Shriner U – A Family Affair Fireside Chat: Intentional Communication

[Title Card] SIEF Noble Academy logo, Shriners International Education Foundation presents: Shriner U – A Family Fireside Chat: Intentional Communication

[Title Card] Jordan Settle, PP, Jaffa Shriners

Yeah. As we talk about what challenge exists, we often talk about intentional communications. And there's really two parts to this. Letting your members know that families are welcome needs to happen in all mediums. People need to be talking about, it needs to be in print, it needs to be messages that are distributed down to your units and clubs. Standard communications are sometimes our nemesis in a lot of things because a shrine might say, "Hey, just change the date, change the person's name, and put the new potentate's name at the bottom of it." But we actually need to start reading the document to make sure that the proper messages, if they are a family event, are there. We talked about earlier, if an invitation to a wedding says Mr. and Mrs. Matt Sturglauson, Mandii, what does that mean?

[Title Card] Mandii Sturlaugson, Spouse, El Zagal Shriners

It means just the two of us.

Jordan Settle:

Yes, to some families it means no children. So you might look at it as Mr. And Mrs. Matt Sturlaugson, that just means you and Matt. However, to some parents, that means, "Okay, you're telling me I can't bring my kid." And in our society that's something that's sensitive. We want to be able to include the families. And a lot of times some people don't even know they're doing it. There was a temple that we used to go to their potentate's reception every single year, and for the first three years we'd go up there and my wife... It would say Noble and Lady. And we traveled about three and a half hours from our area, and my wife would stay in the hotel with the kids while I went to the potentate's reception.

And one year, I just called the potentate up and I said, "Hey, would you mind if I brought my family?" And he's like, "Absolutely. They're very much welcome." I said, "Well, that's not what I got from the invitation. The invitation was that you only wanted my wife or my lady." When my kids... It was an opportunity for my wife to take the girls out to go dress shopping and like you said, just like a wedding, they're usually the first ones out on the dance floor, pulling the adults onto the dance floor. And that specific event, we sat down at our table and one of the clowns from that unit ran out to his car, grabbed some balloons, and started twisting balloons for them. And it was a great event. And the difference is the way they were communicating, it was unintentional, the way they were communicating, but the way they were communicating could be misunderstood by families.