3 Church Communication Strategies For 2023
Your church signage is only one component of your church's communication strategy - from your social media content, your website design, your indoor banners, outdoor banners, email, text messaging and in-service announcements.
Here are some communication ideas to help your community and get the information you need to your church members as effectively as possible.
1. Relevance
Attempt to communicate information only to the people it's relevant to. If you try and jam everything going on at your church into your church announcements when you have everyone in person, then your seniors will tune out when you talk about a youth event, and your singles will tune out when you talk about your marriage small group.
- Save your service's announcement or church's signage attention for "big picture" things that apply to most of your church (like a family outreach event) or new visitor information (for people who haven't yet provided you their contact information)
- Send out an email to parents about what's going on in your student minsitry
- Send out an email to seniors about the seniors events
- Send out a text message to your teens about the registration deadline for their conference
- Send out an email to your board members about their board meeting
- Hang kids ministry event signs in the kids classroom, hallway, and kids check in area
- Put your guest welcome area right by your front doors so new guests see them immediately upon arriving.
As much as possible, try to segment communication content and delivery for each specific audience.
Your church members will be much more likely to know about the one event that applies to them if they got a single communication just about that event (rather than a blanket communication attempt where they miss THEIR event in that email that lists all 13 events this week).
We've got so many messages coming our way in a given day and so much information available at any time that we'll be most likely to hold someone's attention if we choose to eliminate the noise and give our church members information that is specifically relevant to them.
2. Collect Contact Information
Creating relevant communication for each group in your church will only work if you actually have their contact information. Help people understand the value of providing their contact information by letting them know you'll provide them information and reminders about events that apply to them directly.
Use whatever avenues are available to you to collect their information.
A new family may not have filled out your connection card, but they probably submitted their contact information when they checked in their kids or gave online.
Collect information from all of your different databases and use that to create a single place where you're able to communicate with your audience.
When you have an outreach event, offer a door prize draw and collect cell phone numbers through the door prize to let people know if they've won but had to leave the event early AND to connect with them by text messages later.
3. Do something out of the ordinary
Because communication is entirely dependent on attention, getting someone's attention is half of the challenge.
- Instead of sending out a text-only email, send out an email with an image to promote an event.
- Instead of posting a banner about every single event coming up at your church, take down all of your banners and feature one large banner to promote one event
- Instead of a text message with just text, send out a youtube link to a video talking about an upcoming event.
- Instead of just reading announcements during service, bring a prop on stage for variety, feature a video during service, or make your announcements from the side or back of your auditorium to emphasize a specific point or goal.
Make 2023 your best and most effective year for communicating with your church by creating relevant information, collecting contact information, and communicating in a way that's out of the ordinary.
