Creating Professional Emails for Your Church October 30, 2009

A personal observation from Jason, creator of Rooted Up:

I recently attended an event at a local mega-church where I filled out a visitor card. On it I included my email address. Within a few days I received an email telling me about an upcoming event and the kick-off for a new sermon series. Now, let me break down this email for you so that you can avoid some pitfalls when preparing communications that represent your church or organization:

1. My first impression of the email was that it was in Courier New font. As a communications person, I hate Courier New. Your font makes a statement all on its own. Courier New says “unoriginal, non-creative, and lacking any HTML skills” even though Hyper Text Markup Language has been around since 1990 (eons for the Internet world), and subsequently replaced by CSS and other, newer coding languages. The unfortunate truth however is that this was an HTML email because the church’s name was a link to their website.
2. To be kind, this was my first email from that church, I have no way of knowing if that email was one of those unplanned/not-part-of-our-normal-email-distributions or what. However, since it was my first email from them, the communications team at this mega-church should have a philosophy that treats every email they send as potentially being someone’s first. For a large seeker church this is a daily reality. It may not be so common at a smaller church to be concerned with the quality of appearance in every email – but I am surprised by this church with several thousand members and seven weekly services.
3. Another thing that struck me was something you can still mess up on even if you have a nice looking newsletter. The email was “signed” by the pastor – who is male. However, the email address from which it had arrived was “pam@somechurchdotcom”. Now I don’t know if P-A-M stands for something beginning with “Pastor” or what, but none of the other letters were this pastor’s initials. If you are going to send something, make it look like the person who’s salutation is on the email sent it – otherwise it looks unprofessional.

Now, let me say something about first impressions. It takes me a while to develop one of an organization. Since there are obviously many people that make up a church, it takes longer for me to form one. I saw this church’s commercial on TV about a year ago, and said, “that looks like a great church.” It was a well done commercial. I never attended until recently, and got to put actual faces with the church’s name. The email I received is just another, small way to evaluate and form a first impression. You should not be fearful of people’s first impressions of your church, especially if there is much that makes you afraid.

Instead, focus on what you can change. Start small, do research on other churches. Don’t mimic, or plagiarize, but take what has made for attractive communications at one church and transplant it to your own. You will need to make changes to fit within the culture of your own faith community. Always remember that change is unpopular and even more so when less people buy into that change. Ask yourself how you can bring the community together to achieve goals – what will the change allow you to do, or do better? Always be prepared to answer questions, and if possible, provide enough information up front to answer and minimize questions that could come out at a church meeting.

I will leave you with one recommendation: If you are looking for a newsletter program, I use and thoroughly enjoy MailChimp.com for their user-friendliness, corporate sense of humor (they love their jobs, and let you know it), and professional look and feel.

To FWD or not to FWD? October 21, 2009

I was inspired by a recent article to write about the subject of email forwards. Do you have one of those people at your church who send every FWD known to man?

You know someone did.

What I want to uncover in this post is not all the evils of forwarded emails, but rather ask a more direct question: Is the communication coming out of your church predominantly email forwards of the cute kitten and support our troops variety? I’m not knocking kittens or the troops, but if you were to think of every member of your congregation as a public relations person and consider the types of communication they have with people with religious content.

Ask people who work in grassroots organizing and they will tell you people follow and listen to their friends. So logically, if each member of your church has influence over a circle of friends it would make sense to empower each one of them to help spread your message. A newsletter only goes so far in reaching and informing people’s opinions and perceptions of your church.

What we need to consider is the personal impact factor. The person who sends you an email forward is touched by the story, no matter how much they have to scroll past all the names of people indicating the dozens of times the email has been forwarded already. They still “buy in” to the message and want to share it with others. The question for churches then is how to make communications and media that members will share within their sphere of influence.

One obvious answer is an e-newsletter. There are many sites that allow you to create an e-newsletter and distribute it to a list of subscribers. Rooted Up recommends MailChimp.com for their professional look and simple, user-friendly interface for creating e-newsletters fast. If your church has a small number of members you can use this service for free without worrying about going over your allotted number of newsletter distributions per month. If you are a large church, 500+ e-newsletter subscribers or 3,000+ distributions per month, you should have no trouble with the low monthly fees.

