Working Together as a Parish to Embrace New Technology

We had a chance to chat with Katie Kalarovich (self-proclaimed to be Uno’s biggest fan!) from St. Joan of Arc parish in Candler, North Carolina. St. Joan of Arc is a vibrant parish that is home to dozens of active ministries that serve their parish and community beyond. Katie was kind enough to detail how she helped launch Flocknote at the parish.

The parish held two Sign-up Sunday weekends in a row at all Masses. Two weeks prior, they started by displaying posters asking people to bring phones to Mass. Seeing posters to bring your phone to Mass sparked interest.

They also engaged and intrigued parishioners with teasers in the bulletin in weeks leading up. One for instance, read: How would you like to get a text that Mass is canceled before driving in the car on the icy roads?

For the two Sign-up Sunday weekends, the parish pulled out all the stops! For starters, they used the Sign-up Sunday script – that’s available on our website – exactly as it is written. Katie even introduced a little stuffed lamb as Uno’s relative when she introduced Flocknote. “I found my daughter’s TY beanie baby and it looked like Uno’s daughter so I adopted that little lamb.”

Katie gathered a team of 11 people to help launch Flocknote at the parish, and she trained her team with Flocknote’s training videos. “The team members were available to help people troubleshoot when they were signing up.”

Parishioner Rob Berls also had two posters made out of a postcard the parish received from Flocknote – he blew up the postcard and placed it on a foam board, which was not too expensive, and made a big impact. One of the posters is now converted into signage for the parish help desk after Masses and at events. (If you’d like a custom flyer with your church’s text-to-join info and URL, click HERE).

When asked about how they communicated before Flocknote, Katie shared “Our less-than-robust website, the bulletin, and announcements on Sunday were basically all we used for communication. Other ministries had their own avenues to communicate that weren’t connected with anything else. We realized we couldn’t do a survey or anything like that with our current form of communication.”

“A majority of the response from parishioners is really positive. A small minority were hesitant, back in the day, people were fine with riding the horse and they didn’t trust Henry Ford with his Model A. There’s just a mindset we haven’t got through.”

You can read more here: How to Hold a Signup Sunday

This short video was taken from an episode of The Finding Uno Show, a fun & free show hosted by Flocknote Founder & CEO, Matthew Warner. Watch or listen to the full episode at FindingUno.com.