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Homeward Documentation

Posting field updates

The Updates & gallery page — Dashboard → Updates — is where you write to the people who follow your work. Published updates appear on your public profile, reach readers through their Letters edition, and go out by email to supporters who have field-update emails turned on.

Starting a letter

Section titled “Starting a letter”

Select Letter in the top right. Homeward creates a draft immediately — type “newsletter”, titled “New letter” — and opens the editor for it. You are never faced with a blank page and no way back; if you abandon a draft it simply stays a draft.

Selecting a title opens a reader preview, which shows the update roughly as a reader sees it.

The four update types

Section titled “The four update types”
  • Newsletter — “News from your own field, at its most useful while it is fresh.”
  • Editorial — “Your view on the wider world, or a general update. Fades the fastest.”
  • Testimony — “One story worth telling, kept in front of readers as it ages.”
  • Report — “A periodic account of activity, read alongside earlier editions.”

The type is not only a label. It decides how the update ages: newsletters fade fastest and testimonies stay in front of readers longest, and reports are filed with the period they cover.

Writing the update

Section titled “Writing the update”
  • Type — one of the four above. Reports alone reveal two more fields, Period start and Period end, and show you how readers will see the label: “2025”, “Q3 2025”, “Jan – Jun 2025”, or similar.
  • Publishing — Hosted on Homeward, where the full text lives here, or External link, where the update points elsewhere. External updates need an excerpt and a Source URL and do not show a body; hosted updates need the body.
  • Title — required. It is tidied for you on save: an all-caps title becomes title case, small words stay lowercase, and acronyms such as NGO or YWAM are preserved.
  • Excerpt — required for external updates, optional for hosted ones.
  • Location — optional, for example “Nairobi, Kenya”.
  • Body — required for hosted updates, plain paragraphs separated by blank lines.
  • Photo — a cover image in 3:2.

Select Save. Only changed fields are sent, so Save stays disabled until you have actually modified something. There is no publish button in the editor — publishing happens from the table.

Publishing

Section titled “Publishing”

The updates table lists every update with its date, title, excerpt, response, and a Published toggle. On is live; off is a draft, and the date column reads “Draft” instead of a date.

Flipping the toggle on an update that is not ready does not publish it. The editor opens instead, showing “This update isn’t ready to publish” with the reason — a missing title, a report with no period, or an external update with no excerpt or source URL. Fill the gap and try again.

Reading the Response column

Section titled “Reading the Response column”

The Response column shows how many readers found the update valuable. If you see an em dash, nobody has responded yet. Homeward staff can also see how many said an update missed the mark; you do not, and that is deliberate.

Deleting an update

Section titled “Deleting an update”

Delete asks first: “This permanently removes the update from the profile and everywhere it appears. It can’t be undone.”

Section titled “Gallery”

The Gallery card shows the photos on your public profile.

  • Photos in the top right, or the dashed Upload tile, adds photos. They go into your first album, and if you have no albums Homeward creates one called “Gallery”.
  • Select any photo to open a lightbox, with previous and next when there is more than one.
  • The X on a thumbnail removes the photo from the album.
Section titled “Related”