The sun is out here in the northern Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, where your social hour editor got not only 2 1/2 feet of snow, but a lovely head cold and a case of pink-eye to boot, so I wouldn’t have made it to church even if today’s services hadn’t been canceled. But our Facebook fans gave us even more ideas for things to do to stay spiritually connected during weather/disaster-related closings in comments to our post on such from Friday:
– Check out webcasts from other parishes. Esteban Girón plugs that of his, Trinity Wall Street: “My parish does a fantastic online webcast every week. I know this because sometimes I don’t quite make it downtown in time!”
– Beatrice Brady Thompson suggests that parishes help put together and distribute home emergency kits. “Here in hurricane country, these are a given, but elderly church members may need a hand putting them together. Homebound members who lose their safety net in these situations are really at risk. If you ask them if they need anything, 99.99% of the time they’ll tell you no. They may need encouragement to get to a shelter where electricity is insured. After Ike, many people here were out of power for weeks – no way to power home medical devices.” Here in Northern Virginia, some 200,000 households are still without power, and many municipalities aren’t creating shelters because there’s no way to get the people to the shelters.
– Greg Troxell offers pointers to free or low-cost tech tools that can help keep parishes connected to their parishioners, and ease that transition to new media if you’re interested in exploring it:
1) www.Ustream.com – live video broadcast your message and interact with via chat with members who have tuned in.
2) Host a Group Chat Session via tools such as skype, gmail, Google Wave, or add video with www.Paltalk.com
3) www.Phonevite.com – get the message out to everyone in seconds. It’s like phone tree, but very affordable and much easier to manage.
A technical note about Facebook entries: If you see a headline and no post, or a post saying “look at this” with no “this” linked, it usually means there is a video in the entry that didn’t get imported to the note.