Recently I’ve been pondering the challenges of church communication. These stem from three realities.
1. Our churches have a lot to communicate.
For example at my church there are:
- Prayer meetings,
- Carols under the Bridge,
- Annual Vestry Meeting,
- Women’s events,
- Anglicare Winter Appeal,
- Weekend Away,
- Prayer points,
- Connect Groups,
- Encouragements,
- PowerPoint training,
- Worship leader training,
- and many more!
From church to church the particulars will change, but the variety remains the same!
2. Our churches have a diverse range of people we’re communicating with.
On one level, you could break this down in two groups - the people who attend the church (internal communication), and the people who don’t yet attend the church. But this is too simplistic. The variety of people we’re communicating with changes from church to church, and impacts the way we communicate. For example:
- Literacy
- Access to the internet and email
- Age demographics
- Social media usage
- Frequency at church (announcements at church only work if people are there to hear/read them!)
- Personal preferences (some people love email, some people hate email, some people fall asleep in announcements!)
3. Our churches have a lot of potential channels for communication.
For example, at my church we’ve tried a number of different channels of communication:
- church news during services
- printed newsletter distributed at services
- printed quarterly calendar (example)
- weekly e-news
- website news
- website calendar
- Facebook page
- Facebook events
- Facebook advertising
- Event-based minisites (e.g. www.iheartkirribilli.com)
- Twitter account
- phone
- face-to-face
- Connect Groups
- meetings (i.e. communicating to people to a select group of people face-to-face)
- emails to all of church/groups within the church
- A6 postcards (mainly to promote events to people outside the church, e.g. I Heart Kirribilli)
- letterbox drops
- noticeboard (housing A3 posters)
- A1 posters (positioned in frame against the wall outside the church)
- community newsletter (example - though we haven’t printed a second edition!)
- community noticeboards
There are other communications channels available too - for example text messaging isn’t something we’ve explored, but I know of churches using FrontlineSMS for group messaging. Other channels that come to mind are online platforms like On The City, and video messaging (e.g. facilitated by TokBox).
Where to next?
With these three realities firmly in mind, I decided to put together a communications plan - to articulate a thought-out direction to our internal and external communication. The first stage of this was a survey of the church - you can check out the survey here.
The goals of the survey were to:
- understand how church members perceive the current frequency and effectiveness of communication,
- understand what communications channels church members regularly use,
- understand what gaps exist in our current communications, and
- understand what communications channels church members would prefer to be communicated through.
The survey is now closed, and I’m in the process of reviewing the results and already it’s been a very useful exercise in understanding how communication is perceived by the recipients (not the deliverers!) of the communication, and what gaps and areas for improvement exist.
Conduct your own evaluation
If you’d like to improve communication at your church, let me encourage you to survey them as a first step - feel free to use my survey as a starting point. Wufoo is a great tool for surveys, and churches get 50% off (find out more here).
If you’re interested in seeing some other examples of church communications surveys, scroll to the end of this post (click here).
