My meeting hosted another Halloween event earlier this week. When we did it in 2022 we arranged to have flyers distributed by the homeowners’ association of development behind us but we missed the October mailing deadline this time. So a few members flyered in the neighborhood and it worked! Someone saw it and shared it on a parent chat for the nearby elementary school. A few further-off people came because of the Facebook event, which frankly surprised me.
Quaker Ranter
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Tag Archives ⇒ outreach
Cropwell Quakers The importance of Google listings
January 20, 2023
The blog archives will show that I’ve long been interested in Quaker outreach. As I’ve grown more involved at Cropwell Meeting in Marlton, N.J., this past year I’m learning some practical lessons for hyper-local outreach that I’ll share occasionally.
Two non-regular visitors to Quaker meeting this Sunday, one a first-time enquirer and the other a Friend making a special visit. Both saw our Google Maps entry first. One said that all the pictures there made the meeting look especially active. Good to remember that for a lot of potential visitors this is our homepage.
When I was in my wandering-between-meetings phase, visiting different meetings all the time, I’d often upload photos to Google Maps and update contact details as I was sitting in the parking lot before I left. Some of the Cropwell photos are from my first visit a year ago. Adding pictures is very easy and is a great way to help places we like look good to potential visitors.
At Cropwell we’ve also been posting events to Google (via Eventbrite, as I understand the process) and these also appear in Google Maps.
Generational strategies for Quaker outreach
August 5, 2018
From Emily Provance:
An under-45 communications strategy, in contrast, would mostly involve social media (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, possibly Tumblr or Pinterest). Articles would be short and would contain mostly content directly relevant to the reader — or, if the content were not directly relevant, it would be single-story narratives with an emphasis on personal impact. Announcements would come out through messenger apps or text messages, with a strong element of user control about which announcements to receive and which not. Photos and videos would be used frequently.
I’m always a bit wary of generational determinism. I think generational ideas are more like underlying trends that get more or less traction over time. And Quaker digital outreach in particular has been a thing for a quarter century now. But the underlying message — that some people need to be reached digitally while others are still best served by print — is a sound one and I’m glad Emily’s bringing it up.
But it’s still kind of sad that we still need to make this kind of argument. I remember having these discussions around an FGC outreach committee table fifteen years ago: surely we’re all on board about the need for digital outreach in 2018?
Who tells our story
May 31, 2018
Kathleen Wooten asks Who tells our story
Who tells our story in this time? In today’s world of immediate news, and social media, and everyone having a twitter account and an opinion – there’s a lot of misinformation out there. Some of it might be damaging and outright manipulative. Some of it might just be misinformed people, who are confusing Quakers (for example) with Amish folks, or Shakers.
One of the reasons I’ve been so involved in Quaker media is my longtime concern that we’re in increasing danger of being defined by outsiders. A mainstream site with a page on Quakers can easily show up higher in search results than pages we create. For a long time back in the day, an entry on Quakers written by some Unitarians on Religioustolerance.com was a top hit. Google and Facebook have long had more say in defining Quaker beliefs than any of our national organizations. Even when real-life Quakers are involved— in Facebook groups, Wikipedia editing, blogging, and the original Quaker.org — there was none of the kind of formal Quaker process (for better and worse) that historically characterized Quaker publishing.
One happy irony is that Kathleen herself came in through a channel with no Quaker involvement. She writes: ” I had never heard of Quakers until I took an internet quiz in my mid- thirties.” This is almost certainly the “Belief-o-Matic” Beliefnet quiz (confirmed in comments). The site was founded as a venture-capital-fueled attempt to win the advertising religion market in the heady years of what we retrospectively call the dot-com bubble. The original quiz dates further back to a still-going site called SelectSmart, which hosts dozens of quizzes (“Which Bond Villain Are You?,” “What Pizza Topping Are You?,” “Pink Floyd Album Selector”), one of the most popular of which is “Belief System Selector.” The site is Curt and Lori Anderson, a husband-and-wife team; he was the techie who programmed the quizzes; she hunted for content. She used online sources and her local library to coming up with questions for him to plug in for the belief quiz (read some of the story here and also here). Beliefnet started hosting it independently, giving it a UI refresh and renaming it Belief-o-Matic. For whatever reasons of wonky algorithms huge percentages of people who took the test came out as “Liberal Quaker” or “Orthodox Quaker.” No Friends were involved in the quiz, hence the archaic names (few Friends have identified as Orthodox for generations).
