The last four sessions of our Online Church Communications Comprehensive focused primarily on high-level strategy. Now we'll start to transition to some lessons that are a bit more detailed and have practical implications on your day-to-day communications.
The first step in this direction is to focus your communication on a few key messages. A long-standing practice within public relations and communications is to develop a message map.
We spent the last two weeks identifying your church audiences and gaining a better understanding of who they are and how to communicate with them. Today, we're going to shift gears a bit and start planning ways to move these audiences closer to your church goals.
The way we'll do this is by creating a journey map for your audiences. This map, which could also be described as a timeline, should be based on your church goals. The starting point is right before your first point of contact with your audience, and the subsequent points, or destinations, are the desired outcomes based on your church goals.
Last week, I talked about determining the personas your church communications will be developed for. This week, we’re going to work on developing profiles for those personas.
First, we’re going to look at what types of information your personas should include. Then we’ll look at how you can compile that information. At the end of the post, you can download a free worksheet that will help you assemble that information into easy-to-understand profiles. Keep these profiles on hand so you can check your communication efforts against them and so you can easily train new volunteers on your church’s communication strategy.
In my office, on the top shelf of my bookcase, I have a orange and purple acrylic picture frame. Aside from the material and the transparency of the frame, there is one thing unusual about it: it doesn’t contain a picture.
This picture frame is a reminder for me of the first mistake I made in my professional career.
Every good plan starts with goals, and a church communication plan is no different. Stating ministry goals and building communication goals off of them is the first step in making an effective online communication strategy happen.
How many of us remember the candlelight services we have once a year?
When we engage more than one sense in a learning environment, the chance of us learning what is being taught exponentially increases. In candlelight services, we are using the senses of sight, touch, and smell. Remembering these sensory experiences later can also help us recall the message we heard about God’s grace.
From early in church history to the present day, believers have wanted to use their skills and gifts to help others learn about God’s grace. In the past, artists used paintings, sculptures, mosaics, or architecture to tell stories and share messages. Today, in a world full of technology, what are high-tech and low-tech ways we can engage the senses and create an environment for learning?
In an earlier blog, I spoke about personal silos. Since church workers feed into a congregation’s culture, it is the attitude of the church workers that dictate what the culture of a congregation will be. So, that being said, when addressing congregational silos and how to break out, the congregation church workers’ cannot be operating out of a silo mentality, if the congregation is to move out of silos and the assumption is that the church workers are outside.
Pinterest is like a virtual bulletin board or pinboard where you can share things that you are passionate about and love. Members of Pinterest will pin things that they like and things of interest to their account so they can return to them easily. It’s a great place to pick up ideas and learn from others. Pictures, quotes, recipe ideas, activities, crafts, do-it-yourself projects, and more are shared. Basically, Pinterest wants to connect people based on similar interests or organizations.
A half-century after its publishing, Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man continues to be a popular work in the area of media and communications. In the opening paragraph, he proposes the following:
