Subtitled “Blogging Converts, Onling Activits, and Bishops Who Tweet,” the book: “The Church and New Media” is a great read for anyone involved in parish ministry or.. who isn’t!
To learn more about the book, please visit ChurchandNewMedia.com
One way to easily evangelize & catechize with the New Media is to grab snippets of Fr. Robert Barron’s “Catholicism” series from YouTube and share them on Facebook, via email, and on our websites.
Matthew Warner (who blogs for the National Catholic Register and who created flockNote.com) has compiled a handy list on his YouTube channel at http://youtube.com/matthewwarner
Here are some samples:
If you click on any of the above images, you will be taken to the YouTube page where you can view the video. This series of ten 45-50 minute videos can be purchased from Amazon as a 5 DVD set. Here’s a handy quick link to the purchase page: http://j.mp/cathseries
Here are some additional helpful and trustworthy Catholic YouTube channels:
http://youtube.com/wordonfirevideo
http://www.youtube.com/wordonfirevideo2
http://www.youtube.com/spiritjuicestudios
Email can be a very effective tool in ministry and apostolate work, if we know how to employ it effectively and manage it well.
Baydin recently analyzed its database of over 5 million emails to generate helpful advice regarding what words to use and not use when composing effective emails. Want people to read and engage your emails?
Don’t use words such as
Rather, use words like
The data also suggests the best time to send emails is before work. Users who scheduled messages to read later, most often wanted to deal with them around 6 a.m. (Hint: Using a service that schedules emails may be a very good idea).
We encourage you to download, save, and study the infographic embedded at the bottom of this post. Right click on the image and choose “Save Link As…” or “Save Target As…” This will allow you to save the image in the folder of your choice directly on your computer. If you’re using a mobile device, such as an iPad, hold your finger down on the image, then choose “Save Image.”
flockNote is a communications solution built specifically with Catholic parishes and ministries in mind. It allows you to create subscription lists and manage your electronic correspondence in an effective manner.
We encourage you to read flockNote’s blog post titled “10 Challenges When Using Email To Reach Parishioners (And Overcoming Them).” In that post, Matthew Warner outlines the 10 problems and challenges we face and how flockNote solves each one of them.
The following instructions define how to go about recording, editing, and uploading a priest or deacon’s Sunday homilies in the form of a podcast. This blog entry will also show how this process can be automated to where:
All of the above in one blog entry! Ready? Set… Go!
Step 1: Use an Audio Recorder
Here’s a good one that’s very affordable off of Amazon:
Olympus WS-600S Digital Voice Recorder 142610 (Silver)
Place this recorder on the ambo and hit “record” just before you begin and “stop” when you are finished.
If you’d like better audio quality, attach a wired lavalier to the input in the recorder and wear the recorder, just as you wear the lavalier for the sound system. Here’s a good one that fits the Olympus recorder:
Or, you can hook your audio recorder directly into your church’s audio system, if it has an audio output. In that case, you’ll need someone to hit ‘record’ and ‘stop’ for you.
Step 2: Transfer the file and edit it
By using a simple USB connection, you can transfer the audio file from the recorder to your desktop computer. Then, you can edit it with some audio editing software. The main reason you may need to edit it would be to remove any unwanted audio from the beginning or end of the recording. Be sure to save, publish, or export it as an MP3 file on your computer. For example: myhomily.mp3
For free audio editing software, I recommend:
Step 3: Sign up for an account with Liberated Syndication
Go to http://libsyn.com and sign up for the “Libsyn Classic 50 + stats – $7.00/month” plan. When you are signing up, you will be asked to provide a “Show Slug.” This is part of the URL or link to your podcast. I recommend using your name. For example: frjonathan
Step 4: Publish your homily to Libsyn.com
Once you log into http://libsyn.com, click the “Publish” button. Enter a title and short description. Upload your file. Click the green “Publish” button.
Once the file has been published, it is now accessible at http://yourname.libsyn.com and the RSS feed to your podcast is http://yourname.libsyn.com/rss
(To learn about what an RSS feed is, watch this video or read this Wikipedia entry)
Step 5: Set up the widget on your website
Now, we’ll embed the widget on your parish website, which will automatically pull in your podcast episodes from your RSS feed and allow the user to listen to your homilies directly on your parish website! The best part about this is that it is automatic. You never have to update your website after you get it set up.
Here’s the embed code, which you may copy/paste:
<script type="text/javascript"
src="http://saccatholic.com/assets/swfobject.js"></script>
<div id="mediaspace" style="border: 1px solid black; width: 620px;">
This text will be replaced</div>
<script type="text/javascript">// <![CDATA[
var so =
new SWFObject('http://saccatholic.com/assets/player.swf','mpl','620','400','9');
so.addParam('allowfullscreen','true');
so.addParam('allowscriptaccess','always');
so.addParam('wmode','opaque');
so.addVariable('playlistfile','http://yourname.libsyn.com/rss');
so.addVariable('playlistsize','380');
so.addVariable('controlbar','top');
so.addVariable('playlist','bottom');
so.addVariable('playlist.thumbs','false');
so.write('mediaspace');
// ]]></script>
Simply embed the above code upon whatever webpage you would like for the player to appear. Be sure to change yourname to the slug you picked in step 2 above.
Also, note that, in the embed code above, http://saccatholic.com/assets/swfobject.js and http://saccatholic.com/assets/player.swf are assets hosted at saccatholic.com. You may wish to download these two files and place them your web server. If you do, be sure to change the URLs to reflect the change. For example: http://yourdomain/foldername/swfobject.js or player.swf
The player will end up looking something like this:
If you would like to see an example of the above player in action, visit this link.
Step 6: Submit your podcast to iTunes
Many people search for and download podcasts from Apple’s iTunes library. They do this at iTunes.com (For an example, click here) or through the iTunes app on their Mac, PC, iPod Touch, iPhone, iPad, etc.
To submit your podcast to iTunes, first make sure that iTunes is installed on your computer. You can get it at iTunes.com.
Step 7: Setup email subscription through Feedburner
Google’s Feedburner service allows for free email subscription to any RSS feed.
Those instructions in Step #7 above will show you how to embed an email subscription widget in your parish website so visitors can easily give their email address and click a “subscribe” button to get on the email notification list. You will also be given a link that you can email folks, which when clicked upon, brings you to the same email subscription form.
Step 8: Get the Word Out!
Last, but not least… tell anyone and everyone about your new podcast! Toot your horn and let folks know they can listen to it on the website, subscribe by RSS feed or email, and even find it and listen to it through iTunes.
Finally, pour yourself a drink to celebrate your accomplishment in getting Jesus’ Word out the world.
Have you ever seen an outstanding video on a webpage (e.g., on YouTube) and wanted to download it so you could show it to a group of people later, when you don’t have access to an Internet connection? Watch this tutorial:
By downloading a video to your disk drive, you can then view or show it when you do not have an Internet connection. A case-in-point would be to show a video like this one to a group of Confirmation students by connecting your laptop to a television or to a digital video projector (as well as a pair of external computer speakers).
If there was just one Catholic new media blog you should follow as a parish ministry leader, check out Catholic Tech Talk.
The Catholic Tech Talk blog features relevant, practical posts that will assist you. Topics of recent blog entries include:
Ever seen those cool boxes on websites that say “We’re on Facebook.” with the number of current likes, the ability to ‘like’ the page, and even photos of people?
Here’s a link to the Facebook like box generator. It creates the code that you can then embed on your parish or ministry website. Of course, you’ll need a Facebook page first. You can create one here.