In the 2000s, this quiz was inadvertently far more successful in outreach than any program conceived by Friends (sorry PYM/FGC/Pendle Hill donors). I think we’ve all become better at media and telling our own story but Kathleen’s question — who tells our story in this time? — is still a key one. After all, Lori Anderson’s checklist of beliefs (on SelectSmart and Beliefnet) are probably one of the most-read definitions of Liberal Quakerism.
QuakerKathleen Updated July 2018
Lifting up the vocabulary
May 22, 2018
This week’s featured Friends Journal article is Selling Hope by Tom Hoopes. Hoopes is a teacher at George School, one of the two prominent Quaker boarding schools in the Philadelphia area, and he talks about the branding challenges of “Quaker values” which historic Quaker schools so often fall back on when describing their mission. We often describe these with the simplistic “SPICES” forumulation (Eric Moon wrote about the problems over-emphasizing these). Hoopes encourages us to expand our language:
We can use any number of descriptors that do not sound so haughty and nearsighted. I think we should continually lift up some key pieces of vocabulary that really do make the Quaker way distinctive. Here is a brief list, to which I am sure Friends can add others: “that of God in every person”; “the Inner Light”; “continuing revelation”; “discernment”; “sense of the meeting”; “rightly led and rightly ordered”; “Friend speaks my mind”; “the still, small voice within”; “way opening”; “clerking”; “query”; “worship sharing”; “expectant waiting”; “centering down”; “Quaker decision making”; “Quaker tradition”; “faith and practice”; “seeking clearness”; “Quaker testimonies”; and of course, “meeting for worship.”
Longtime FJ readers will remember a much-discussed 2008 article by Hoopes, “Young Families and Quakerism: Will the Center Hold?” It certain spoke to my condition as a parent struggling with family life among Friends:
Let’s look at some hard realities facing many Quaker parents of young children today. They are frequently exhausted and frazzled from attending to their children’s needs in addition to their own all week long. They desperately need a break from their own children, and they may feel guilty about that fact. They are often asked — or expected — to serve as First-day school teachers or childcare providers. Hence, their experience of meeting is not one of replenishment, but of further depletion.
I wish I could report that Philadelphia Friends took the 2008 article to heart.
Could Quakerism be the radical faith?
April 23, 2018
Isaac Smith wonders whether the title of Chris Venables’s recent piece, “Could Quakerism be the radical faith that the millennial generation is looking for?,” is following Betteridge’s Law of Headlines.
I’d put the dilemma of Quakerism in the 21st century this way: It’s not just that our treasures are in jars of clay, it’s that no one would even know the treasures were there, and it seems like they’re easier to find elsewhere. And how do we know that what we have are even treasures?
I gave my own skeptical take on Venables’s article yesterday. Smith hits on part of what worries me when he says current religious disengagement is of a kind to be immune to “better social media game or a more streamlined church bureaucracy.” These are the easy, value-free answers institutions like to turn to.
I’m thinking about these issues not only because of this article but also because Friends Journal is seeking submissions for thr August issue “Going Viral with Quakerism.” A few weeks ago I wrote a post that referred back to Quaker internet outreach 25 years ago.
Could Quakerism be the radical faith that the millennial generation is looking for?
Whassup Quaker Internet?
April 4, 2018
The August issue of Friends Journal will look at “Going Viral with Quakerism.” I wrote an Editor’s Desk post with some ideas of topics I’d love to see and some queries:
- Do we have a vision of what kind of Quakerism we’re inviting people into?
