Guiding Principles
The Church and Social Media: An Overview
Definitions
Guidelines
Establishing a Site
Social Networking with Minors
Personal Sites
How to Report and Monitor
Introduction
These guidelines are offered as a synthesis of best practices. They include material compiled from church entities, for-profit corporations, and non-profit organizations. Suggestions and comments are welcome at commdept@usccb.org.
In this document, “church personnel” is defined as anyone—priest, deacon, religious, bishop, lay employee, or volunteer—who provides ministry or service or is employed by an entity associated with the Catholic Church.
Last updated June 2014
Guiding Principles
“Communication is a means of expressing the missionary vocation of the entire Church; today the social networks are one way to experience this call to discover the beauty of faith, the beauty of encountering Christ. In the area of communications too, we need a Church capable of bringing warmth and of stirring hearts” (Pope Francis’ Message for the 48th World Communications Day [WCD], 2014).
Social media is fundamentally changing how people communicate. Our Church can not ignore it; in fact, it is our responsibility as Catholics to bring the Church’s teachings into what Pope Benedict XVI called the “digital continent.”
As Pope Francis wrote in the 48th World Communications Day message, “The revolution taking place in communications media and in information technologies represents a great and thrilling challenge; may we respond to that challenge with fresh energy and imagination as we seek to share with others the beauty of God.”
The Church can use social media to encourage respect, dialogue, and honest relationships—in other words, “true friendship” (Pope Benedict XVI’s Message for the 43rd World Communications Day, 2009). To do so requires us to approach social media as a powerful means of evangelization and to consider the Church’s role in providing a Christian perspective on digital literacy.
Before beginning work on social media guidelines, consider reading all of the World Communications Day messages issued since 2006, since each message focuses on social media.
The Church and Social Media: An Overview
Social media offer both opportunities and challenges to Catholic organizations. These can be grouped into three primary categories:
Visibility
Community
Accountability
Visibility
Online social media communities are vast and are growing at a rapid pace. For example, there are now more active Facebook accounts than there are Catholics, worldwide. Given the size and scope of these communities, they offer excellent forums for the Church’s visibility and evangelization.
The key question that faces each church organization that decides to engage social media is, How will we engage? Careful consideration should be made to determine the particular strengths of each form of social media (blogs, social networks, text messaging, etc.) and the needs of a ministry, parish, or organization. The strengths should match the needs. For instance, a blog post may not be the most effective way to remind students of an event. However, a mass text message to all students and their parents telling them that the retreat begins at 9 a.m. may be very effective.
Because of the high volume of content and sites and the dynamics of search engines and computer networking, social media require constant input and monitoring to make the Church’s presence effective. To keep members, a social networking site such as a blog needs to have new content on a regular basis. In the case of social media, the axiom “build it and they will come” is not applicable. It may seem paradoxical, when considering the fluidity of social media, but good planning and strategizing is as essential, if not more so, when approaching social media, versus traditional media.
Community
Social media can be powerful tools for strengthening community, although social media interaction should not be viewed as a substitute for face-to-face gatherings. Social media can support communities in a myriad of ways: connecting people with similar interests, sharing information about in-person events, providing ways for people to engage in dialogue, etc.
The use of social media should be well integrated into the overall communication strategy for the organization. Users move seamlessly across multiple platforms, receiving information and entering into dialogue using print, oral, video, and digital communications, in a variety of settings. Effective communication strategies recognize the expectations and preferences of the community and develop messages suited to those expectations and preferences.
A well-considered use of social media has the ultimate goal of encouraging “an authentic culture of encounter” (WCD message, 2014), or, to use the parlance of the practitioners, “creating engagement.”
With the rapid acceptance of digital social networks, the “digital continent” has become very crowded. The Church can be successful in being heard above the fray by creating engagement. Engagement is defined as the activity that happens around a message posted on a social network. This activity includes likes, comments, and shares. The more engagement that happens on a particular message, the more it will be seen.
Accountability
Social media provide tools for building community. Membership in communities also requires accountability and responsibility. Users of social media expect site administrators to allow dialogue, to provide information, and to acknowledge mistakes. The explosion of information available to social media consumers has meant that they often only use information from trusted sites or sites recommended by those whom they trust.
While not every demand or inquiry can be met, it is important that creators and site administrators of social media understand both how much social media are different from mass media and the expectations of their consumers. Creators and consumers of mass media generally accept their one-way conversations (letters to the editor being the exception). Social media’s emphasis is on the word “social,” with a general blurring of the distinction between creators of content and consumers of content. Many communication experts are describing the adaption of social media as a paradigm shift in how humans communicate, a development as important as that of the printing press and the innovation of electronic communication.