For many of us, getting out from behind our desk does us a lot of good. Besides fresh air and lively friendship, a conference among our fellow workers stirs the pot for new ideas.

I was getting ready for a short road trip to the April 17-19 National Meeting of the Institute on Religious Life (IRL) in Mundelein, IL, when on the spur of the moment I grabbed my video camera and thought, “Why not shoot some real live interviews of priests and sisters? It would be fun.”

The IRL’s annual conference, the largest of its kind in the country, hosts some two hundred religious from around the country, as well as young men and women from church youth groups in the Midwest. Some communities are large, more established religious orders, and some are feisty start-ups of ten or twenty years old. Some of our TreeFrogClick clients are here as well.

I got to the conference and talked to attendees there, and offered to put their interviews on YouTube at no cost. The interest was immediate, with many religious thanking me for the free publicity. I asked questions such as, “Why is it good to become a sister today?” “Why should a man become a priest in your order?” and “What have you enjoyed about this weekend?” (See our YouTube videos.)

Those interviewed were vocation directors, or those who recruit others to their communities. The interviews were spontaneous and lively. I was impressed with their zeal for serving the Lord with their calling. Many were young, with fresh faces, and all had a clear idea of what religious life was all about.

My idea was to help these religious enter the exciting world of social media, starting with videos. It’s a good idea to learn more about YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and other forms of the new “Web 2.0″ — they are big, and they are getting bigger. Why, in just four days since posting one of my videos from the conference, I received 26 views, and with no publicity. People are looking for new things on YouTube.

In the two weeks since the conference, I’ve been in touch with several people who have shown an interest in our work, whether through website design, press releases, or videos.

We’ve put together four videos, each of five minutes or less, and all together they take in 13 interviews of about one minute each. See the YouTube interviews, or learn more about the Institute on Religious Life. For more info, Contact Us.