THE VIBRANT PARISH NEWSLETTER

Introducing Catholic Stock Photos From LPi

Looking for photography and images that accurately capture and depict Catholic life and liturgy? Look no further! We have produced over 4000 stock photographs for you to use in your parish’s bulletin, website, program advertisements, and however else you can think of to use them! LPi’s collection of Catholic content, WeCreate, now has a searchable library of stock photography images for all of our bulletin customers and subscribers to drop right into their projects! Here are some teasers of what you can find under some of the searchable labels in this expansive collection. If your church is already printing with LPi, great news — you have access to ALL of these stock photos inside of WeCreate. If not, subscribe here.

Sacraments — We are continuously adding to both our staged and candid photos of the Sacraments! Just search the name of the sacrament you are searching for stock photos of and scroll through all the beautiful imagery!

Sacramentals — Every celebration and tradition has those items that are special to practicing Catholics. Search for them by their name — for example, palms — or by the name of the liturgical practice they are associated with, which, in this case, would be Palm Sunday.

Mass — Explore images of people from different communities praying together and celebrating Mass. Scrolling through these photographs showcases the beautiful diversity of our Catholic faith!

Priests — Inside WeCreate you will find stock images of priests from all over the country! Pair your search for “priest” with another search query like “reconciliation” to dial in on the specific type of priest image you want. Looking for images of people from a different type of religious vocation? You can also search for deacon, sister, and more.

Eucharist — From Eucharistic Adoration to celebrating the Eucharist as Mass, we have a plethora of stock images to help you reach your community with the good news of Jesus!

Architecture — Our collection of photographs of beautiful church architecture continues to grow. Is your church building special? Maybe we already have photos of it!

Statues & Art — Looking to represent a specific saint or well known image to accompany an article in your church bulletin or website? Want to find unique Catholic art photography? We continue to add to this portion of our stock photography collection!

Liturgical Dates/Holy Days — We have images of Catholic celebrations from multiple communities and traditions! Search for the name of the Holy Day or specific tradition to narrow down your search.

Community — We have a plethora of images depicting a wide variety of community activities including families, youth, and people of all ages in many different locations!

We are always interested in finding new parishes to photograph. If your community is interested in volunteering to host an LPi stock photography photo shoot, contact us to discuss the possibilities!

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SOCIAL MEDIA INFOGRAPHIC

Find social media tools for Holy Week, spring break activities, and engagement ideas for the celebration of creation around Earth Day - all with links to assets ready for you to use!

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Simple Integrations that Add Value to Your Church Website

A web integration is a tool used by web designers to pull information from another system or website directly into your own website. This information can be updated remotely and automatically populates your site. This might seem confusing, complicated, and technical but, in fact, it is the opposite! At LPi, we’ve created specific drag-and-drop web integrations for our customers that are designed to make their lives easier when they are using WeConnect to build their websites. These useful tools take most of the manual work out of the process of updating certain aspects of your website with new and engaging content. Still not sure what we mean? Read on for examples of web integrations that we’ve created to make keeping your website new and relevant effortless!

Bulletin Widget — a web integration with the Parishes Online Directory.

Every week, when your bulletin editor submits your bulletin to print, your bulletin will automatically be sent to your church’s listing on Parishes Online. If you drop the Bulletin Widget into your website, it will always display your newest bulletin, updating your website for you so that you can sit back and look like a master web designer. The bulletin widget is most effective when it’s featured on your homepage so that those visiting your website can easily access all of the information that you carefully compile into your bulletin each week. Bonus — This web integration is designed in a neutral, modern way so that it will always look professional alongside your church’s branding. We also developed this brochure to teach you more about how to add this important web integration to your website.

Saints & Gospel Integrations

The Weekly Gospel Widget is an integration that includes one of the new beautiful gospel illustrations we have been releasing in 2023 along with an excerpt from the Gospel. This is already formatted to look lovely on your website.

The Saint of the Week Integration is another widget that we debuted in 2023 that includes a short biography of a saint or, saint in the making, as well as one of the custom illustrations of that holy person created by our art and content team.

These can be found within the “weekly content” section of the WeConnect menu. We have an option to select the Weekly Gospel, the Saint of the Week, or both. The best part about these integrations is that you only have to drag and drop them once into your website builder and they will automatically update with new content created weekly by us at LPi.

