OUTSIDE THE BOX

SPRING 2019

THE STREAMING PARISH

NOT SO LONG AGO, PARISH COMMUNICATIONS WERE LIMITED to a handful of low-tech options: a printed weekly bulletin, a few 8½-by-11 handouts, posters and announcements from the altar. [In photo: St. Lawrence O'Toole Church, Brewster.]

With the arrival of the digital era, the game changed. Email, websites and social media provided promising new platforms from which parishes could trumpet their messages to parishioners and the world. For most parishes, however, the excitement didn’t last long. As well-funded commercial websites evolved, most parish websites and social media pages began to feel stodgy.

A few parishes, however, have found a way to use new media as a tool for dynamic communication and community building. When Sally Silvestro took on the role of communications director at St. Lawrence O’Toole in Brewster, she started by creating a brand for the parish. The first step, she says, was  “to create a logo for St. Lawrence O’Toole, then create a look and feel with typefaces that would be used for all the different communications.”

Next, she revamped their website. “I thought we needed to make it lighter and brighter,” she recalls. “There was a template available that was white and bright, where we could apply our logo colors, red and orange, and some of our typefaces. So we went and just cleaned everything up, then started adding great content.”

Today, the St. Lawrence O’Toole website features photo galleries, an up-to-date parish calendar, videos in which parishioners extol various educational and community programs, the week’s readings and audio recordings of the weekly homilies by the pastor, Fr. Richard Gill. “People love to listen to the homilies,” Silvestro says. “I get responses on that all the time.”

A similar transformation has taken place at St. Francis de Sales parish in upper Manhattan. In 2018, its website was looking dated – even though it was only five years old. “A year ago, you wouldn’t have been able to tell from the website what a vibrant, exciting community of faith we have here,” says Lydia Serrano, the parish’s communications director. “So the first thing we wanted to do was to make sure that what was going on in the community was reflected online.”

Serrano, who has a marketing background, was able to find collaborators within the parish. “We were lucky to have some parishioners who happen to be designers,” she says. “We were able to redesign the site, and now we are updating it constantly. We have a page for every one of our ministry groups. Our events page is updated every day, our news page every week. As often as possible we put up pictures, we put up blog posts. And we have a podcast. If you can’t be here on Sunday, you can listen on your phone to Fr. Philip Kelly, our pastor, or Fr. Tony Ciorra doing the homily.”

Fr. Philip Kelly, pastor of St. Francis de Sales Church, Manhattan, greeting parishioners after Mass. // Photo by Stephanie Massaro Photography.

Both Silvestro and Serrano stress the usefulness of social media. “We’ve been on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter for a few years,” Serrano says, “but we’re looking at it now as a way to build our community as opposed to just putting up pictures and announcements.” Serrano, who is bilingual, posts in both English and Spanish, and she is finding that Facebook provides a surprising opportunity to build a bridge between communities. 

In late 2018, the parish posted a Facebook announcement in two languages about a potluck fundraiser connected with the annual Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe. “So many of our English-language parishioners ended up coming to the potluck and donating money and enjoying the food,” Serrano recalls. “Just messaging things together in both languages unified people in a way that wasn’t happening before.”

Perhaps the biggest factor in the success of a parish’s digital communication is frequent updating of content. The day after the March for Life in Washington, D.C., St. Lawrence O’Toole posted a photo gallery of parishioners at the event. “People really responded to it,” Silvestro says. “They see pictures of their children or friends and they share the post. It lets them know what’s going on in our parish. It really does feel like a big community and a big family.”

For those wishing to enhance the digital communications at their own parishes, Serrano and Silvestro are quick to say that you don’t need to be a design pro to pull it off. “You just have to be consistent,” Serrano says. “If you had a great event yesterday, post those pictures! Put up a little blog post! If you have top-notch super-expensive high-quality content but you’re only doing it once a month, it would be better to have something home-grown that’s done every day so visitors can tell that the parish is active, that this is a parish they want to be part of.”

“Ultimately what we’re doing is evangelizing,” she adds. “It’s not that we’re reinventing the wheel. We’re doing what we’ve always done, we’re just doing it in new and exciting ways.”