News Release #330

Released to media on January 5, 2001

New Ulm – The Catholic Diocese of New Ulm was awarded the prestigious Proclaim Award for its poster marketing a new website promoting vocations to the priesthood. The Hollywood film style poster features hip looking seminarians of the diocese in sunglasses encouraging people to visit www.OurMIB.org. The poster is only one component of a marketing strategy that is focused on encouraging young males 13-24 to give the website a look and consider priesthood as a possible career choice.

Upon receiving the award, vocations director for the New Ulm diocese, Rev. Brian Oestreich commented, We are honored and very excited to receive the Proclaim Award for the Our Men In Black poster, which is the first of many approaches the Diocese of New Ulm, Minnesota (home of Little House on the Prairie) is using to evangelize. The potential of the internet struck us like lightning.

According to Oestreich, since the website was launched in early 1999, www.OurMIB.org has averaged 5,000 hits per month. We thank the USCC for recognizing the effort we are making to use a different kind of net to serve the church in the modern society. This Proclaim Award will help us as we prepare for a national release of this project in January 2001. The Diocese of New Ulm is syndicating this website, encouraging other dioceses to fish from the same net.

The Proclaim Award, presented by the United States Catholic Conference, Washington D.C., recognizes the outstanding efforts of dioceses to proclaim the gospel message through the media. The awards ceremony was recently held in Orlando, FL., during the UNDA Convention. UNDA is the National Association of Catholic Communicators.