Discover how to leverage technology in your church

In our information-saturated landscape, many have asked the question “how do we communicate well with our church’s members?” The answer to that question is, of course, multi-faceted and ever-changing. A little more than a year ago, as my church—Mount Olive Lutheran Church in Rockford, Illinois—evaluated the congregation’s communication needs, our existing communication avenues, and the time and energy we devoted to different efforts, we determined that our monthly email newsletter wasn’t as helpful as it had been in the past.

Enter The Connecting Point. Well, to be honest, it didn’t have that name or a clear direction for a while. There was a good chunk of time in the development stage when I would refer to it as “the new quarterly storytelling publication that will be available both as a hard copy and digitally.” Let’s just say that, while descriptive, the name garnered more raised eyebrows than buy-in.

If you’ve attended worship at a variety of churches, you know that church announcements are a wild card. You might get a newsletter when you enter into the sanctuary. There may be screens with looping announcements prior to the service. The pastor(s), staff, lay people, or a combination of those people might give verbal announcements at the beginning, middle, or end of the service. In many of our churches, there is a lot of information we’d like both members and visitors to know about us and what’s happening in our ministries.

Improving your church announcements is an important task to consider, as it’s a component of your overall communications strategy.

Church newsletters often include copy from a number of contributors, like the pastor, youth director, and volunteers. Likely, they send all that copy in Word documents. And if you design the newsletter in Adobe InDesign, well, then you probably already know Word and InDesign aren’t besties.

If the process of moving from Word to InDesign for your church newsletter is a regular headache, try using styles to streamline your workflow.

Let’s be real—creating newsletters is a pain. Especially if you’re creating your document in Microsoft Word, where formatting can be a real issue.

Whether you make newsletters for print or email, it’s a struggle to keep your announcements down to a page or two. But if your newsletters are much longer than that, readers lose interest and resort to skimming or throwing away the paper completely. Here are some tips to keep your newsletters short and informative: