Test your newsletter with different email providers and in different browsers.

You can do a search for “popular email providers” to get a short list of email accounts to sign up for. I recommend testing your newsletter in 4-5 free email accounts, and Microsoft Outlook. The more you test in (and can compare side by side) the better.

If you do not have any personal accounts for any of the free email providers, then create new accounts for your church (I recommend using the same word or phrase before the @ symbol, example: churchname @ dotcom). You do not need to advertise or use them unless you want to. At this point they are just for testing purposes.

My method is to open all email accounts in one web browser like Internet Explorer, for example. Send a test email to all of them and then view them side by side to see how they look. Remember, there are many variables that determine how people see your newsletter. The web browser, email provider, screen size, and operating system all affect the look of your newsletter in varying degrees.

You can also search for “standard monitor size 2010″ (replace the year to stay current) to give you an idea. Knowing the average monitor size is helpful, but mostly for designing websites. However, have a broader understanding of the average user experience will keep you from falling into the trap of assuming that, “if it looks good on my computer it must be good.”

The most important way to test user experience is to download different web browsers for testing the look of your newsletter (also highly recommended for testing websites). Do a search for “web browsers market share 2010″ and you will see that Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, and Opera cover 98% of the Internet surfing world. You will want any newsletter or website to be functional in all of these.

Finally, you will want to test emails in Microsoft Outlook. Many people use Outlook, but Outlook formats email differently than other providers, negatively affecting how emails are displayed.

An example of how all this can benefit you:

I recently tested a new email campaign from MailChimp with a new template. Having already setup different email accounts I logged in to a few of them in Google Chrome and Internet Explorer. Things were looking great until I opened it in Microsoft Outlook.

I had uploaded two images and then shrunk them using MailChimp’s on-board newsletter builder. They were supposed be icon-sized links to YouTube and Google Calendar (I wanted to promote a recent video and the launch of a new public calendar). When I opened the email in Outlook the images were their original 450×450 pixel size instead of 16×16. They completely overcrowded the rest of the email. I corrected the problem by uploading pre-shrunk icons of the images I wanted to my MailChimp database and the problem did not repeat itself in Outlook again.

I hope that this information has been helpful. If you need any assistance setting up your next email campaign, please send an email to contact (at) rootedupdotcom.

Is this how new members or visitors perceive your church?

Lessons from Customer Service

In the customer service industry any communication or tool that the customer interacts with is called a customer-facing function or service. Understanding your church’s ability to effectively communicate your message requires a broader understanding of what “functions” face the people who interact with your church.

I have worked in retail and call center customer service jobs since 2001. I do my best to relate to customers with empathy and build rapport with them. Oftentimes people find themselves in a situation caused by their own actions, not understanding the consequences that would occur. Unless the customer is out to shoot the messenger I can usually turn an irate customer into someone who at least appreciates me for being honest and understanding them. They may still be unhappy with my employer, but they are now willing to trust me when I tell them the truth.

The parallels between customer service representatives and Christ’s ambassadors are very similar. As long as we treat other people like human beings they will be attracted to Christ’s message. While the main “customer-facing function” in a church is one-to-one interaction in real life settings, it is important that other tools like Facebook and church websites reflect genuine love and empathy also.

The Computer Cannot Smile

If your church is using social media, are there people who read the wall posts and interact with visitors who comment there? Does your church have voicemail to catch calls after hours, or if the power goes out in a hurricane? […read more about voice-mail as a tool for your church’s emergency response plan] When people apply for jobs at your church, do you call each applicant and thank them for doing so even after you have filled the position?

As someone who works closely with customers on a daily basis, and follows the trends in social media on the Internet I am noticing a disturbing trend when it comes to customer-facing systems: they are becoming even more impersonal.

A personal example: I have put in many job applications in recent years, and one development that I have seen since the early 2000s is more of it going online. Churches don’t do this necessarily, but we should be aware of the human tendency to make things easier, and we should ask: “Easier for who?” Almost gone are the days when you see a person in the interview process. The long hours of completing online forms and tests to find a job can take a lot out of you, and you are not even guaranteed an email telling you that they position has been filled. No, the trend is moving towards silence when it comes to an employer rejecting your application. We need to be mindful of how customer-facing functions affect the emotions of the customer, especially negatively.

