Week 99 - "Life moves pretty fast. If you blink you might miss it."
Hey, everyone. It feels like I just wrote a weekly email. The weeks are going by so fast. I'm not sure what it is, but I think it's a combination of being close to the end, being in some level of social isolation still, staying busy and spending A LOT of time at a computer. The quote is probably butchered, but it's supposed to be a line from Ferris Bueller (played by Matthew Broderick) in Ferris Bueller's Day Off.
So in the past couple of weeks we've been working with some of the other social media specialists to try to formalize and structure the work we're all doing and so forth. Up until this point we've been pretty disorganized. Like, really disorganized. It's sort of just been a free-for-all. Elder Washburn described it as a system of feudal lords. In contrast, now we're installing some kind of constitutional system.
Basically, up until this point, there's been no leadership assignment among all this social media stuff. All the scial media specialists, one for each zone (+1 for the Spanish missionaries) have been on equal footing, so we've all just been kind of going our own direction and doing our own thing. That's fine, but it's not unified, and it makes for kind of a mess. We're all pulling in different directions, sort of. So we've been talking with two of the social media specialist companionships that we feel we are on the same page with, and we've been trying to make some changes. The biggest one has been just getting all the pages under the same umbrella. Facebook has this Business Manager thing that you can get an account for so you can have stewardship over multiple pages, and so we've been consolidating all the pages under that roof. You can also hook up an Ads Manager account to the Business Manager account so all your advertising information can be in one place and can be monitored and reviewed by a set of missionaries. Previously everyone was just running their own ads and stuff from their own personal business manager accounts (fun fact, if you've ever run a Facebook page and had an opportunity to boost a post and then done it, you probably have your own personal Ads Manager account hooked up to your profile). This separates everything out, which is nice for an organization, because it means control can be transferred from one person to another without any mess. Right now all the finances are spread out among a bunch of different missionaries that have changed from transfer to transfer, and the records are on their personal ad accounts, so we're probably going to have to track them all down and get them to send us receipts or something. The financial side has been crazy.
So we've been unifying in that way. In addition, we've put systems in place so that all the pages can crosspost to one another, and we've set up some different types of infrastructures, I guess, but the problem right now is that there's really been no mandatory or comprehensive training for anyone. So as we've been talking with some of the elders down in Columbus (Elder Jones and Elder Timothy), that's what we've been figuring out with them. We're going to try to get something established so we can train all the social media specialists on how to do their jobs more effectively.
In addition to that training, for the past transfer and a half, Edler Washburn and I have obviously (I've mentioned it before) been working on training videos to help missionaries understand how to do Facebook better, but I'm not sure how much traction it's getting. Some people have watched them or are watching them, but some people seem to not even be aware that they exist, which is weird to us, because the assistants shared them with the whole mission. Again, there's nothing mandated right now. It's just sort of all free-floating. Someone once said madness is having responsibility but no authority. I guess that's something like what we're experiencing right now. We're working on a video right now to teach people in a fun and relatable and interesting way why it's important to like, comment on and share content, but I worry a little that no one's even going to watch it. I'm sure some people will, but when I don't have authority to command that anyone does anything, at least in this circumstance, I can't effect broad, helpful changes. It's all just kind of suggestions. Maybe we need to work on our patience, longsuffering and so forth and try to effect change that way. It's just frustrating to have to work with people one-on-one when what would be so much more efficient is if everyone just watched the videos and tried to implement them. But I guess one-on-one is how the gospel is preached, so maybe that's just the way we've got to do it. Maybe we just have to be giving people individual attention.
All this being said, the missionaries in our zone are doing a pretty great job. A lot of them are running their own Facebook pages because President Connor had us set those up at the beginning of last transfer, and they're doing a great job! It's awesome! We wish we could be more helpful when it comes to guiding them. We're sort of juggling a lot of balls in the air right now, and it feels like we need more time than we can get out of 24 hours.
I guess I just hope we can get everything done in 6 weeks. Or 7 and a half weeks. I'd also like for us to be making and putting out more content, but it seems more important to be teaching people how to do that instead of just trying to do it ourselves. Us doing it would be a band-aid. We need to help missionaries learn how to be successful this way so that they can have better missions.
Let's see, what else has happened? We finally got to visit the Palkos, and we had an appointment set up with them yesterday, but it fell through, so we might be meeting with them today. Here's hoping. We had zone conference last week, which I neglected to mention. It wasn't super eventful. I got up in front of the missionaries with Elder Washburn and two of the other social media specialists, and we trained the missionaries on some things. Apparently my training came off a little unpleasant--I was feeling super cynical and jaded at the time, and so to say I wasn't very peppy would be an understatement. In my brain I was kind of just thinking something along the lines of, "You all aren't spending time on anything else. Can you please just do this?" I'm making some assumptions about others- time, though--I don't know everyone's individual circumstance. It has felt a little like we're back in "quarantine," where we were at the beginning of this whole thing. Because people can't street contact or knock doors, some of them seem very frustrated, like they can't do missionary work. I guess "very frustrated" might be an overstatement. It just seems like a lot of people don't have confidence in this new way of doing missionary work. It's hard to inspire them and help them understand that it can be successful. We're trying, but our efforts haven't yielded as much fruit as we want them to.
We also had interviews this week. I got the chance to talk to President about a few things regarding social media specialist stuff, and we were able to get some of that rolling (now we have all the pages under one Business Manager account, like I said). Elder Grayson has started doing My Plan. He's got about 10 days, I think, before he goes back home. He does it in the computer lab where we work, so we've heard snippets here and there. Elder Washburn was making fun of me having to hear it so close to the end of my mission, but I reminded him that he was going to have to hear MyPlan two transfers in a row (once from Elder Grayson and once from me), and he's still been out less than a year.
Elder Washburn gave a bomb devotional a few days ago where he took us through some things in the Bible Dictionary and the Book of Revelation. I learned some cool things, and I'm hoping the other missionaries did, too.
Other than that, we're just sort of plugging along. We're doing everything we can. We do 5 hours of service every week, but again, it's hard to keep the area work and the social media work balanced--we still haven't quite gotten the hang of both doing regular missionary stuff (successfully contacting people and teaching) as well as doing the social media work, but I think once we've got these training videos done, we'll be there. We'll have resources we can point people to when they need help with social media, and we'll be able to move forward on both fronts.
I guess that's basically it for this week. Reach out and let me know what's going on in your life--I'd love to hear from you.
Elder Davis
No pictures this week, but if you want to see one of the elders I served with on OSU (Elder Hoffman--he's a total stud and a stellar missionary) take the Paqui one-chip challenge (that's a chip infused with Carolina Reaper heat) with his companion, go here: https://www.facebook.
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