Heard It at Council (April 2016)
April 12, 2016
Moderator Deb Washington opened the meeting with a prayer, reminding us that each of us is divined with special gifts to use as confirmed by the Holy Spirit. We are endowed to do good, to help others, to act as stewards, and carry our gifts forward as a demonstration of our faith.
Attorney Larry Bowers walked Council through two proposed policies: Gift Acceptance Policy and the Policy on Gifts of Real Property. The policies empower us uniformly to review gifts in order to determine whether they are appropriate, whether we can handle them, or whether they would actually become burdensome. Gifts of real property (roughly real estate in legalese) would be encompassed by both the Gift Acceptance Policy and the Policy on Gifts of Real Property. In almost all cases, and especially with gifts that are made as part of the Capital Campaign, the goal would be to convert the items to cash as expeditiously and efficiently as possible. Both policies were approved by Council.
Brian Fluharty, Chair of the Communications Committee, conducted a social media teach-in for the benefit of Council, outlining Old South Church’s web presence and its extension into Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other platforms. Our website’s contents are both static and dynamic. While segments such as directions and staff members’ names largely remain the same week after week, others such as sermons and announcements are ever-changing. Almost two-thirds of the site’s traffic is comprised of visitors. We have the first position among search results for those seeking “Liberal/Progressive Church Boston”! About 30 percent of our website searches come from mobile devices. The most frequented page of our site is the photo gallery followed by sermons, then history. Weddings is # 17 while use and rental is # 18.
A subdomain, pray.oldsouth.org (which is still under construction) features some of the handwritten prayers left in the Sanctuary Prayer Box, inviting visitors to our website to pray the prayers left in person. Discussion took place regarding the best way to communicate these prayers, each of which is read by clergy during the week. While there would be some advantages to posting all prayers verbatim online, the task involved in organizing and maintaining them would be enormous. Additionally, confidentiality must always be a concern. Nancy reflected that the very acts of writing, by hand, the prayer and the physical releasing of the paper into the prayer box are themselves affirming. Our open doors will continue to welcome that tradition.
Anthony particularly commended the website, managed by Amy Perry, for its aesthetics and ease of navigability.
Regarding Facebook, there is a tremendous opportunity to communicate with numbers unheard of in the past. Facebook has nearly 1.4 billion users monthly, 70 percent logging on every day, sharing one million links every 20 minutes. Three-quarters of its users are 18-34 year olds. This kind of non-traditional advertising is cheap and relatively easy. Old South Church has 4,000 “likes”; the largest number came after the disavow post and the scarf project.
As for Twitter, 288 million log in monthly and 36 percent log in daily. There are 9,100 tweets/second. Here, too, there are multiple opportunities to target through communication. At Brian’s last count we had 1,179 followers on Twitter.
Then there are Instagram, a photo sharing site for photos and short videos, Yelp, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Youtube, Google Plus and, no doubt, more to come. For now, our Communications Committee encourages everyone to Like, Tweet, Yelp positively, express Pinterest, to interact with and reach out to the world through this vast medium.
There was a sneak preview of upcoming recommendations from the Stewardship Committee regarding a revamp of the pledging process as well as a possible change of the annual meeting to coincide with the season of giving.
Sadly, Seminarian Intern Amelia Nugent will conclude her internship on May 15th. She will continue to work with GBIO on homelessness.
Robert Gabler, Clerk