CHURCH COMMUNICATIONS
How to develop an effective church communications strategy
What is motivating you to consider a church communication strategy?
For most churches, the thing that drives them to develop a communication strategy is a problem. What problem are you trying to solve?
It may be that you’re fed up of hearing that people in your church ‘didn’t know’ that an event was happening when you were trying to promote it week after week.
Maybe really important announcements are getting lost amongst hundreds of other messages and you’re struggling to prioritise.
Or perhaps your church members are feeling overwhelmed and burdened by the amount of announcements or emails they’re receiving.
When you identify the problems you’re trying to solve, it helps you refine what your goals are for your church communication. And when developing a communication strategy, that’s a great place to start.
Step 1 | Communications Guidelines
Your aims for your church communication should shape everything about your strategy. It’s worth defining some clear goals before you launch into planning and practicalities. Every church will have different goals, depending on what the people in your church need. But here are some simple goals, in response to common communication issues in churches that might act as a springboard for you to think about your own church’s goals.
We aim to make all communication relevant
To prevent people being bombarded with messages that aren’t intended for them.
We aim to use the most effective channel
To ensure we’re communicating with the right people in the right way.
We aim to simplify the way we communicate
To ensure the most important messages are heard and understood.
We aim to communicate in a timely manner
To serve our church and community and eliminate stress.
We aim to keep everyone on the same page
To keep our communications cohesive and consistent.
When you have defined your goals, you have the basis of a simple communication guidelines document.
Step 2 | Communications Framework
Now that you know your goals and have an understanding of different ways to reach your target audience, the next step is to create a communications framework to help you turn this into an actionable plan.
In my experience, churches need 4 different roadmaps for promotion:
Wide Promotion
Important event or message that impacts more than 50% of the church
Church Announcement | 4 weeks before & 1 week before
Whole Church Email | 5 weeks before & 1 week before
Website Calendar | 6 weeks before
Pre-service Slides | 4 weeks before
Printed Flyer | 4 weeks
Instagram Post | 1 week before
Targeted Promotion
Impacts a specific group of people which is less than 50% of the church
Targeted Announcement | 4 weeks before & 1 week before
Targeted Email | 5 weeks before & 1 week before
Website Calendar | 6 weeks before
Targeted Whatsapp Groups | 2 weeks before
Poster on Noticeboard | 4 weeks before
Church Bulletin | 2 weeks before
External Promotion
Target audience is outside your church
Website Calendar | 8 weeks before
Banner outside Church | 8 weeks before
Boosted Facebook Post | 3 weeks before
Posters on Community Noticeboards | 8 weeks before
Instagram Post | 2 weeks before
Flyers in Community | 3 weeks before
Regular Promotion
Regular events that need communicating but there’s no time-sensitive message
Website Calendar | Regular events scheduled yearly
Website Page | Always available
‘What’s on’ Booklet on Welcome Desk | Always Available
You can adapt these promotion roadmaps for your own church context and using your church’s communication channels. The timeframes here are just examples. Consider what would be appropriate for your church.
Step 3 | Communications Plan
Once you’ve got this framework in place, you’ll likely need a planning document to keep everyone on the same page and to stay organised. Most churches find that they have multiple people involved in communications and so a centralised document can help keep everyone working together.
Open up a new spreadsheet in your chosen software. Across the top of the page, you’ll create a column for each of your communication channels. Include all of the channels that you want to use in your communications strategy.
Then, down the left hand side, you’ll put the dates. For most churches, one row per week is great. If you’re a large church with a lot of communication happening throughout the week, you can create a row per day. I usually recommend churches create a plan for 3-4 months at a time because this can become a big document!
Using your communications framework to guide you, fill in your spreadsheet. Now that you know you’ll be promoting your Christmas Events with a whole church email 5 weeks out, you can add this to your plan. What you’ll end up with is a really easy-to-use document that tells you what you need to do each week in order to communicate effectively with your church.
Creating a plan like this also helps you spot any issues in advance. For example, you might discover you have a lot of emails planned for one week. Planning in advance gives you time to fix this. You could push some emails a week earlier or some a week later.
Once you’ve completed these 4 steps, you’ll have a simple but robust church communications strategy that should serve your church for years. Feel free to take these steps and create your own template, but if you’re looking to get started with planning straight away, you can get the template I’ve created based on this strategy. It’s a Canva template made up of Canva Sheets and documents and, like everything in the Church Design Shop, you only pay what you can.
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