My name is Richard Robbins. I created this website to show Latter-day Saints how to gather the elect using the internet, which I believe to be the most efficient tool to find people who are interested in the restored gospel. I believe that if the majority of members of the Church participated in the activities described on this website, there would be almost zero need for missionaries to spend their time finding people to teach. The internet (Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc.) can be much more efficient at identifying people who want to hear our message than our current force of less than 100,000 missionaries, each of whose time is much better spent teaching and baptizing than wandering the streets looking for someone to talk to.
For my day job, I am raising a family of eight children, and I operate several online businesses to support us, including:
- TheTechnologyVault.com – A portal for news, information, and how-tos about all kinds of technology-related topics
- Prosperopedia.com – The handbook for success, happiness, and prosperity.
- SweatshirtStation.com – An online clothing store
- OnlineSafetyDepot.com – An online retail store focused on safety equipment and related products
My Story
My parents joined The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Florida, where I grew up before moving to Utah when I was 16 years old. My folks raised me and my six siblings in the LDS Church. My four brothers, one of my sisters, and I all served missions for the LDS Church in areas of the world spanning the United States, Canada, Guatemala, and the Philippines. Our family loves to share our beliefs with others.
This website is designed to share practical ideas that will help Latter-day Saints make better use of the opportunity that is available to us because of this day and age in which we live. There are amazing opportunities available to each one of us to have a major impact on the Church’s growth. We’ve been told over the past few years that now is the time to “hasten the work”. The ideas shared on this website are designed precisely with that aim in mind.
Internet Marketing and Lead Generation
Since 1999, I have made my living doing internet marketing, including search engine optimization, social media, and other forms of internet communication. My family and I have been financially blessed because I learned how to harness the power of the internet to attract an audience and to communicate (selling products) with lots of people quickly and with precision. Much of my career has been focused on what’s called “the conversion funnel” in ecommerce terms.
Beginning in 2010, I spent two and a half years working in the Church’s IT Department in Riverton, Utah. I was an internet marketing strategist for LDS.org, Mormon.org, and several other websites operated by the Church. I have seen from inside the Church how important it is for the membership to participate in this effort. I also know that there are ways that each member of the Church can actively contribute, from finding and tweeting to people whose profiles and messages identify them as potentially interested in gospel principles to creating Pinterest boards that link to the scriptures to getting our chapels to rank in Google searches.
The Challenge of Missionary Work
Having lived in Utah for almost my entire adult life, I have noticed that especially in areas that are highly populated with Latter-day Saints, there is a tendency to accept that we aren’t in the “mission field”. We’ve become accustomed to the idea that our neighbors and friends are all Mormons, and we tend to check out of the mindset that tells us that our religion should be shared with others.
I’ve also witnessed the difficulty that members of the Church outside of Utah (in my case Tallahassee, Florida) have sharing their faith in an environment that is often unaccepting and even hostile to Mormon doctrine.
The tutorials on this website can be used to overcome the difficulties of sharing the gospel in both of these scenarios and can empower anyone with an electronic device to “speak unto all the ends of the earth“, an opportunity we have that was coveted by Alma.
The Opportunity
I believe that Latter-day Saints are expected to use their agency to find ways to share the gospel. I’ve discovered some things that I know from experience will work. I invite you to find something here that you can do NOW to contribute, and hammer away at it.
Other Contributor
Hi, My name is Jonathan Javid and I like Richard have a passion for online missionary work. For two years I served as a full time missionary in the small towns of the Spain Madrid mission. I served in many small branches that often consisted on just one active family. In one of my areas I knocked on the door of every single house and apartment in the city in just under 3 months. I kept a tracking record of each and every door. At the end of the 3 months I burned the record because I knew that it would only discourage further missionaries. But in my heart I knew that missionaries had been in that city for over 15 years which means that if all missionaries did what I did that each door in that city had been knocked on over 60 times. I knew then that we must change the way we do missionary work! Albert Einstein define insanity: “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” We likely would never find another investigator in that city by tracking.
I couldn’t do online missionary work when I was in Spain from 2004-2006 but I am fully committed to doing it now. The only problem has been knowing what effective online missionary work is. But with Richard’s help we are developing this site to teach new ideas that many members have not known about before.