An Email Retreat: Moving into Daily Life – Kristina M. DeNeve, Archdiocese of Honolulu

This past Lent, I offered an email retreat. The “topic” was on St. Damien. Each day, retreatants received an email with 1-2 paragraphs describing something about the life of St. Damien, a link to the USCCB for the daily readings, a question to reflect on and a picture related to the day. I used an easy (and cheap!) email marketing tool called Constant Contact to format and send out the emails. 

This program also easily allowed people to subscribe, unsubscribe, forward and use social media for further connections. You can see an arhive of the retreat here: http://www.catholichawaii.org/damienretreat 

Lent began with 240 retreatants and ended with 536.  People continued subscribing until Holy Week as word spread. While intended for people in the State of Hawaii, retreatants signed up from all over the U.S. and even as far as Rome. On any given day, 50-70% of people opened the email and approximately 50 people used the email to access the daily Scriptures.

How can you offer this in your world, for your DRE parents, for your teens, for your entire parish? Here are the key steps:

1. Pick a timeframe, preferably 30 days or a liturgical season like Advent, Christmas, Lent or Easter.
2. Activate an email marketing program like Constant Contact. This will cost you maybe $15-50 per month, but will eliminate much of the formatting and administrative headaches for you.
3. Line up your topic/theme. It could be anything from the patron saint of your parish, to Advent reflections by parents for parents, to a 30-day retreat on how to more fully love your enemies.
4. Line up your contributors. You do not have to do this all yourself! Consider having a small team of 2-4 people write different sections each day (like the prayer Q: or finding the picture) or have people handle each of the various dates in their entirety.
5. As you advertise at Mass, in bulletins, on handouts, in letters to parents, keep the sign-ups open ended with no deadline. Once you begin, you will find more and more people join as they forward your good material on to others!
6. Keep each day’s email short and simple. People like the small prayer books that are one paragraph long, so keep your email short too! If possible, use the “USA Today” rule of providing info for different senses, aka, your words along with a picture or a link to a video or song.
7. If you include emails on the weekends, consider (as I did) a “repetition” for Saturdays and then a focus on the Sunday Gospels for Sundays. Here’s more info on Ignatian repetito for prayer experiences:  http://godinallthings.com/2013/05/20/repetition/
8. Once the retreat is over, do NOT ask people for anything. Let it stand as a gift, a free prayer gift.  If you wish, later down the road, you can email the retreat group to invite them to X, Y, or Z. But, for now, let the offering simply deepen yours and anothers prayer experience.