The DNA of those OPEN to the church

December 2020

Dear Friends, 

I want to tell you about another super-duper exciting experiment we are working on. It is called the “Facebook DNA” experiment. Let me briefly explain it. (“Super-duper” may not be the most technical term, but have you noticed there are no technical terms to describe excitement?)

1. Research tells us there are a large number of social-justice minded, mainly young people who are very open to the Christian message even if they are not in church on Sundays. 
2. We built a page on Facebook to attract these types of people. We call them OPENS. We currently have just under 5,000 people following the page.
3. With that number of followers, Facebook is able to generate a deep statistical profile of the group. We call this the DNA of the OPENS. We can now reach the people around a church who have that OPENS DNA. They are called “lookalikes” by Facebook.
4. Since they are particularly open to the message of social justice, we’re going to test it out with some congregations that have a strong social justice ministry. The “lookalike” folks are likely to be interested in what such a congregation has to say and how to get involved. (When we tried this with another organization, the engagement rate shot up to 48% as compared to the normal engagement rate on Facebook of about 1%.)
5. We are going to test if the OPENS can become friends of, and possibly members, of the congregation.

While we look for congregations, we are testing this out this week with the diocese of the Central Gulf Coast. They are having a revival this week called “Just Mercy – Just Jesus” which should be of interest to the social-justice minded OPENS. I can’t wait to see what we discover.
 
See? I need a technical term for super-duper excited!

With much gratitude,
Fr. Lorenzo