We’re less than one week away from Christmas—is your social media ready?
While Christmas provides some great opportunities for your church to share the Gospel with your community, it can be a challenge to get everything done on time and still be creative. Here are three quick ways to leverage social media during the busiest time of the year.
The way we use our memory has changed in recent years, and daily tasks that once required us to recall information are now done by accessing digital directories or using voice activation. When I was in grade school, memory tools were of the index-card variety, each holding a different historical fact, spelling word, or basic math equation. Now memory cards hold countless digital images and files, at times doing our remembering for us.
If your ministry is on Snapchat, I applaud you! Snapchat is, in my opinion, one of the hardest social media platforms to manage and create content for, especially for churches. So the fact that you even have a Snapchat means you’re going in the right direction.
I had only been a pastor for a short while at my first congregation. I remember trying to look up families and guessing the ages of their children. I cannot remember if it was for confirmation or something else. The church wanted to send a letter because of an upcoming class. The secretary was walking by and asked me what I was doing. I explained and said that it was hard work. I had been doing it for a couple of days at that point. She started laughing and telling me that all I had to do was ask her. All that information was kept in Shepherd’s Staff, which was our church management software (CMS).
“Immortal God, what a world I see dawning. Why can I not be young again?”
The Dutch scholar Erasmus wrote these words in 1517, enraptured by the possibilities created by the Renaissance. The zeitgeist of the Renaissance was closely entwined with that of the Reformation, also dawning in 1517, as Europeans awakened to new ways of seeing the world and understanding their individual roles in it.
It was technology that enabled the ideas of the Renaissance and Reformation to spread like wildfire around Europe: Gutenberg’s moveable type printing press drastically increased the speed and accessibility of information. This technological innovation not only transformed the way ideas were spread, but also played a significant part in developing the ideas themselves, as more and more people were able to consider themselves readers, writers, and independent thinkers.
So there’s a big event coming up at church, and you’re the one doing the communications. You’ve got to get the word out to members and the community. You’ve got to get other people on board for the marketing and make sure they can do what you need them to do. It’s a lot to do, and it might just be a big swirly ball of chaos inside your mind. Or maybe you don’t know where to start and feel like you’re staring at a blank canvas. So how do you get started?
Here’s an outline for coordinating the marketing for an event. It’s the same process I used when running the marketing for a huge event that happened at my church a few weeks ago. This road map will guide you through the planning, execution, and analysis process, helping you manage a campaign that is comprehensive and well organized.
IFTTT is a dream come true and can save an entire weekend of your time in a single click. I use this tool to automate portions of the social media marketing efforts in Michigan, and I’m always seeking out new ways to expand our reach and reduce the time we have to spend on busywork.
It’s been quite a while since I wrote about my favorite application, Microsoft Excel. When I’m not using different combinations of formulas and applying beautiful styles to my spreadsheets, I find that there are many fantastic tools within Excel that many people have never used. These tools aren’t actually hidden, but if you don’t know what you’re looking for, you can easily miss them. Here are my seven favorite Excel tools that you can start using today.
Even in the age of social media, email still proves to be more effective than social media when reaching people. In the last five to ten years, email providers, email clients, and government regulations have combined to provide better management, more personalization, and less spam for an overall better email experience. Unfortunately, many organizations (even churches) don’t use email to its fullest and can end up abusing it.
The best way to leverage email is to properly manage your lists so you can provide the most relevant content to the right audiences. Here are some principles of list management to help you make the most of email communications.
When I lived in the Pacific Northwest, one of my routines was to venture to Pike Place Fish Market in Seattle on Saturday mornings. Not only was it fun to pick out fresh fish for Saturday dinners, but the fish market employees also brought such joy and fun to the experience. They would literally toss trout and salmon through the air to each other, to customers, to anyone who would frolic in their game.
