I just finished my Communications 101 class officially titled Mass Communications. It was a
pre-requisite and I thought it would be a straightforward and simple class. It was in a way, but we got to participate in a huge event that just so happened to count as my final for the class. Our class joined up with an organization called The More Good Foundation and other sponsors, including the church. We worked to put together a fair held on campus that was all about using social media to share the gospel. Elder Lund of the Seventy had taken charge of the event so it was able to become a bigger deal. Pretty much all of the YSA stakes in Provo were invited. The class was divided into groups that each was responsible for a platform. I volunteered to be the group leader for Pinterest.
Our job was to learn about the platform, and learn more about how we could share the gospel using it. We went to workshops held by those from the foundation and the Flashlight club on campus. (They used materials from this website, that has information that you might find useful or enlightening.) We had to prepare materials, activities, and distribution of info at a booth. On March 25th, our class manned booths around the student's center and we passed out flyers and promoted the big event which was on March 31st. It was promoted as a FHE activity so many student groups and families could come.
The night turned out very successful! We were busy all night long. We had created a pinboard of our own on a bulletin board behind us and as people came around we would ask them to write their own "pin" which could be a favorite hymn, scripture, or one or two words of wisdom. We also promoted a communal pinboard which you can see here.
Going into this, I had no idea about many of the ways you can be a missionary online. I also knew very little about the official online missionaries, who came to our class one day and talked about what they do. Did you know that mission has a 90+% retention rate? It's all pretty amazing.
Here's some news coverage of the event:
BYU Eleven News (you can see my laptop screen, shiny nails, and hear me say "and" around 0:57 seconds and 1:24)
The Universe (this one explains everything very well)
There were some amazing results out of this. Over 7,000 people came to the event. While there, each person was doing little bits of missionary work. Each group had three goals. Ours, for example, were to have
1. Have 500 people follow the Pinterest board
2. Have 250 people make their own pin
3. Have 500 people re-pin something LDS related or follow another LDS pinner
We were able to meet those goals. The one result from another group that stands out to me is that The Book of Mormon (the actual book) is now the #1 search result on Amazon. This means that before the two hour event started, the scriptures came up as #6 if one was to search "Book of Mormon." With hundreds of people giving their good reviews, it became #1. I think that's pretty neat. As I finish this month's post, here are my
Five Ways to Use Pinterest to Share the Gospel Online:
1. Share a quote from a general conference talk and have the image link to that talk on lds.org. Share uplifting messages from church leaders that would appeal to everybody in an nonintrusive way.
2. Create specific boards such as Girl's Camp Ideas, Lesson plans, Family Home Evening, Seminary, Family History, etc.
3. Pin your personal Mormon.org profile to your profile
4. Pin videos directly from YouTube (Mormon Channel,etc.)
5. Use hashtags such as #lds #ldsconf #BookofMormon in your descriptions
See you next month! (P.S. feel free to follow my board heh)
5 comments:
Super Cool Megan! Man to be a college student now and to take a communications class would be radically different from even 10 years ago! This looks like such a cool event and enlightening! Thanks for writing it all up. ps I worked the lunch hour for the secretary of the communication's department in college. I was supposed to answer the phone but I used it to "do" email too--which was kinda new; emailing friends and James in SL and Logan. Anyway the head of the department didn't have a computer in his office, he wrote much on a yellow legal stenos and had the secretary, type it up and send it out. I thought it was odd...and a little old school for 1995! I like the board your class put together!
That is so cool. I have done a few of the things you mentioned, but not all of them. And I had no idea there were specifically called social media missionaries! How cool is that? Thanks for posting! I learned a lot and enjoyed reading about it all.
Neat project, and I agree with Nora -- so much more exciting than my mass communications class in 1990. (Yes, I'm that old. Sigh.) There's so much trash on the internet, yet it's refreshing that church leaders see the positive benefits, and encourage us to be part of that force.
Wow, wow, wow! Knocked my socks off Megan!! So much hard work that really paid off. Thank you for doing the work and thank you for explaining it to us and sharing the results! I'm going to shared this around!!! And I'm going to get busy on Pinterest....
Your whole project is extremely interesting. I learned a lot from you and need to follow your board so I can learn more.Thanks for sharing all of your work.
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