Is your religious community or Catholic organization making the best use of social media?
Are you getting the candidates and the people that you want?
Pew stealing was OK
Just recently I discovered something interesting on one of the vocations quizzes that we send out. This young man was from a seminary in the Midwest. He answered the quiz and said, “Yes, I would like to learn more about religious life.” Well, he was in the seminary already. Normally we don’t agree with pew stealing, since this man was already attending a diocesan seminary. But in this case, his director suggested that he look around at different religious communities.
I thought I would text this young man, and he responded. We had a couple of good back and forth texts. He did answer well on the quiz as far as his prayer life, his general intentions in life, and any life obstacles. So I forwarded his name and phone number to our community’s vocation director.
In this way, we were able to do a little legwork for our community, to qualify this fellow and start the conversation with him.
This is the kind of relationships we build at Vocation Promotion.
Four components of social media marketing
In our experience, we’ve identified four essential components of social media marketing and reaching your audience.
First of all, there’s Facebook advertising, with our quiz that’s linked to that. So we send our ads to Catholics who tend to be devout, and then we send them a quiz asking various questions about whether they have a prayer life, whether they seem to be well disposed toward religious life, how well balanced a person they are, and so on.
The second component is a newsletter follow-up. Now this has to do with sending regular newsletters explaining to them about religious life. We also encourage them and ask them questions to get to know of their interest through the use of surveys.
Now the third component is personal contact, that I mentioned above. It is done with texting or emails. With texting, there’s special software that you can use where you can use your desktop to send the text, and see who’s responded to you.
The fourth area of social media is Facebook and other social media posting, and in this case you are putting up pictures of your community events and your community members, and also you’re responding to those people who are kind enough to make comments.
Be consistent with social media marketing
If you follow these four different components and use them effectively you can find a lot of candidates. You can qualify which ones are the best ones and you can attract them to your community.
Now the system works well also for just about any kind of nonprofit or ministry where you offer a service. That can be private high schools, colleges, and various types of counseling services, such as therapeutic treatment.
In the business world, it’s called lead generation. The people who know how to do it have it down to a science. Let me tell you, we here at Vocation Promotion study this all the time and we find the best practices and software available.
Our program is called the Come and See Vocation Promotion Program. Why not check it out?
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