How Christ’s Church Should be Different

As Christians we need to make certain that as we try to keep up with changing technology we do not forget the human beings we must also build relationships with. Facebook and Twitter are great tools, but they must be part of the larger goal of loving people and attracting them to Christ’s love.

People want real human interaction, and respond better when you are empathetic to their needs. Automation and faceless, oftentimes response-less, customer-facing systems are demoralizing. When someone shows that they care, even a little, that is currency. When Christians are authentic we build trust.

Whether through our face-to-face daily living or technology-based communications we need to make sure we convey Christ’s love. To do this we must ask ourselves how “outsiders” perceive us in the ways we interact with them, especially when we adopt technologies to enhance ministry opportunity.

While small pockets of the county had power and phone service restored within hours, large swaths remained without power for weeks and months. Services were hard to come by, and venturing out on the roads was dangerous with so much debris and no working street lights. How a church plans for and responds to such a crisis depends on effective communication. While there are many things you can do to prepare, there is one simple tool that can be of enormous value.

When a disaster or a loss of power occurs, a simple and very effective tool is remote access voice-mail.

How to use Voice-mail for Emergency Preparedness and Response

1. First, if you do not have an emergency preparation and response plan that covers a broad range of man-made and natural situations… “git ‘er dun!”
2. Decide what parts of your plan need to understood by your congregation. Most of the time simply knowing that the church has a plan (and not necessarily all the details of it) is enough. Communication, or more accurately how the church plans to maintain communication after/during a disaster is the most important thing.
3. Make a concerted effort to inform the most needy members of your congregation and their family members about the church’s plans and how these plans can help them communicate during an emergency if normal lines of communication are disrupted. Think of your church’s physical location and communications systems as the central “place” to meet after a disaster.
4. Voice-mail can behave as a “place” especially if you use it right. Have a response team assemble a few times during the year to evaluate the plan. For the purposes of utilizing voice-mail after a disaster have two or more emergency radios that come with features like the ability to charge cell phones. You will need this to call in remotely to the church’s voice-mail account.
5. If it appears that a hurricane is indeed going to hit your area, for example, record a “greeting” message that informs people that they have reached the emergency information line (be sure not to call it a hotline so that people don’t assume you are staffing the line with operators). Provide concise, but not endless information.
6. Let callers know up front when the message was recorded, and close the message with an estimated time for when the next message will be recorded.
   • Example:
     “You have reached the emergency information line for First Church of the City. If you would like to leave a message please press (number, #, or * sign). This recorded message is dated for Monday, November 29, 2010 at 7:15 A.M. Our regular service times and office hours have been suspended in light of Hurricane Alpha. All announcements and changes to service times will be updated regularly on this phone line. This is not an emergency contact number and messages are being checked when possible. If you need immediate assistance please dial 9-1-1. Other useful numbers are the Broward County Emergency Management Division at 1-800-555-5555, the Florida State Watch Office at 1-800-555-5555, or tune your radio to WIOD 610 AM for news and information. [You will want to keep the first part general and relatively consistent, and follow it with a regularly updated message.] The following message was recorded on Monday, November 29, 2010 at 7:15 A.M. …[message]… The next scheduled update will be recorded Monday, November 29, 2010 at 8:00 P.M. Thank you for calling First Church of the City.
7. One of the better features about voice-mail as opposed to an answering machine (other than the fact that a machine would need a power source) is that such long messages can be bypassed by people who have already heard the latest announcement. All they need to do is press the right number to be taken to the prompt for leaving their message in one of the mailboxes you have setup.

Full Disclosure Notice

It is not my custom to promote a specific company’s product, and I would only do so if I had absolute confidence in the product or service being provided. If I am going to promote voice-mail as a highly effective communications tool in emergencies it is only because I believe AT&T can provide the level of effectiveness which I highly recommend you have in your communications tool box. In the interest of full disclosure I have been an AT&T employee, and have relatives who have been or are employed by AT&T. As of this writing, I am a contractor for AT&T in a non-sales related position, and I am not being asked or paid by AT&T to write this blog entry.

