At our election this last April, the Regional Fraternity named a redesigned website as one of our top priorities. We have been so blessed by the gifts that our new Vocations Committee chairs, Bill Pansire and Walter Osterman, have brought to our Region, with their years of devoted service to our Order and talents in new technologies that can be used to help spread the Good News!
Explore, enjoy and provide feedback on several new features. Thanks to the incorporation of Google maps, the seeker can quickly and easily find a fraternity near them, and get contact information, and meeting place and time to “come and see”.
We’ve used Google translate to allow our brothers and sisters from other cultures to learn about our life, and to find one of our fraternities that are Spanish, Portuguese or Vietnamese speaking.
We have new pages for Ministries and Events, featuring our Regional projects, and allowing our Fraternities to share their apostolates. The Events page is wonderful, providing access to related flyers, Facebook pages, websites, and directions to the event location.
Our Minister’s blog allows for comments (uh-oh!). Please be compassionate!
The website is geared toward attracting new vocations, but also has wonderful resources for our existing Fraternities. We have included all the content from our old website, plus some new content.
We have the Regional Directory in our Resource page – password protected to guard against personal information being compromised, since we are a public site. Please ask your Fraternity Minister for the password. It gives us the ability to keep the Directory up to date on a regular basis, adding new information from our elections. The information is to be used for Secular Franciscan Order communication only.
The possibilities with this new platform are almost endless. Each Fraternity has the possibility of having their own page, so start some creative conversations on how you might use it. You could post your monthly newsletter, or share your upcoming Fraternity events. We will help you with concerns about security. We prefer not to provide contact information such as phone numbers and addresses on our website, since it is open to the public.
Please explore, enjoy and offer suggestions. This is only the beginning of this exciting new journey!
And, please – appoint a “Public Relations” contact for your Fraternity to provide our Webmaster with great photos and stories from your Fraternity!