Call for Volunteers: Member Missionary Online Training Center Comes To Facebook

Selected members of the LDS Church have a chance to get involved as member missionaries online by teaming up with missionaries at  the Referral Center at the Provo MTC.  The RC missionaries are looking for volunteers to help them engage in the online process.  They solicit help through the use of a Facebook page to find possible people to help them gain ideas.  Then they have you give them your Skype name so they can call you on a weekly audio Skype chat to discuss ways of doing this or solicting ideas on ways they can improve the online missionary process.  If the missionaries and their leaders think you have something to contribute they will invite you to give them ideas at one or more of their sessions. You could end up becoming an online missionary or consultant depending on your skill set.

Second Wave of Approved Blogging LDS Missions: A Call to Help

Earlier I wrote about the New York Rochester Mission being the first to pilot LDS missionaries officially blogging. This week a second wave of missionaries from five other mission the California Santa Rosa Mission, Connecticut Hartford Mission, Louisiana Baton Rouge Mission, Michigan Lansing Mission, Pennsylvania Philadelphia Mission, and a special branch of the   Referral Center Mission (RC) Provo MTC  joined the approved blogging network.

Seven mission groups in total have come on board under the new blogging czar Michael Hemmingway.The RC missionaries are not an official mission yet so there are six missions participating and one branch of the MTC. There are about a dozen missionaries anticipated from each mission blogging or soon to be blogging and Facebooking.   The missions are in various stages from just beginning to having blogs and Facebook.  They are used a variety of methods from general Facebook pages to Facebook notes to single person blogs to group blogs. The blogs are mostly Blogspot but there are a few Word Press blogs. One mission the California Santa Rosa hasn't had time to put up any blogs. The California Santa Rosa Mission only has the mission president on Facebook so far.

The RC Missionaries: Special MTC Chatting Missionaries

During the last two months I have been in contact with Gideon Burton, a professor of rhetoric and a consultant to the Referral Center Missionaries at the MTC.  I had not heard about the RC missionaries but my daughter who served a couple of years ago was aware of them having run in to them at the MTC in Provo, Utah. I knew that there were links around the Internet that said "Chat with a Mormon Missionary" but I didn't know who was actually chatting with people.

Missionary Mingles & MTC Facebook Missionaries: New Innovative Method

Yesterday I discovered that the missionaries at the MTC have been approved for Facebook use this coming Friday. Apparently the new Social Media guru Michael Hemmingway from the LDS Missionary Department has given the go-live approval.   A special MTC team of social media consultants are working with this small cadre of missionaries to get the program up and running.

O, That I Were an Angel!: New Media for Mormon Missionary Work (Blog of the Month)

This past couple weeks I have been receiving emails from Gideon Burton, an English professor at BYU who specializes in rhetoric particularly relating to online blogging.  He and I agreed to collaborate on identifying good missionary blogs that he can use as examples for his students and for prospective future missionaries and their families. Today to my surprise I came across his newest blog O That I Were An Angel: New Media for Mormon Missionary Work that he has put up since our emails began. The blog is really graphically pleasing and has some really good insight in to the topic of missionaries using the new media. In his new blog, that has been active for only one week, Burton has already put up five posts.