It seems Amazon has finally caught up with all of the preorders and early purchases of The Church and New Media. They now show the book to be “In Stock” once more, so if you haven’t already ordered your copy, now’s the perfect chance!
Monthly Archives: August 2011
Interview with Laura Durington (Catholic Relief Services)
While putting together The Church and New Media, I had the chance to interview a number of new media experts. Unfortunately, I couldn’t fit all of their tips and advice into the book. But there were so much good advice that begged to be shared. So through our regular interview series here on the blog, we’ll continue unpacking more of that wisdom.
Today we talk to Laura Durington. 
Before working for CRS, Laura lived in South Africa and helped develop training manuals for the treatment of HIV as part of a Harvard-AIDS Institute funded project.
1. Why, in particular, does CRS see it important to use New Media–blogs, Facebook, YouTube, etc?
Catholic Relief Services has been using social media for the past four years. We have found it to be an invaluable asset that gives us the opportunity to engage with and educate our supporters on global issues. We can listen to what they have to say, and often facilitate a dialog among our supporters.
Additionally, the viral nature of social media affords us a way to further our reach to audiences we may not have traditionally had access to, ultimately increasing awareness of CRS and the work we do.
2. In what ways does New Media both aid and inhibit Catholic activism?
Social media is an exemplary platform where we can offer our supporters small actions they can take every day, and that ultimately helps support the work we do. These actions might be to call their congressional representatives, or to take a pledge to pray, and sometimes to donate to an emergency. Even if the action is simply to read a story on our website about our work or on a particular issue, we value the idea that the more informed our constituents are about the plight of the world’s poor, the better for everyone.
The downside is that because the online nature of social media affords a sense of anonymity, sadly we’ve found on a few occasions having to remove comments that were needlessly aggressive, insulting or offensive to our other supporters while doing nothing to advance the conversation. We welcome all points of view but we’ve had to institute a comments policy that we reserve the right to delete these types of comments.
An additional, possible downside, is that only time will tell if the most engaged supporters will eventually make the best donors, or if all of these small actions will leave supporters feeling as if they have already acted on our behalf and feel as if they have given their support without making a donation. It will be interesting to look back in five years.
3. How can New Media be used in service of Catholic social teaching?
Pope Benedict XVI has noted that New Media furthers the values of Catholic Social Teaching, including creating bonds of solidarity, serving the common good, empowering the poor and vulnerable and offering access to powerful communication tools that encourage subsidiarity.
Pope Benedict, in his message for last year’s World Communications Day, spoke about the “extraordinary potential of the new [digital] technologies, if they are used to promote human understanding and solidarity.” This is something we strive for with our social media efforts – by informing our supporters about issues adversely affecting the poor, we foster a deeper level of understanding of why these issues are so important, and why we must care for the neediest. Through our social media interactions, we invite our online community to live their faith in solidarity with the poor and marginalized as we bond together to pray, learn, act and give for our brothers and sisters overseas.
Additionally, we are often able to enlist our overseas communications officers to interview and post stories of the people we serve through our programming, giving a voice to the voiceless and shining a light in places where the mainstream media has overlooked.
4. How does New Media encourage more people to participate in the work of CRS?
By giving people small doses of information we find that it is an easy way for supporters to keep up with our work overseas. We nearly always try to make our posts timely, relevant, and interesting, with an opportunity to do something further (pray, read a story on our website, take an advocacy action, donate, take survey, watch a video.)
One interesting phenomenon we witnessed in the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake was that people came to our Facebook page in droves looking for the latest information coming out of Port-au-Prince. Our number of Facebook “Fans” (as they were called then) went from just barely 6,000 to over 15,000 in just a few weeks. Our Facebook page has continued to flourish with the help of our very dedicated and passionate supporters who have given us thoughtful comments, great suggestions, and glowing testimonials.
Be sure to follow Catholic Relief Services on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.
