A Social Media Policy For Your Parish?
When I got involved in my parish, I was asked to help design the website and do other ‘internet stuff’. I wasn’t doing things alone, others were helping me. I assumed that publishing information on a parish website, using social media wouldn’t need a lot of explanation to people who were already using it for personal reasons. But soon I discovered this is not necessarily the case. Not everybody ‘gets’ New Media. Or realises that a parish website can never be a platform for your personal opinions. I saw that the Twitter account was mostly dead aside from some tweets on upcoming activities that were posted only a couple of days before the actual activity took place. This way the Twitter account was made completely useless. Being able to type 140 character messages does not guarantee that Twitter is used efficiently. How can a parish use all the new tools and use them in an efficient way?
After doing some online research, I found out that lots of parishes are struggling with Social Media and their proper use. On Catholic Tech Talk I found a suggestion about creating a Parish Social Media Policy. I honestly never considered doing that. First, because I don’t like red tape and creating all kinds of manuals people never read and second because I was naive enough to assume young people were smart enough to figure out how to use the new tools they were using in their personal lives already.
If you are a parish and you think about getting a website and social media accounts, ask yourself the question why you need that. Sometimes it seems that parishes get blogs and Twitter accounts because everybody has them. In those cases it’s only natural that they won’t be used because nobody has a clear idea what to do with them. Or, people who use a social media account may start to think they ‘own’ it because they have the login credentials.
In our case, when the person using our twitter account with all it followers became inactive, it meant that nobody had access to that account anymore. We got no response after asking the login credentials and had to give up the account. We ended up creating a new one, but in doing so we lost all followers from the old account. This made me realise that a social media policy is very important to have for parishes, if only for the sake of continuity.
When setting up blogs, social media accounts and even e-mail addresses, it’s important that those using it are fully aware of the fact that it’s not theirs, that personal opinions cannot be shared on that account and that administrators are able to log in and see what is being written. This also applies to e-mail. I would encourage people using an official parish e-mail address to only use that for parish-related affairs and keep personal correspondence in their private account.
In the upcoming weeks I will try to write a digital communication policy for our parish. In the meanwhile I’m curious to other people’s experiences with the use (and abuse) of digital communication in their parishes or dioceses.