Google Calendar

This drag-and-drop integration incorporates your church’s live Google calendar of events right into your website. This way you can add an “events” tab to your homepage menu that links directly to a beautiful page on your site the features a constantly updated and easy to navigate view of your parish’s upcoming events. After incorporating this integration, every time you add items to your calendar it will automatically populate that part of your website! The same goes for any time you might delete an event — it will automatically delete from your website too. Simple and easy!

Fillable Forms

When you need to collect information from your parishioners, we have you covered with our Fillable Forms Integration. For example, you can easily embed a “subscribe to our blog,” “contact us,” or “register for this event” form to collect the information you need, and it works with a number of popular form sites and tools. We are also fully equipped to integrate with MailChimp and Constant Contact and can even connect with Google Sheets to compile the data you collect. All you have to do is create your form, then follow the prompts in our drag and drop fillable forms integration!

Social Media

We have a web integration for Instagram and Twitter that you can easily drop into your website anywhere you like. For example, you can share your Twitter feed so that visitors to your website can see the up-to-date content you are tweeting out. The same goes for Instagram! We have a widget that allows you to share your Instagram photo gallery directly to your website. The gallery is updated whenever your parish posts new photos to Instagram!

Making use of web integrations when building your website will take a lot of the headache out of the web design process. If you’ve used any of these integrations in your website and want to show off how great it looks, tag us in a post on your Facebook or Twitter account with a link to your homepage — we’d love to see it!

All of these widgets are compatible with WeConnect, LPi's website solution for parishes like yours. If you're curious about WeConnect, learn more on our website. 

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7 Ways to Use Stock Photography in Your Church’s Communications

Making use of stock photography from a resource like LPi’s WeCreate library of Catholic content can enhance your parish’s communication efforts. Here are 7 ways to use stock photos like a pro to communicate more effectively with your vibrant community.

1. Church Website — When choosing photographs to accompany the information on your church’s website, you should consider these 5 examples of photos every parish needs. However, if you haven’t built up your parish’s custom photo library yet, stock photos are a great option to get your message across. Even if you already use a lot of your own photography, stock photography is a great tool to fill in any imagery gaps that you may have.
2. Church Bulletin — Sometimes there’s an article in the bulletin that could use a beautiful image to go with it. Whether you print in color or in black and white, adding a professionally captured photograph can elevate a bulletin article from mediocre to awesome!
3. Advertising for Events & Programs — Whether for Confirmation preparation classes, a support group meeting, or a parish retreat, churches are in constant need of new posters, packets, and flyers. Using beautiful stock photography in their design can save you time and make these communications look as professional as possible.
4. Social Media Posts — The same goes with your social media posts. You may be advertising an event or simply sharing a thought on social media. Either way, intentionally including some nice stock photography will make the post more effective.
5. Ministry Brochures — Are you printing brochures for different ministries, initiatives, and more? No need to constantly ask parishioners for photos of events and ministries to include because we’ve got you covered. Need a trifold about your parent group or food drive? Search our Catholic stock photography library in WeCreate to quickly find images you can use!
6. Church Blog — Blog posts are a perfect example of a communication method for which people regularly use stock photos. In fact, some have found that content which includes a relevant photograph receives a whopping 90%+ more views .
7. Church Newsletter — Does your parish send out a newsletter to parishioners? Maybe a specific ministry, like the youth ministry, emails or hands out a printed monthly newsletter to its members. Using stock photography to enhance the design of a newsletter can save you time and energy while also making your newsletter more appealing to those on the receiving end!

We are constantly adding to our stock photography collection in WeCreate to cover all of your church’s content needs. This being said, we are always interested in finding new parishes to photograph. If your community is interested in volunteering to host an LPi stock photography photo shoot, contact us and maybe we’ll have one of our photographers set it up!

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Using the Facebook and Instagram STORIES Tool for Engagement

An awesome tool that both Facebook and Instagram have developed over the last few years is their STORY feature. This tool is so robust and a great (free!) way to engage with your community when used correctly. In this blog you will find some tips and tricks on how to utilize the social media story feature to share your own vibrant parish community with the world!

Stories? Why should I have to learn ONE MORE THING?

