I know that Catholic vocation directors like you never say, “We want to find good vocation candidates – What’s the worst way to spend our time?”
Not at all. On the contrary, you go to another youth conference or the March for Life. Or you hold a Come & See retreat, or recruit people through your own contacts.
You also contact your referral partners, such as good priests and college ministry people.
You might have thought about online promotion, although this seems – despite a lot of hype out there – like terra incognita with lots of alligators in the pond.
I go through the same dilemma in choosing marketing techniques. Conventions, referrals, or online promotion?
I’m not going to push you in one direction or another, because all of these approaches can produce results. But I will say that there has been a paradigm shift in the way people find each other and connect. That is with the internet.
Internet promotion in the Church is still new, with the biplane wings flopping in the wind as the plane zooms down the runway. But if you want to know how to pull the levels and gauge the wind, you have to jump into the cockpit.
If you know how to do social media marketing, you can tap into 50,000 to 80,000 devout single Catholics right now and reach them for your community.
Here at TreeFrogClick, we found that for one religious community among our clients, 18% of 121 women respondents said they would like to pursue a vocation as a religious sister. Sixty-four percent said “maybe.”
Among a group of 354 men, we found that 42% agreed with the phrase, “In prayer, God seems to speak to me in a positive way about religious/consecrated life.” In that same group, 40% said that they had a spiritual director or parent who guided them in their vocation.
You don’t find that kind of people just walking down the street.
Yes, the vocations are out there, but they are rarely all in one place – at least not in a way that you can hang onto the relationship with each one of them.
But you can find them with social media ads, and follow up with them through informative and inspiring emails that lay out all the beauty of consecrated life.
There’s a new evangelism in the Church, and it is consecrated people who will act as a leaven for the rest of society. The Church itself says, “the consecrated life is at the very heart of the Church as a decisive element for her mission, since it ‘manifests the inner nature of the Christian calling’ and the striving of the whole Church as Bride towards union with her one Spouse.” (Vita Consecrata, No. 3)
Want to learn more about how it works? Read or press release issued just a few days ago, “Vocation Recruitment Makes Big Strides on the Internet.”
PS: We at TreeFrogClick regularly get 30-40 names of new candidates every month for each of our clients in our program, and then follow up with them with our Come & See Vocation Promotion Program. Read more about it with our press release. Then call me at the number at the top of this page.
