Great story from ActivistFaith.org co-founder Dan King on how to take your friends on the journey with you on a mission trip. I would love to hear similar stories from any of you in the comments below.
As always, thanks for reading and sharing!
-Dillon
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For me it started out as a way to
document thoughts, observations, and memories throughout the trip. But
the cool part about it was that others back home would be able to read
my notes. The idea of taking our whole church on our mission trip to Haiti wasn’t fully realized until much later.
The concept was really pretty simple: I tweet, they read.
I never expected to experience what ended up happening.
Let me start by telling you how I set everything up. It’s an important part of how this whole thing worked itself out.
First I had to make sure that I had a mobile phone that would work down in Haiti. I could’ve gone with a pay-per-use phone from one of the local carriers like Digicel or Voila.
Using
this approach would have guaranteed that I’d have phone service that
worked down there, but would’ve required me to a great deal of ‘set-up’
once I got the new (temporary) phone from a local dealer outside the
airport.
Luckily
my provider (Verizon Wireless) has a cool global plan that I was able
to get with unlimited data for about $20.0o (prorated for the time I
used it). And since my DROID (unfortunately) didn’t work on the GSM network, I even got a loaner Blackberry for only the cost of shipping (about $10).
The Power of Twitter
Then the key to the whole plan was centered around Twitter.
After installing a Twitter app (UberTwitter worked best for me) on the Blackberry, then I was well on my way to sending the updates and photos (via TweetPhoto) to everyone back home.
Everything
else was about how I streamed the updates to people who wanted to
follow along. Here’s a quick list of the various elements involved with
making it as easy as possible for people to connect:
- Obviously, they could follow my Twitter stream directly. Some even set up text message alerts for my tweets so they would instantly get the updates on their mobile phone as they happened.
- I also have Facebook
set up to use my Twitter updates to update my Facebook status. Then I
would get emails from Facebook when people commented on my Facebook
statuses. This became an important part of the back-and-forth
communication. More on that in a minute… - The Twitter Tools plugin for my self-hosted WordPress
blog gave me the ability to create a ‘daily digest’ post automatically
with a list of my tweets throughout the day. This gave many the ability
to look at one post each day and see everything that we did throughout
the day. Check out this example to see what one of these posts looks like. - Even
though people could subscribe to the blog to get updated about new
posts, I still tried to make it easier for them by creating a central
page that I could update (with the WordPress plugin for Blackberry) that
had all of the latest links and even a Flickr gallery (also updated via
Blackberry). I even gave it a custom URL to make it as simple as
possible for people to remember how to get there: http://bibledude.net/haiti - Finally, NetworkedBlogs on Facebook allowed me to easily feed the blog posts onto the walls for my personal profile, my blog’s page, and the church’s page.
The
only thing that I had to do to make all of this tick was to send
updates to Twitter. After all of this, I was certain that people would
be able to get the updates that they wanted.
As I got emails from
Facebook with people’s comments on the status updates, I thought it
would be cool to share some of the encouragement that people back home
were sending. Most of it was simple feedback like, “Wow! How cool!
Praying for you guys!”
But I wasn’t expecting what happened next…
One
day when we were out in a remote village delivering food I snapped a
picture of some of our people singing and dancing with the locals. It
was a great icebreaker as we started connecting with these people, many
of whom haven’t had anything substantial to eat in about three weeks.
Within
about 15 minutes of uploading this tweet/photo, I got an email
notification from someone who had commented on the photos that I was
sending. It was from a full-time missionary (from our church) who is
living/serving in Morocco. She wanted me to let one of the ladies in the
photo know that she needed to put on some sunscreen because she was
looking a little burnt.
That single comment shattered all of the
constraints of time and distance that I previously had in my mind, and I
quickly realized that we weren’t just sending little notes back home…
we are ALL on this trip together. After that we started sharing
updates back and forth, and people back home (and all around the world)
opened up conversation with us. The prayers and encouragement that
people were able to send to us ended up being very specific and
targeted, just as if they were there with us.
I don’t think that our church will ever do a mission trip again without a strong social media strategy as a core part of what we do.
It
turned out to be a great way to allow our whole church to be involved
well beyond writing a check ahead of time and hearing a few short
testimonies afterwards.