- Does growing necessitate casting off or re-embracing various Quaker practices?
- Can we point to specific and reproducible tasks that meetings have done that have led to growth?
- Are there models from other churches or social change movements that we could learn from?
- What are the dangers of over-focusing on growth?
- Is there really a possibility that Quakerism could become a mass movement?
- What would our Quaker experiences look like if our numbers rose even ten-fold?
One thing that’s missing there is the internet. Yet one of the most common things people want to talk about when we talk about growing Friends is the internet. I think we’ve gotten to the point at which we can’t just pin our hopes for future vitality of the Religious Society of Friends on the internet. It’s not a build-it-and-they-will come phenomenon, especially now that so much of the internet’s attention mechanisms are dominated by billion-dollar companies.
I went into the Friends Journal archives to get a little perspective on Friends’ evolving relationship with electronic media. The word “internet” first showed up near the end of 1992, in a short announcement of a new Quaker-themed listserv. In 1993 there was a fantastic article on electronic networks, The Invisible Meetinghouse. Written by Joel GAzis-SAx, it describes the Quaker Electronic Project as
an ongoing yearly meeting that Friends around the world can join any time. It is, at once, a library, a meetinghouse, a social center, and a bulletin board. W e have created both a community and a resource center…
Amazingly, many of the people mentioned in this article from 25 years ago are still active online.
The first “http” web address was published in Friends Journal in a 1995 issue. In June 2001 the magazine announced its own website; the word “blog” debuted in 2004, “Facebook” in 2007, “Twitter” in 2011. Obviously, the internet is great for outreach. But time check: we’ve been collectively reaching out online for a quarter century. Every organization has a website. Blogs and social media have become a settled tool in outreach.
Introductions to the web and techniques and how-to’s have been done. But how do these various media work together to advance our visibility? What kind of expanded outreach could happen with a little more focus? How does any online project integrate with real-world activity. I’m not naysaying the internet; obviously, I could give my answers to these questions. But I’d like to know what others think about our Quaker electronic projects a quarter century later?
What Do You Teach the Kids, Nones?
March 18, 2015
From Religion in the News, an interesting study on what “spiritual but not religious” parents (the “nones”) are looking for:
Many of [the nones] are nonetheless reluctant to impose their skepticism on their children, and will often outsource religious education by sending their children to a Protestant Sunday school or Catholic CCD or Jewish Hebrew School. But while, like other Americans, Nones “agree that everybody should be able to choose,” Manning said, “Nones won’t allow children to choose just anything.”
What I find interesting is parents’ willingness to outsource religious education to local institutions that have stronger beliefs that they themselves do — as long as the school program is relatively non-judgemental.
This actually rings true for me personally. Although I’m Quaker and my wife Catholic, the most regular outside-the-home religious ed my kids get is from the Presbyterian Sunday School in our town. We’ve picked it because it’s hyper-local, the teachers are nice and down to earth, and — well, they only focus on cross-denominational Bible stories and crafts.
In the Philadelphia area, Quaker schools are known as the go-to place for parents that want (and can afford) a progressive, ethical education that has a spiritual component but isn’t religious. If “nones” are looking for safe religious education on Sunday morning, it seems like it would be theoretically possible to extend that known “Quaker school” brand and reputation over to our First-day schools. It would be a tremenous outreach tool.
Alas, this is just idle speculation. I don’t see many local meetings that are able (willing?) to take on a big project like this. Some meetings would get consumed over internal disagreements on what to even teach. And then, well, I wonder if we have a deep enough bench of experience. A few years ago Philadelphia Yearly Meeting’s sessions overlapped with the Vacation Bible School at my local Presbyterian church. This is one small church in one small town and yet their VBS attendance was not that much less than the elementary/middle-school youth program at PhYM sessions. It was sobering to realize just how small we Friends sometimes are.