Every church wants to have effective communication.
Except, it’s difficult to define effective. After decades helping churches in every region of the United States, I’ve defined it as:
Informing your congregation (internal audience) WHILE connecting with your community (external audience)
It’s important to complete both tasks of reaching 2 audiences, if you want to improve the health of your church.
If you concentrate too much on your internal audience, you’ll start to shrink because of attrition, moving, and death. It’s essential to connect with your external audience because they ARE growing and you need to attract people into your fellowship.
There are 3 do’s and don’ts that you must do in order to be successful at it:
DO have a brand thread.
Your leadership must know the benefit of why people should attend and communicate it regularly.
This thread helps you become known for something that’s relevant and needed. If you don’t control and limit your stories to your thread, you risk being forgettable.
DO have a communication calendar.
You need to have a master calendar that has every church event and major community event listed on it. Bonus if you tier them in priority.
You should also have a schedule in order to post something on the calendar being careful that you have enough time to produce an effective communication campaign. Make sure events don’t overlap or compete.
DO control the tools that you have accessible.
Based on the skillset and the amount of communication practitioners you have, limit the amount of tools you utilize.
Create a master list that ministries can use based on who they’re trying to reach. Make sure you have someone who understands and controls each of the tools.
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DON’T let everyone have access to every tool.
Just because someone wants a communication tool, doesn’t mean they should use it. Overuse creates a cacophony of messaging that creates an environment of people who half listen at best. Most times? They start to ignore everything. Only communicate to those who need to hear the message. Stop wasting people’s time.
DON’T let anyone break the process.
Once the system is in place with events getting put on the calendar in a timely fashion, no one should consistently override the timeframes. If someone does, you don’t have a process anymore. Good work takes time! Your process must build enough time into it to consistently do good work.
DON’T use material without editing it.
In the rush to communicate, many churches ask for the information and immediately add it to the tool schedule. It appears in social media, the website, and bulletin exactly as received. This is a mistake. Always edit to the least amount of information. Make sure the benefit of the event is clear and send interested people to your website to get the details.