How to Get “The Church and New Media” Into Your Library
Check out this awesome story from Michael B. in Minnesota:
“Last week, shortly after the release of The Church and the New Media, I e-mailed the library staff at my local Catholic university here in Minnesota, of which I am an alumnus, and strongly suggested that they add a copy to their collection. I am pleased to report that after checking their online catalog earlier today, my alma mater’s library ordered a copy of The Church and the New Media.
It will probably be a couple months before it hits the shelves there, but at least one Catholic college library system will have a copy of the book. I also suggested the book for purchase at a couple public library systems in the state where I have borrowing privileges. I’ve done this in the past with other Catholic books, such as Pope Benedict’s encyclicals, using the “suggest an item for purchase” form that almost all public library systems have.
You do need to have borrowing privileges at the library you suggest in order to recommend it. The form will ask for information, such as the title, author, publisher, ISBN, and retail price, which you can easily find on a website like Amazon.com. Once the form is submitted, if the library orders the item they will usually place it on hold for you, and so, not only will you be getting quality Catholic books such as The Church and the New Media into your college or public library’s collection, you will also likely be among the first people to read those books!
If it can be done in Minnesota, then it can be done across the country, and so I highly recommend that my fellow Catholics utilize a similar strategy to get quality Catholic books such as The Church and the New Media into your college and local library systems. The libraries probably won’t order everything you suggest, but I’ve gotten a fair amount of the books I’ve suggested into the public libraries in my area.”
Resources on New Media and Catechesis
I’m going to be giving a half-dozen talks in September, in and around Des Moines, Iowa, all on the topic of new media and catechesis. As I’ve prepared my talks, I’ve gathered many different resources to help teachers, catechists, school principals, and anyone involved in faith formation to use tools like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and blogs.
Click on the banner below to head over to the Resources page, which now includes many resources on “New Media and Catechesis”.
Sample from the Book
Your Purchase Helps
100% of the royalties from the book will go toward establishing school computer labs throughout the Archdiocese of Mombasa, Kenya. In addition to providing computers, the students will be trained in computer literacy skills – their ticket to the “digital continent”.
You can see pictures here , and make an additional donation) through Catholic Relief Services.
Site Design Acknowledgement
Spirit Juice Studios, as featured in the book!
Mormons, Catholics, and Online Success
Posted on August 20, 2011
While preparing some talks I’m giving on New Media, I was struck with a realization: the two fastest growing religious groups in our country are also the two with the strongest online presence–Mormonism and Atheism. I’ll save Atheism and its aggressive new media evangelism for another day, but right now I’ll focus on Mormonism.
A recent article in Mail Online highlights the digital success of the Mormon community (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints):
What’s the secret to their incredible success? The answer is something we touch on in the Church and New Media book. In the sidebar dedicated to Devin Rose, Devin explains how important it is for faithful Catholic websites to be high up in the Google results for search terms relevant to our faith. For example, if someone searches for “Catholic Church” we don’t want the first five articles to be written by anti-Catholic polemicists. Likewise if they search for “priests” we don’t want the first ten articles to be about the sexual abuse crisis.
The art of influencing these search result rankings is know as “SEO”–search engine optimization. There are plenty of guides and tips on how to improve your SEO around the Internet, and in fact it’s pretty big business in the online world. Corporations pay thousands of dollars to ensure their businesses will be near the top of search results.
In the religious world, however, SEO is often considered an unglamorous pursuit. But the Mormon community is single-handedly proving its power.
A major reason the Mormon community has attracted so many people through the Internet is simply because of its proximity and prevalence (the same holds true, by the way, for the atheist community.)
This should rattle us Catholics. The Catholic Church, the world’s largest and most influential offline religion, should not be satisfied with appearing low in search results. When someone searches digitally for “Jesus”, the Church should ideally be the first response, not the tenth or twentieth, just as she aims to be offline.
It’s clear that the Mormon community has devoted time, money, and–maybe most importantly–technological expertise to their online missionary efforts. It’s time we Catholics do the same. We need to take seriously the online mission field and equally invest in entrepreneurial evangelization.
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