Communicate: This is How We Communicate

It came to my attention over the weekend that a member of our church had no idea we had started using the Holman translation of the Bible. When I heard this, I was a bit shocked. We had communicated this in multiple church announcements, in our email newsletter, on our blog, in social media - there are no communication channels (apart from personal phone calls) that we hadn't used to communicate this important change. Once again, I was reminded of the challenges of church communication! After reading a great article on Church Marketing Sucks, I discovered a helpful principle:

It's important to communicate how your church communicates.

This means regularly articulating the main place people should go to discover what's happening/register/get involved, etc. This means communicating the following:

"If you want to know what's happening at [church], you need to look at Y."

In most churches, this can't be the announcements in the church services, because, depending on the church, on any given weekend a reasonable proportion of people won't be there. Social media generally shouldn't be the dominant channel because there are good reasons why people might avoid social media. The church website can be used for this purpose, but at Church by the Bridge (where 99.9% of members have an email address), the primary channel to know what's happening is E-News. What's the primary channel at your church? Once you've selected the primary channel, there are 2 benefits:

1. People don't need to think about where to go ("Should I look on the website? Was there a handout at church? Do I go to the Facebook page?")
2. You can prioritise your communication, to ensure that everything is communicated on the primary channel first (without worrying about communicating everything on every channel).

For more on this topic with 5 helpful tips, check out 'Communicate how you communicate'.