Church Communication with Techies, Boomers, and Luddites
Long gone are the days of theses being nailed on the church wall and announcements thumbtacked to bulletin boards in the church foyer. Is there a way for pastors to communicate with people at all points along the technological spectrum without going crazy?
Yes, with one caveat: No matter how many communication systems you put in place, some people will say they didn’t know. (It is unlikely they are reading this.)
With that being said, here’s the communication strategy we’ve put in place at our church:
Monthly Bulletin - When we had a weekly bulletin, 85% of our content was the same from week to week. By moving to a monthly bulletin, we use bigger paper, print it in color, print less of them, and email it to our congregation in PDF form each month. In our bulletin, we have graphics for major emphases, a weekly schedule for recurring events, birthdays & anniversaries that month, and church stats. We’ve literally saved hours in the office for our administrative assistant to do more important things.
Monthly Newsletter: Cancelled. Instead of a monthly newsletter, we mail out our monthly newsletter to shut-ins. The only thing missing are articles by the staff that no one read. Again, staff hours saved to focus on more important things.
Church-Wide Emails - Maximum of 2 per week. If we have a church-wide emphasis or a message that the entire church needs to read, we send it out by email. We used to send an email out for individual prayer requests, as well as one each Friday that contained both a summary of upcoming events and our entire prayer list. But we discovered that when people are receiving too many emails, they begin skipping them all.
Prayer Requests - We use the Echo Prayer App (for techies) and print a weekly paper list (for Luddites). We also send out the weekly list via email for tweeners who sign up for it. With the Echo Prayer App, the staff can send out instantaneous prayer requests and people can control their notifications as they wish.
Social Media - We use FB, Twitter, and (soon) Instagram for certain emphases.
Text-in-Church - We communicate via text message with newcomers, committees & ministry teams, and (rarely) the entire church.
Stage Announcements - As a general rule, if the announcement doesn’t impact more than half of the congregation, we probably won’t announce it.
Pre-Worship Slide Rotation - Just about everything you need to know is found on the screens in the Worship Center before worship. By making these the same graphics that are used for stage announcements, the bulletin, and social media, we save the staff time to focus on other things.
Website - Our public website and our event page contain the details (Who? What? When? Where? Why? How Much?) of all the things that we do. This way, the graphics we use for the bulletin and elsewhere can simply point people to the website.
Calendar - We use Google Calendar to create both a Churchwide Calendar (with important events that the public may want to come to) and a Leader Calendar (with committee and team meetings). The Churchwide Calendar is accessible on the Calendar page of our website, and both addresses are posted there for people to subscribe to.
Is this communication strategy perfect? No, but there is a backup plan for anyone who feels out of the loop: Call the church office. Send us an email. Message us on FB. Tweet us. Catch us in the hallway. That’s the great thing about communication. It goes two ways.
