Strong communication is an essential piece to ministry. It’s through communication that churches can help their congregants engage with their church body, resulting in spiritual flourishing and growth.
That’s why our team at Concordia Technology Solutions developed a suite of communication tools inside Church360° Members. The Communication Module is an upgraded voice messaging system built to keep your church connected in a more efficient and meaningful way. This module features improved list-building capabilities, longer voice messages, and a robust reporting system for all your church communications!
With the Communication Module, churches can coordinate texts, emails, and now voice messages to personalized lists of members using their contact information.
This feature opens the door to many exciting ways for your church to actively inform your congregation how they can get involved and support your shared ministry. To help you get the most out of the Communication Module, we’ve assembled a list of seven phenomenal ways your church office can take advantage of Church360° Members.
1. Inform Your Church of Inclement Weather
One of the best ways your church office can use the Communication Module is when the safety of your congregants is at risk. When inclement weather threatens to snow in your church, a timely voice message blast to warn your congregation can make all the difference.
This is an excellent opportunity to use the voice feature since urgency is involved. You can’t wait for someone to happen to check their texts or emails; they need to know as soon as possible not to risk their family’s safety driving through ice and snow.
2. Share Sermon Snippets
Rain or shine, your church can also use the Communication Module to enrich the spiritual lives of your congregation. A great example of this could be to repurpose your pastor’s sermon notes from the past Sunday. A weekly email to all your members highlighting the main takeaways from the sermon, and any other essential church updates, could be a great way to actively engage with your congregation outside of your Sunday worship service.
3. Connect through Prayer Requests
Another common use for the Communication Module is sharing prayer requests from those who have given the church permission to share their petitions publicly.
Prayer requests have always been a cornerstone of how your congregation connects. Depending on the urgency of the request, sending out either a voice, text, or email message can be a great way to give your congregation opportunities to serve their church and keep one another in their hearts throughout the week.
4. Announce Easter Worship Times
Holy Week and Easter are two high points of the Church Year. This busy week can often be packed full of midweek services, special announcements, and changes in weekend worship times and processes. It’s important to communicate all of these changes in an efficient way to those who want to attend services.
Churches can take advantage of the Communication Module by sending an update to everyone on your email list outlining the Holy Week worship schedule and other Easter announcements. Congregants can’t come to a service if they don’t know about it.
5. Alert Congregants to Special Events
For many churches, an Easter breakfast is a common way to nurture the community, share in spiritual growth, and instill a sense of connection between congregants. Use one or more communication channel to ensure your message is received and as many church members as possible can make it to the event.
Once all the day’s logistics are decided, you can send out an email to all of your congregants about a week out from Easter Sunday announcing the opportunity to share in fellowship with one another. You can make sure all of your volunteers have it on their calendars by sending a voice message to them the day before the event. Finally, you can send a text message to your church body ten minutes after the preceding church service ends, warmly inviting them to the breakfast location.
6. Engage Your Congregation
Churches that actively engage their congregations through events and community activities traditionally see an uptick in church participation.
A common practice in Church360° Members when managing your people data is to use the tagging feature to “tag” individuals with particular interests and hobbies. This can be incredibly useful when building a list for a community event or a particular church need.
For instance, many churches enjoy hearing the choir sing during church on Sunday, but recruiting new choir members has become increasingly difficult over the years. If you tagged congregants who were interested in the choir or other music-related activities, you would have all the data you need to reach out to the individuals most likely to join the choir if asked.
7. Support New Church Visitors
Finally, one of the most impactful ways to use the Communication Module is by supporting church visitors.
When someone ventures to explore a church, they are putting themselves out there. It can often be an awkward experience to try something new, especially when it comes to attempting to become a part of a new faith family.
That’s why churches need to do their best in welcoming those who walk through their doors—offering them community, connection, and a place for them to become spiritually refreshed.
One way to do this is to leverage your church’s visitor cards to send visitors an invitation to a “Monthly Visitor Luncheon” or other support resources.
This can be done by creating a Smart Group in Church360° Members with the selected traits of those who are marked as “Nonmembers” and have attended worship in the last 30 days. In this case, any communication channel (voice, text, or email) would help invite these visitors back into your church. The more personal and caring, the better.
Actions and ideas like this are sure to support visitors in their pursuit of a new church home, resulting in your church’s growth and continued flourishing.
In Closing . . .
With the Communication Module, there are many possibilities for staying connected with your congregation—sending weekly announcements or sermon snippets through voice messages, using it as a tool for pastoral care by checking in on members, hosting virtual meetings and prayer calls, or using it as a way to get feedback from members.
A final tip for choosing which communication channel to use: voice, text, and then email seems to be an effective order depending on the urgency of your message.
With an easy-to-use design and compatibility across any type of device, you can use this platform with confidence, knowing that everyone in your church has access to the information they need at the right time.
Get started today by signing up for Church360° Members, and take advantage of all these amazing features inside the new Communication Module.
