The call does not land on the doormat any more. It arrives as an email, usually with a text alongside it, telling your missionary that their assignment is ready to open. There is no envelope to hold up to the light, no postmark to study, nothing to prop against the fruit bowl until Sunday afternoon.
Which means the opening is now something you plan rather than something that happens to you. Mostly that is good news. You choose the day. You choose the room. You can have a grandmother two states away watching their face at the same second as the people on the sofa.
Below is how the event actually works now, how to run the guessing so it is fun rather than awkward, and which ideas earn the effort they cost. There is a free guessing page further down — genuinely free, no account, nothing to buy — but everything above it works with a group text, a printed map and a bowl of paper slips.
One thing to say plainly at the top: we are an independent company, not connected to or endorsed by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Nothing here changes any instruction your missionary has been given.
How the call arrives now
The assignment is posted in the Missionary Portal, and your missionary is notified by email, and usually a text message, that it is ready to open. They sign in and read it on a phone, a tablet or a laptop, and alongside the assignment it carries the practical details — the language, and where and when they report. Whether a copy can be saved or printed is worth your missionary checking a day or two beforehand rather than on the night. It names the mission, the language, and where and when they report.
Two things follow from that, and they shape the whole event.
The timing belongs to your missionary. The notification only says the letter is ready. Nothing opens it but them. What the notification says is that the assignment is ready. The opening itself is your missionary's to do, whenever they choose, and families routinely take a week or two to get everybody in one place. What we cannot tell you is how much their portal shows them before they open it — that is not something we can see from outside, and it is not worth planning a surprise on our guess. Ask them to look, and let what they see decide the date.
So does the account. Do not ask for their password, and do not let anyone move a verification code from one person to another — not a parent, not a sibling, not us. If you want to help, sit beside them, or have them share their screen while you watch. There is no step in any of this that a parent needs to sign in for.
Three decisions, before any of the fun bits
When. Give yourself a few days at least. The temptation is to open it the evening it arrived, with four people present, because the excitement is unbearable. It is a fair choice — just make it a choice rather than a default.
Who is in the room. Be honest about the number. Twelve people around a kitchen table is a different event from sixty in a cultural hall. The smaller room is the easier one to record, for the plain reason that everyone can hear the letter being read.
Who is on a screen. This is the part that has genuinely improved. Open a room in whatever you already use — Meet, Zoom, FaceTime — and send the link with the invitation. Grandparents, a sibling already serving, the friend at school out of state: they can all be there. Put one person in charge of the laptop, and point the camera at faces rather than at the letter.
The guessing
The guessing is the whole tradition, and it works because it commits people. Someone who has written "Chile" on a slip of paper is leaning forward when the mission is read. Someone who wandered in for cake is not.
Three ways to run it that hold up:
- Slips in a bowl. Everyone writes a name and a guess as they come in. Cheap, fast, and it works for a grandmother who will not be installing anything.
- A map and a pin. Print a world map, hand out map pins or sticky notes with names on them. This is the one that photographs well, and afterwards it becomes the thing you keep.
- Written first, said aloud second. Whichever you use, have people commit privately before anyone says a guess out loud. The first person who says "Brazil" in a loud voice will collect five copycats, and the spread of guesses is half the fun.
Collect the guesses before the reading starts, not during. Once the letter is out, nobody is writing anything.
The one thing most reveal props cannot do
A colour-coded box, a themed cake, a piñata stuffed with the right flag: every one of those requires somebody to already know the answer. Which means somebody reads the letter before the missionary does.
Some families are entirely happy with that, and if you are, make it your missionary's decision who that person is, rather than whichever aunt got to the laptop first. If you are not happy with it, do not contort the evening trying to fake it. Plan the food and the flags for a second, smaller gathering a fortnight later — and it will be better, because by then you can actually cook the food of the place.
Most of what circulates as mission call opening inspiration is a photograph of a table. There are some genuinely lovely free printables out there, and they do the job for the people in the room. What a printed sheet cannot do is include the half of your family who are not in the room.
Ideas that are worth the effort
- Have two copies of the letter. One on your missionary's phone, one printed. Readers get overwhelmed, and a printed page can be handed to somebody else mid-sentence in a way a scrolling PDF cannot.
- Let them say the name themselves. Whoever is reading, the mission name should come out of your missionary's mouth. It is the one line everybody will replay.
- Assign one person to film, and one to hold the tablet. Not the same person. Film faces, not paper.
- Ask everyone to arrive with one sentence. Something they would want said to a missionary before they go. Collect them in a notebook while the cake is being cut. It costs nothing, and it is the one part of the evening that will exist nowhere else afterwards.
- Read the whole letter, not just the assignment. The report date and the language are the details everybody forgets and later argues about.
