Kickstart your parish presence in social media
You’re a priest looking to build a new media presence online. You’re a secretary who does the bulletin and now has been asked to build a blog. You’re a well-meaning volunteer who wants to help your parish family take their communications strategy to the next level. But you’re stumped – how do you get started with this when your parish has an outdated site that hasn’t been touched in years?
One place to start might be the recently published USCCB Social Media Guidelines. In the absence of their own formal social media policies and procedures, many dioceses are looking to this document as a springboard. It’s concise, easy to understand, and gives you specific strategies for building the basics. A few highlights of their recommendations include the following:
Dealing with minors – Follow these tips and tools for social networking with younger members of your parish. Take into account existing safe environment procedures and be sure to consider implementing a social media permission policy in your registration process for events and classes.
Dual administration – Always have two sets of eyes looking at your social media products for accountability, for moderation of comments and for logistical issues such as keeping track of passwords.
Separating personal and professional – Clearly delineate your personal presence online from your parish’s online social media presence. No fair posting your kids’ soccer score on the parish Facebook page!
Take ten minutes to read the USCCB document in its entirety and you’ll find some great definitions and recommendations.
Getting started with building a parish web presence can be overwhelming, but will also yield immediate results. My own parish’s Facebook page had over a hundred “likes” within a few days of being set up. Hits to our website have increased since we added this tool and we’re just getting started with reaching out to teens, young adults and visitors to our parish who may not regularly visit the parish site. I’ve even managed to learn the names of fellow parishioners by connecting with them in this way!
If you’re just get started with building a parish presence in social media circuits like Facebook and Twitter, what are some of the greatest obstacles you face?
Just getting my diocese to respond and start using new social media outlets,is a job within itself. We have had great luck with using Facebook in conjunction with Constant Contact,but hope to start building a bigger presence by funneling everyone to our WordPress site. How do you get them to voluntary enter their names and email?… to get regular updates for events?
Good stuff! Thanks for pointing out the Social Media Guidelines published by the USCCB. I didn’t know about them. I have been the webmaster for my parish for nearly ten years, and am looking forward to learning about great ideas from the Catholic Media Guild!
Mike – this is a great question! I think this takes a real grass roots effort, announcements at mass about the value of subscribing (for example, getting a copy of the bulletin early – some people love that), and baby steps. We haven’t gone down this route yet in my parish, so I’ll be interested to hear what others have to say on this topic.
Mike – I am in the field of web design and development by profession, and I try to extend my talents and skills to my parish life as well. Getting people to sign up for a newsletter can be challenging, but as Lisa says, you need to show people the value of doing so. My parish doesn’t have a parish-wide e-mail list at the moment, but our Young Adults Group has a list (powered by Constant Contact), and we are constantly announcing the list at our meetings. We even have a paper sign-up sheet at every event that people can write the name and e-mail on and then we manually add them to the list. To encourage people to sign up on the site, I suggest placing the sign-up box in a very visible area and use your design to draw the eye to the sign-up area. If people aren’t seeing the sign-up easily, you’ll automatically lose a lot of potential list members.
Lance – what is the confirmation process for Constant Contact if you manually add email addresses that have been submitted by paper? Do they receive a request to confirm? This could even be done before or after mass in some type of a special event/address drive type of arrangement. I will be blogging soon about Flocknote, which is a great alternative, but I would like to know more about the process for manually adding Constant Contact names/emails. Thanks for chiming in.
The admin who enters the addresses into the Constant Contact back-end is presented with a message that reads, “Be advised, your account is subject to the terms in our zero tolerance Anti-Spam Policy. Your list must be permission based. Please read rules for adding contacts.” This means that you couldn’t just go add everyone at your parish to your Constant Contact group – it must be opt-in, but Constant Contact realizes that there are multiple ways to opt-in, some of which do not take place online.
If you attempt to add an address which has previously opted-out, the system will prevent you from adding that e-mail with a message that says, “Cannot add an opted-out subscriber to contact lists.” In this case, the person must actively opt-in themselves through a web based form.
Depending on how you setup your Constant Contact groups, when a new address is added, a welcome message can be sent informing the individual that their address has been added and providing information about how to opt-out if they wish.
Cool, so it looks as though you can simply manually add folks if they’ve given you permission by signing a hard copy list. Thanks for the information. Very helpful!
For my studies I did a class called “Human engineering”, which involves user-centered webdesign and programming. There are some great tricks you can use on a website to guide your audience’s focus. For example, if there’s a picture of a face on a website, that’s the first place people will look at automatically, they are hard-wired to do so.
You could for example make a banner with people from your parish looking in a particular direction off camera. This serves two purposes: first the reader gets an idea who you are as a parish (what kind of people) and second, the direction in which the people gaze could be a pointer to the site’s search function or … where to subscribe for the newsletter.
Great tip Inge! Now that you point this out, I recognize that I as a reader do this. Awesome suggestion.
As I am developing the new WP site, I am taking more time to use images of our parishioners. It seems to create talk among them at parish events and Holy Mass. –In the case is gossip good? — lol … This is great info, thanks for sharing everyone.
Great article, Lisa!
I’m a Journalism student from Ryerson University working on a story about the Catholic Church’s use of Social Media. I would love to hear more from you regarding your thoughts. Specifically, I’m interested in learning WHY you feel parishes ought to build their presence online. What do you think are the advantages and disadvantages to doing so? I would love to hear your thoughts! If you could send me an email at trisha.fialho@ryerson.ca I would truly appreciate it.
Thanks for your time!
-Trisha