Social Media Tools to Spread the Word of the Teacher

Our Module 6 Blog assignment this week came at the perfect time.  I am amazingly blessed to be serving on the Board of Directors for the Center for Action and Contemplation (CAC), a 501C3 in Albuquerque, NM.  I am on a retreat and board meeting where we are planning our direction for the next three years.  We are finding it interesting that as we sit in our meeting talking about how the tools of social media can help us achieve some of our goals, we are in a monastery with no cell service or access to the Internet.  When we asked one of the monks if they had access to cellular data, he asked: “What’s that?”.  Hmmm, what a surprisingly refreshing question.  

The founder of the CAC is Fr. Richard Rohr.  For more than forty years he has been traveling the world sharing his word, writing books, leading conferences, creating and operating a men’s spirituality program, and serving on panels with other spiritual leaders.  He is living his life calling and feels divinely inspired in his messages.  In March of 2013, Fr. Richard turned 70 years old.  Two years ago he told us he was going to retire from traveling on the road when he turned 70.  For most of his life, he has spent more than half of each year on the road, and he wants to be able to be more monastic in his life, teach individuals and small groups, write more books, be able to minister personally to the marginalized more frequently, and only travel to events when and where he wants to, mostly staying in New Mexico. 

This comes at a time when his work has become more widely recognized and his popularity has increased.  His last two books, Falling Upward and Immortal Diamond have both reached the Amazon best seller list.  He has more than 84,000 followers of his daily meditations and there are nearly 12,000 fans of the CAC Facebook page.  Fr. Richard was recently on a panel with the Dalai Lama and other globally recognized spiritual leaders at the Festival of Faiths, and every conference he has done for the past five years has been sold out with waiting lists.  There are many seekers of Fr. Richard’s messages, so at a time when he wants to be less available both globally and frequently, he is being sought more globally and frequently.  As a board, we have worked together with the CAC to create the Living School of the Rohr Institute with several program offerings to support Fr. Richard’s passion for teaching.  One program offering is a multi-year curriculum with Fr. Richard and several other Master teachers, where Cohorts of twenty-five students at a time study through a delivery mechanism that combines in-person, online and distance education.  Another offering is an online education program where students can attend a variety of multi-week individual courses.  Finally, Fr. Richard has still been leading one conference per year for one thousand participants.  The dilemma is that there is still a large community of followers who are not being served by Fr. Richard now that he has significantly reduced his travel and activity calendar.  There are an increasing number of requests for his time and presence and we are trying to figure out how to serve them while honoring Fr. Richard’s request.

With this as my framework for our assignment this week, combined with one of the areas of focus I have on the CAC board (technology), I came up with a plan for how to use social media to talk with Fr. Richard’s followers and have them talk together so we can learn how they want to be served, and offer ways to serve them.  To support this, I am recommending we leverage three tools of social media. 

The first tool I am recommending is a social networking site.  Facebook has pages that are for businesses, organizations or communities instead of individuals.  I am recommending we create a Facebook community page focused on the conversation around how followers of the CAC want to be reached now that physical conferences around the world will be significantly reduced.  As a board we have identified the importance of making sure we understand how his followers want to be reached and communicated with so we serve them well.  We know their requests will be diverse, but if we create conversation with them and encourage them to create conversation together, they will be participating in the design of how we facilitate the ways of reaching them.  Facebook is a good tool for this because it is so widely used, with more than 1.15 Billion users globally, it is already a tool designed for conversations, and it is supported on almost all digital platform alternatives.  To make followers aware of this new Facebook page, I am recommending we leverage the targeted touch points that already exist with Fr. Richard's followers and provide them information about, and a link to, this new community page.  These touch points include the CAC webpage, the CAC Facebook page, Fr.Richard’s Twitter (something he has bravely joined and is way outside his comfort zone), the CAC daily meditations delivered through email, and the CAC print periodicals.

The second tool I am recommending is webcasts.  These will allow Fr. Richard to be a virtual leader who is visible but not physically present.  There are a number of benefits of this offering.  First, since he has a global following, he can have webcasts during the local timeframes of countries around the world instead of people having to watch, for example, at 2am.  People can watch in small community groups where they can talk together afterward, so everyone doesn’t need to be in a single room in a single location.  This cuts down the cost for people to have access, since they don’t have to travel or take time away from work.  It helps serve one of Fr. Richard’s goals which is to help people become multipliers of how his teachings have touched their lives.  Because of the capabilities of the technologies of webcasts, the sessions can be interactive.  This provides opportunities for both Fr. Richard and the attendees to have conversations and question and answer sessions, which helps satisfy the desire of his followers to be closer to him.  Finally, because these sessions are recorded, people who are not able to attend the session live can watch the session when they have time, the session can serve as a tool for groups to use, and individuals can watch it over and over to listen for what they may have missed the first time they watched and listened to the messages.  While I initially thought Google Hangouts might be a good option because it is free, it has a limitation of ten attendees at a time and that is too small a number.  I looked at Top 10 Reviews for Webinar Services.  Based on the limitations of the number of attendees on several of the options, and the lack of a mobile capability for some of the options, I chose Cisco WebEx.  Help & Support were highly rated, it has a robust suite of features, and it has a mobile option which addresses a global need.       

The third tool I am recommending is a Blog.  People who learn from Fr. Richard have often said his material is so deep they need help understanding it.  They identify that their lives are transformed by his teachings, but it is often after talking with other people and learning through how their interpretations and perspectives are applied to Fr. Richard’s teachings.  At conferences, this is served through scheduled times of conversation for people at the tables in the conference room, during periods of community meals, and during breaks.  Even at conferences, people have often said they would like more time to be able to talk with other attendees to help internalize his teachings.  In addition, they have identified they would like to have communities they can share with after the conference, so they can better integrate his teachings in to their lives.  A blog creates a platform that invites conversation and doesn’t limit the community of contributors.  It is different than a posting on Facebook, because each conversation will stay with the original teaching and be archived for easy retrieval so if someone comes to the Blog site in the future, they can see the list of Blog postings and select the one (or ones) they would like to read.  This also supports creating a body of work that can be used by groups for further teaching when it becomes relevant to them.  I have been following blogging expert Denise Wakeman for many years.  I went to her site to look for her recommendations for and comparisons of Blogging Platforms, and to learn how she would recommend choosing a platform powerful enough to support the traffic and need for a professional image this work would require.  Based on her Blog Platform Comparison Chart and the fact Denise uses WordPress herself, I selected WordPress.

As as final note, I chose Facebook as the tool for conversation to collect information for our use instead of a more formalized Internet survey tool like SurveyMonkey or Wufoo, because, while we would be able to collect statistics and the process would be more direct, we would not be able to hear what our followers were seeking, and they would not be as free to share and encourage conversation.