- Keep the food boring. Nobody remembers the food. They remember who cried.
- Photograph the map afterwards, with the pins still in it. Wrong guesses are funnier in five years than right ones.
A free page for the guessing
We built this because the guessing is the part that breaks when half your family is elsewhere. It is at missionarylegacy.com/call/new, and it is free — no account and no card, for you or for your guests.
You give the missionary's name, your email, and, if you have them, the day you will open it and your own meeting link. Your own name is optional, but put it in: it goes on the emails your guests receive. You tick one box. It is your promise to tell everyone on the call if you record it, and it is also where you agree to the Terms and Privacy Policy, both linked beside it. You get two links back, both emailed to you:
- A guest link to send to the ward, the cousins and the grandparents. It shows a first name and a last initial, the day you are opening it, a Join the opening button if you added a meeting room, and a running list of who guessed what. Guests give a name and a guess; an email is optional, and if they leave one they get a short confirmation of their guess, your invitation if you choose to send one, and the announcement when you open the call.
- A host link, which is your console. From there you copy the guest link, set the date, save the meeting link, email everyone who has already guessed, and see the full guest list with addresses. When you are ready, you type the mission and press the button — twice, deliberately — and everyone who left an address is emailed with your name on the From line beside ours, so what forty people see is the family announcing it rather than a company.
Some details worth knowing before you rely on it:
- Your missionary's own event page is set to noindex, so it stays out of search results, and its address is a random string never built from a name. (The setup page you started on is an ordinary public page — it names nobody.) The full name you type is not what gets shown.
- Guests' email addresses are never on the public page. Only you see those.
- The host link has no password. The link itself is the key, which is what lets you text it to your spouse — and also why it should not go in the ward group chat.
- The reveal cannot be undone. Guessing closes the moment you press it.
- If you save a meeting link, and recording is switched on, the console offers a Record the opening button. If it is not switched on, the console says so rather than leaving you pressing a button that does nothing. A recorder joins your room as a visible guest called "Missionary Legacy (recording)", so nobody is recorded without watching it arrive. It gives up after five minutes in an empty room, leaves about a minute after everyone hangs up, and the file appears on your console shortly after, yours to download.
- If you never start an archive with us, an unclaimed recording is kept 90 days from the day the file lands. We email you three times before that with a download link that is never behind a payment, and nothing is removed unless at least two of those reminders actually went out.
- Two rough edges, said out loud. The people who tick "send me their letters" are not imported anywhere automatically — that list is yours to see and yours to use. And the email address you give to get your host link is added to our own list of families who may want an archive later; if you would rather it were not, write to us and we will take it off.
You do not need any of it. A group text, a bowl of slips and somebody's phone will do the same job.
Save it that night, while you are thinking about it
Whatever you record, it is on one phone, and one phone is not a backup.
- Get the original file off the phone the same evening — AirDrop, a shared album, an upload — not through a group chat, which compresses it.
- Put a copy somewhere that is not that phone.
- Write down the date you opened it. In eighteen months nobody will agree on it.
- Photograph the printed letter, flat, in decent light.
And while your missionary is still at home with their own login, read how to save their emails and photos before the account closes. The timing there is reported rather than published, nobody can tell you your date, and the free steps take an evening.
One thing we make
This is the part you can skip.
Missionary Legacy keeps the mission itself. We create a private email address that belongs only to your missionary; they add it to the weekly letter they are already writing, and every letter, photo and attachment files itself by date as it arrives. Weekly family calls can be recorded and transcribed with each speaker named. If you host your call opening with us and later start an archive using the same email address, the recording attaches itself and prints in the book's opening pages under the caption "The day the call was opened", with a scan-to-watch code beside it.
It is $49 to set up and $19 a month, and the monthly charge does not begin until the mission start date you enter — the months of anticipation are not billed. There is a $24 Premium tier, and the only difference is that the recorder joins your weekly family call by itself and videos are kept alongside the photos. Everything else is identical on both.
Two honest caveats. Book printing is not open yet; it opens after the founders testing period. And there is no self-serve export or delete button today — both go through us, by hand.
None of that is needed to open a mission call. The guessing page is free and stays free.
The checklist
- Wait for the notification, and let your missionary decide the day.
- Never ask for their password or a verification code. Sit beside them instead.
- Pick the room, then count who is actually coming.
- Open a video room for the people who cannot travel, and send the link with the invitation.
- Set up the guessing — slips, a map, or a free guessing page — and collect guesses before the reading starts.
- Two copies of the letter. One person filming faces, one person holding the tablet.
- Let your missionary say the mission name out loud.
- Get the video off the phone that night, and write down the date.
Everything else is cake.