Social media is an extension of the wonderful community that your church has already built and, simply put, the way that the majority of your parishioners are communicating with each other in their daily lives. Did you know that 82% of people in the United States use Facebook to communicate with each other on a daily basis? Since this is the case, churches should consider using all of the tools that Facebook and other social media platforms offer in order to connect daily with their community and keep their community connected!

The story feature on Facebook and Instagram is designed specifically to encourage your following to message you and engage with each story post you make. Story posts expire after 24 hours and are usually quick and sweet while also incorporating easy to use tools for engagement. For this reason, using the stories feature makes it easier for you to engage with your followers on a daily basis! Stories are also a quick and easy way for you to collaborate with followers and repost their content — another tool you can use to engage with your community and lift up your parishioners!

So, What Exactly ARE Social Media Stories?

On Facebook and Instagram, a story is a post you can make that consists of either a photo or a short video. These posts work like a slide show and offer a new photo or video after a few seconds. Story posts show up in your STORIES FEED instead of on your regular ol’ newsfeed. Stories expire in 24 hours, so this feed is constantly refreshing. This is appealing to your users because they know that they should look at your stories if they want to find quick, current content from you. This attraction is evident in the fact that most posts using the stories feature get many times more views and interactions than newsfeed posts do. This is due to the allure of quick, current content, as well as the fact that Facebook provides more access points for users to view your stories than it does to your permanent newsfeed.

Why does Facebook prefer to promote story posts over regular newsfeed posts? In part it’s because story posts have a bunch of options for INTERACTIVE features that you can add to your photo or video which keep people using the app for longer amounts of time. These features are how you can direct more engagement with stories, and Facebook is ALL ABOUT getting as much engagement as possible.

Engagement tools you can add to story posts:

• Captions for accessibility for all users!
• viewer polls
• donation buttons
• question and answer prompts
• quizzes
• products to buy
• links
• music
• Countdowns
• Food orders
• Small business support shout outs
• mentions & tags

All responses to a story post will go to the app’s messaging feature as a direct message to you instead of being posted as a comment or a “like” as is standard on newsfeed posts. You can then message the user who interacted with your story, “like” whatever they sent via messenger, or use the engagement data collected from that story post. For example, if you are doing a poll and you get poll results, you could put those results in a new story post for even more engagement! Engagement, engagement, engagement!

What Kind of Content Should I Be Posting in Stories?

It’s this author’s opinion that all regular newsfeed posts should also be mirrored in your stories as story posts. Remember, more eyes are usually on stories than on newsfeed posts so one way to draw attention to a new newsfeed post is to also post it as a story!

Need help getting started? You’re in luck! In WeCreate, LPi’s digital library of ready-to-use content made specifically for you, there’s an entire selectin of images created specifically to be used in social media stories.

In WeCreate, these images can all be found under the section titled "Social Media Stories.” If you click that section and then use the search bar, the words you search will only turn up results that are sized and designed specifically to be used as Facebook and/or Instagram stories. Often these images are grouped in WeCreate with other images that are visually similar to them so that you can use them, one after the other, for multiple story slides! Basically, we made it really easy for you to just take our ready-made images and create in-depth stories for your church in the blink of an eye! You can simply save them from WeCreate and then drop them into whatever platform you are using — or if you are feeling fancy, you can overlay one of the special engagement tools (mentioned earlier in this blog) onto them.

Remember that for maximum viewership, it’s important to make sure that the privacy settings on your stories are set to public. This way, anyone who visits your church’s Facebook or Instagram can view them and interact with you!

The All-Important Story Highlight Menu

For Instagram users, your stories don’t actually have to have a 24-hour expiration date. To avoid this, make sure to build a library of your most important story posts by using Instagram’s Story Highlights tool. When you highlight a story, you are effectively building a catalogue of story content that you want to save permanently on your Instagram feed. You can separate these permanent story posts into categories of your choosing like news, milestones, staff introductions, polls, parishioner highlights, or whatever else you can come up with. This library of story content will show up as part of your Instagram profile and viewers will see these category options for story highlights before they even see your main newsfeed!

Conclusion — Tag us!

Want to connect with us? Tag LPi in your stories! Tagging another user in your story post makes it possible for that user to easily re-post your story into their own story feed! This is a great way to promote each other online by sharing content so, if you use our WeCreate story resources, feel free to tag us and maybe you will find your story reposted on our own social media accounts! On Facebook we are @LitPub and on Instagram we are @LPi_Community. See you in the social sphere!

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