One woman, 237 phone calls

I got a call last night from a person in my parish who is on the parish family album committee. She had some bad news. All the photos taken a few weeks ago of the parish teams and committees got lost, er erased it seems. The dark side of digital photography - easy to take photos and just as easy to lose them!

So, here she is faced with the daunting task of notifying everyone of what happened and informing them of the upcoming photo re-take. Time to put the phone chain in action. I get a call as leader of our parish web team to notify the members of my group, as will the other 21 group leaders. There are 22 groups in our parish, with a few hundred volunteers in total... good thing local calls aren't charged by the minute!

Wouldn't it be nice if there was an easier way for her to notify everyone directly, both the group leaders and members of each group, and get it all done in under 15 minutes?

Notification simplicity

One feature of DeoWeb that is getting more and more use lately is the message centre. The message centre is a simple yet powerful tool for anyone (with authorization of course) to send out a message to one or more groups of people in a parish or across the diocese. You simply type out your message, pick your group(s) and out it goes by email and / or fax.

The extra nice part is the groups and individual contact information are centralized on the web, so the parish secretary, priest, group leader or lay volunteer can use it to communicate. Individuals maintain their personal information, including their email address, so there isn't a need for an administrator to keep everything up-to-date.

Fr. Tony Man-son-hing, the Chancellor of the diocese uses the message centre regularly to keep priests informed on what is going on. Some of those priests receive the information by fax, but Fr. Tony doesn't need to know that. That information is also posted in a private section of the diocesan web site. He was pleased and surprised to see responses to his message after just 5 minutes in some instances. Simple, fast and efficient.

Unfortunately, Sheila wasn't aware she would have been able to use the message centre to notify group leaders. We're still in process of introducing these tools to our parish volunteers. I'm also still working on getting all of our parish volunteers registered in the system so that the second level of the phone chain is covered. Now I've got the perfect story for motivation to get the job finished.

Find out how you can use the message centre

If you think the message centre can benefit you, contact the DeoWeb Communications team. support@diocesessm.org