or social media will help to keep everyone in the Town informed and involved in Town matters.
Feedback
Do you have a preferred method of of receiving news other than what is mentioned here? You can reach out and let us know. It's as simple as filling out our contact form. Our contact form is more reliable than email, because it is not something that may get sent to our junk mail folder.