Other ways to encourage members to spread your message is through utilizing Facebook and other social media sites, as well as your church website. The key is to give people what they want and need and then make it easy for them to share it with others. For example, see a previous post about putting a share button on your church website.

As for those people who will likely still send the occasional “FWD: FWD: FWD: RE: YOU’VE GOT TO SEE THIS!!!!!” gently send them the Snopes.com version of the same email. You can usually do this by searching for a few key words from the body of the email or the subject line, and after a little browsing on Snopes locate the true or false nature of the email. Be kind and tell them you wanted to make sure they were aware it was a hoax/false (they usually are). They will usually be thankful, but still need a few reminders that Snopes.com is the online authority for discovering if an email forward is true or false.

Is Your Church Worth Inviting People To? October 16, 2009

Is your's a welcoming congregation?

Do you invite people to your home when its dirty? How about when your grumpy uncle is living in the guest room, there is no food in the fridge to offer them, and your family has occasional arguments around the dinner table?

If the comparison can be drawn to the behavior of some at your church you may not want to, or already don’t, invite people to church. Obviously we shouldn’t stop inviting people and turn all our attention to making our faith communities better before we can resume outreach again. As a very wise woman once said, “church is a hospital for sinners, not a museum for saints,” Abigail ‘Dear Abby’ Van Buren. Outreach is a process that includes attracting new people while simultaneously making disciples by teaching current members of the body “to obey all that I have commanded you.” – Jesus’ Great Commission.

Attracting new people is difficult though when some people’s actions are perceived as unwelcoming, or when people fail to understand that the command to reach out to others applies to them. Some people think its the pastor’s job to do evangelism, and their job to warm a pew.

If you are looking for ways to change the culture within your faith community, and restructure your communications to present a unified front against the evils of bad grammar and poor graphics, we can help. Coming soon: more about making communications at your church more effective, and how to impact church culture to grow up.

For now, check out a poll conducted by ChurchMarketingSucks.com – their results were posted on October 14, 2009 and reveal some interesting truths about outreach among people who do communications and marketing for their church.

Sharing Content on Social Media October 15, 2009

Share Button

Have you ever wondered how people get these buttons on their site?

I have been trying to figure that out for a while now. I really want to add it to my church’s website, and to any other sites we use – like Facebook, and others… if I can do that (will let you know).

Google Search Suggestions

Though I knew what I was looking for, I didn’t know what it was called. So, I made Google Search to do the work for me. I started by typing “how to” and let the drop-down of suggested results pop up. Then I added “share” to the search phrase, and after trying a few other phrases, typing one letter at a time to see what suggestions there were, I just went with “on social media” and got what I was looking for. Success!

Now, if you don’t understand what I just did, I wasn’t writing a long paragraph for my health. If you have never used Google Tool Bar to find something, I have just described how useful it can be when you aren’t even sure what key words to use in your search. If you would like to download Google Toolbar, click here.

Now, the exciting results of my search findings!

This site generates a button with code you can copy and add to your site. This is exactly what I have been looking for, but had no idea where to find it. I also discovered something. Go here to see it for yourself.

What I realized is that there are a lot, and I mean lots of social media sites - which those in the know refer to as Web 2.0 sites which you can take advantage of to promote your church or nonprofit online.

Web 2.0 simply means the reinvention of the Internet with a focus on user driven content and promotion. Social media has revolutionized the way the Internet is used. No longer is it just a world where techie website administrators control all the content and delivery of information to the Web. Now the average user can take a page they like, share it with friends on other sites to create buzz.

In essence, the users of your website or blog advertise your content for you. The best part is that these people hold sway and influence over their friends who have email addresses and membership accounts also on social networking sites. The phrase “its not what you know but who you know” has finally been applied to the Internet.

When you create media and content that your visitors find useful or enjoy they will share it, and your visitor traffic will grow, thereby spreading your message.