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How Rough is Your Online Ashlar?

We are an ancient tradition in the 21st century.  We need to look the part or we’re doomed.  Period.  End of story.  Your lodge may have the greatest ritual work, pancakes or the youngest officer line in the fraternity, but there’s more to being relevant in this age.  If you want your lodge to survive in the coming millennia and capture the interest of my fellow millennials, let’s get digital. First let me say, greetings from Blendon Lodge No. 339 in Westerville, Ohio.  I’m Matt Johnson, a 30-year-old, who is Senior Warden this year, and I’ve been the caretaker of www.blendon339.com since my raising in 2009.  I also happen to be a professional marketing director, with relevant experience that I will be applying to my lodge’s future this year.  I’m here to ask you some serious questions about the future of our fraternity. I’m legitimately concerned for us, so let’s role-play for a moment.  If I know nothing about Freemasonry and live in your area - what am I going to find when I look around? Where am I going to look? I’m going to start by searching online for a local lodge, using my computer, smartphone or tablet.  Am I going to find your lodge’s website (you have one right?) with current or accurate information? Some lodges haven’t updated their websites in over a decade.  Many have very confusing layouts and designs reminiscent of the late 1990s.  Our most basic and essential marketing tool - working 24/7/365 - isn’t being utilized very well. You need a perfect online ashlar upon which to build a firm fraternal foundation. This is an internet-driven era.  You have approximately 10 seconds or less when I find your homepage for me to gauge if I’m wasting my time. I’d be more likely to close the page, never looking back because I think Lodge XYZ is essentially dead.  I often hear “we only want the most interested candidates,”  that’s great, but give them something to keep their interest. Key Thoughts Does your lodge look alive to the outside world? How easy is it for the curious public to find you and learn more about you? Can they subscribe to you via email, Facebook, etc? You don’t need an executive level website or a daily blog; but you do need to consider if you’re at least doing the basics well.  Visit freemason.com and look for my articles so we can explore together how to make your lodge’s website one of the working tools of our profession.

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