Invitations from Our Lady – Recruitment for Golden Rose

One of the ways you can contribute a rose for Wild Rose week is to commit a significant effort, generally amounting to an hour or more of your time, to active recruitment. But how does that work? Well in many ways the world is your oyster. You can hire an aeroplane with a banner or stand on a soapbox with a megaphone for an hour telling people to sign up… However the suggestions heretofore aren’t quite your style we’re going to explore a few alternative options in this blog post!

Giving out Business Cards / Flyers

This can often be one of the least intimidating ways to invite people to join. Basically it involves handing out business cards or flyers with information about Golden Rose (or at least the website url). Since it’s difficult to quantify such activity by time, the guideline for roses is that every 30 cards and/or flyers given to people can be counted as a rose. This can be done as a concentrated recruitment effort, or simply by handing cards as occasions arise in day to day life.

Having Conversations

Experience would indicate that it is difficult to beat this method of recruitment for effectivity. To quantify for the purposes of offering it as a rose is a little more difficult though. As a general rule of thumb, we’ll say the initiation of five conversations that go beyond a few minutes and include at least 4/5 of the following can be counted:

• Giving a general outline of what Golden Rose is
• Talking a bit about your personal experience with Golden Rose
• Asking the person about their own experience with similar such movements or Marian Consecration, asking what they think and checking if they have any questions etc. as appropriate to the conversation
• An invitation with encouragement – either to the meeting or to contributing to the monthly online bouquet
• Showing the person the website or giving something with the url so the person can do further research

Conversations you initiated but couldn’t get to go this far may be counted as a ‘half’ conversation – so, e.g. 10 of them would be a rose, or 2 of them and 4 ‘full’ conversations would be a rose etc. Conversations which are fruitful and highly engaged and which take over 20 minutes (where the full focus remains on Golden Rose) can be counted as two conversations for the purposes of completing the rose. This is left for the individual to measure.

Internet Promotion

This can seem like a handy option, but it shouldn’t really make up any more than 20% of the time you give to recruitment because it effectivity tends to be limited. Accordingly, if you spend 10-15 minute doing something to promote Golden Rose on social media etc., you can use it to replace 20% of another effort – e.g. one conversation or the distribution or 6 flyers/business cards. However internet promotion cannot be used instead of these activities to offer as a complete recruitment rose. If you are in a position where your Wild Rose contribution needs to be online rather than in person, consider writing for the website instead…

Final note…

In time, perhaps we will to be able to add more options here that presently aren’t appropriate to how developed the apostolate is. Things like approaching parishes and organising stands at events etc… but all of that is in God’s hands. For now we leave these three options and a ‘watch this space’, nevertheless if you have further suggestions do let us know!