Facebook is where it’s at when it comes to attracting qualified candidates to religious life.
We hesitate to spill some of our secrets here, but we’ve discovered a two-pronged approach for getting prospects involved with religious communities. First, you can get new “likes” for your page by sending paid ads to a list of young single devout Catholic men or women who are likely to be good religious candidates. (Our list is at about 40,000 – 50,000 right now each for men and women.) Thus, you are reaching outside of your existing pool of friends.
Secondly, you can send paid ads to those new fans (acquired through likes), asking them to sign up for your newsletter. It’s also good to make two organic posts per week to get people to sign up.
We here at Vocation Promotion not only do this, but we’ve developed a new landing page for Facebook, based on a system that has proven to be very effective in capturing newsletter signups. For one religious community of Sisters, we’ve gotten five signups since May 1. We’re on course for delivering twenty for this month.
We've found that this newsletter signup form on Facebook works well with religious communities.
We have found that you can’t just put a newsletter signup box out there; you have to give a sales pitch, a freebie, and some attractive photos.
As you can see, we’re putting a major emphasis in our work here on taking advantage of social media engagement for religious communities – and it’s working, and getting better.
You could do all by yourself, but you’ll spend so many hours testing the system and looking for the right third-party software that it won’t be cost effective. Besides, our pool of candidates is proprietary, and took some two years to develop. Why not go to an expert in vocation marketing?
What others say:
“Kevin, besides the five girls from the Franciscan University at Steubenville that I had mentioned to you, I have two more, one from California and another from Washington, D. C.”
— Sr. Jeanette, Midwest active religious community
“We have received a couple more very good candidates that we are arranging visits with. Thank you again.”
— Active Sisters’ community in the Midwest
“Actually I have a young man here [this weekend] who came to us through it.”
— Active men’s order in the East
Would you like to start a monthly “like” and newsletter campaign for $700 per month? I think we can get at least 20 newsletter signups and a lot of new fans each month for you for that amount. That’s $35 per new signup. That includes getting new “likes,” which are seeds for future signups. Of course, we cannot guarantee this number, but we won’t rest until we reach that goal, and hopefully exceed it.
As before, there’s no ongoing contract involved. We ask that you try it for at least three months, however, to ensure the program gets traction. More and more young people are getting on Facebook these days, and we have to cast our nets there to get them.
Contact Kevin so we can talk about it.
