Social media spreads Easter message

When Lutheran Church–Canada launched Operation Holy Week, March 23, the goal was to share the true meaning of Easter with as many people as possible through the website www.whatiseaster.ca. By Easter Monday, the site received more than 1700 visitors and the video by President Bugbee, Good News from the Cemetery, almost 2300 viewers.

“More than 1800 views came from links from e-mails or on websites, which means people were sharing the message,” noted Dr. Ian Adnams, LCC’s director of communications. “What I found really interesting was that the average visitor to What is Easter spent more than three minutes there, which is a long time for a webpage. People were reading what Easter is all about!”

The initiative used a number of social media vehicles to raise awareness of the site including e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, and the website www.whatyoubelieve.ca. A number of congregations added the links to their websites and members also sent emails and Twitter messages.

“About 76 percent of the visitors to the Easter site continued to the list of LCC congregations, hopefully looking for a place to celebrate Christ’s resurrection,” Adnams said. About 60 of LCC’s 320 congregations supplied information for Holy Week services, ten less than 2009.

Operation Holy Week also attracted interest from the secular and Christian media in Canada. Among those was a talk radio station in Kitchener, Ontario which conducted a telephone interview with President Bugbee.

LCC Communications will put together similar initiatives for Thanksgiving and Christmas. Dr. Adnams admitted this is breaking new ground and that he “would like to hear ideas on how to improve this outreach and engage more people in using social media to spread the Good News.”

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