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Facebook as a Major Method of Communication in Parish Religious Education Programs

In parish religious education programs communication with parents and catechists is important. Upcoming events, changes in the program, and classroom reminders are the most frequent communications. While some programs incorporate regular meetings with catechists not all programs have this ability. As a result most parish religious education programs rely on paper flyers, email, web site updates, or some combination of these.

Many parishes have websites but often these sites are maintained by volunteers who update the site based on their own availability rather than any urgency of the need for the posting. Email programs such as Constant Contact have been used successfully. The limitation with Constant Contact, however, is that parishioners must provide a valid email address and opt to receive messages. Many parents report to us that they are inundated with email and tend to disregard emails from institutions such as schools and the parish as information that doesn’t necessarily need immediate attention or they mistakenly believe they will read the email later.

In collaboration with our parish’s middle school youth minister we sought permission to create a Facebook page that targets parents and catechists involved in our K-8 program. Our belief was that a passive approach to communication for the recipient would be more successful. Once a user “liked” our page updates would automatically appear in the user’s newsfeed.

We met with several issues in the creation of the Facebook page. Facebook’s own use policies meant we had to link the page to one of our own personal accounts. Facebook does not allow users to have multiple accounts, for example a profile for my own personal use and a profile for work purposes. To administer a professional page one must be a user on Facebook. For those individuals who do not desire to use Facebook regularly this can simply be overcome by only managing the page for your parish and not using your personal page. This may provide challenging, however, if you do not have a working knowledge of how Facebook works.

With our office located within our parish school and using the school’s internet provider, we found that the firewall configuration of the internet blocks all users from Facebook and other social media sites. We obtained permission to access Facebook and received a bypass code that allowed access. Unfortunately the bypass code prevented us from uploading pictures or internet links. If we wanted to include either we had to use a computer not on the school’s network. Our parish policy on computer usage does not allow the use of home computers for work purposes without permission. Ultimately we did seek this permission and found that the Facebook page was more successful when images or internet links were included.

When seeking permission for this project we also agreed that no more than 15 minutes per day would be dedicated to this project. Initially posts were made as one of my first tasks of the day; however, this proved to be bad practice as our users tend to view their Facebook pages later in the day and may not scroll far enough down in their newsfeed to see our posting. By using Facebook’s analytics we found that posts made between 4 p.m. and 6 p.m. obtained more visibility and sharing. I found the analytics to be thorough and very helpful in identifying viewing trends. This allowed us to modify how and when we posted to the page and improved our visibility on Facebook.

Overall we are pleased with how the Facebook page has complemented communication methods used by our program. Initially acquiring “likes” was a challenge but as word has spread about our program having a Facebook page we have attracted more families and have had posts “shared” broadening our audience. During this two month project we received 68 likes. We average 6 new users per week. It is our plan to continue to promote the page and to update it at least once daily. While too early to determine if other methods of communication can be discontinued it should be noted that we had the best attendance at our First Reconciliation and Confirmation retreats than previous years. I attribute this to the multiple approaches of reminding parents - paper flyers, post cards, emails, and several Facebook reminders.