Benefits of voice-mail from AT&T

• Anyone with a cell phone and access code can retrieve messages and record “greetings” that give essential updates to members needing information. Utilize and inform your members that your voice-mail message will be updated regularly after a disaster with important information, including emergency services phone numbers and/or ways to help those in need and when and where volunteers can report.
• As long as you do not have a device that stores messages then voice-mail from AT&T will keep your messages for you at the central office. There are central offices located all over the country and serve as the routing stations or “home” for your phone number. Unless the computer server physically located in the central office is also impacted by the disaster your messages are safe.
• AT&T provides essential emergency resources to all their central offices, and places a very high priority on getting their systems back up and running quickly after a disaster.

If you use voice-mail from AT&T you can rest assured that it will work. If it isn’t working, then something has gone wrong with the physical hardware and AT&T is working hard to fix it. Without a functioning network emergency responders and medical facilities won’t have working phone service. It is therefore imperative that AT&T get its network up and running ASAP after a disaster – lives are at stake. I can personally testify that no other company has the commitment or resources to ensuring timely restoration of services in the aftermath of a natural disaster.

Note: There is a difference between a Facebook Group and a Page. They are very similar, and you can create one of each for your church, nonprofit, or business. You can create different Pages and Groups for youth ministries and other major ministries of your church, like a preschool or bookstore. Also, do not create a personal profile for your church, or set the privacy settings to require people to add you as a friend. This give the impression that you are not inclusive. A Fan Page is the best because people can simply “Fan” your church (become a fan), and you can control what kind of information they can post and where without having admin rights. An example of what not to do: Calvary Chapel Fort Lauderdale

Select what kind of organization you are. There are three options with radial buttons: “Local” – “Brand, Product, or Organization” – “Artist, Band, or Public Figure”. For churches, I recommend you select “Local” and then from the drop down menu select “Religious Center”.

Naming your page. If your church has a name that is popular among other churches I highly recommend naming your church’s Facebook Page something unique, while still remaining something people will associate with your church. If you are the First Church of Your City this is not a bad name. In fact using the name of your city is recommended. This is also a good tip for naming your church’s website.

The most important thing for your Facebook Page is that you publicize it. While you are still on the page, click Edit Page. On the right and down the page you will see a button to create a Fan Box. If your church has a website, you can post this Fan Box there to lead people back to your Facebook Page. Also, you can share the Page on your Facebook profile, as well as invite all of your friends to join it. You can invite people who are your Facebook friends, and by entering their email address if they do not have Facebook. These people will need to create a Facebook account in order to accept your invitation.

Note: If you are the pastor of your church I highly recommend that you use this as an opportunity to include others in ministry opportunities. The best movements (yes your congregation; the Church is a movement) are ones that people grab hold of and share without being told to do so. Include some new people in the communications at your church, and give them a free hand to be creative and utilize Facebook in conjunction with other communications efforts. Always encourage your Facebook team (have several administrators) to be active and engaging the community online.

Post pictures, do a video blog, post events and invite friends and more. Use Facebook to build an online community that serves as an extension of Sundays and mid-week small groups, but also goes the other way to attract people into the flesh and blood community. Most importantly, have fun with Facebook and use it as a tool to increase people’s faith in God and love for one another and you will see changes in the lives of people attending your church.

Some examples of larger churches with Facebook Pages (enter these search phrases in the Facebook search bar):

Hillsong Church London

NewSpring Church

Ginghamsburg Church

Willow Creek Community Church

The Ark Church

One minister, Will Clark of Orange Park United Methodist Church in Jacksonville, has noticed that members of the church’s Facebook page are “friending” each other, although discussion about posts he has made have not been very active. Rooted Up visited the church’s website, and their Facebook page and can say that they are off to a good start with their communications. However, this has spurred us to research a “How To Guide” on creating and maintaining your church’s Facebook presence – and how to promote it. Look for this post in the coming week.

As for why you should use social media sites like Facebook, Rev. Clark does say that he has had opportunities to counsel people through the chat feature on Facebook – interactions he may not have had otherwise. He also posts teasers about upcoming sermons to try and create buzz and get people thinking – an excellent idea!

Read the full article from the Florida United Methodist Conference, and here’s hoping you will be inspired to apply what your learn to your church!

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.

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'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.

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.