Posted by Zack Hubert

You know those weekly bulletins that you email out with all that important content you’ve written?  Let your eyes go down past all that great stuff you wrote and let it rest on the link at the very bottom.

“Click to Unsubscribe”

Have you thought about what that means?

With one click, a vital member of your church can step away…with no clear channel for returning.  They’re done.  All that work you’ve done to get that email address is now wasted.  If anything should keep the communications director of the church awake at night, it’s got to be this one-click nightmare scenario.

How did we get this way?

At some point, the church decided to follow in the footsteps of email marketers and employ the same sort of campaign tools that they use for broadcasting their advertisements.  Rather than contextualizing the message, we adopted this uniform “one size fits all” broadcast style that looks more like spam than it does the vital link to the life of the church that it really can be.  With such a broad brush approach it’s no surprise that many of the churches I’ve talked to that employ this strategy see 10% engagement rates on a monthly basis. 

Some good news…

The good news here is that social networking changes all of this (especially when you adopt a networking strategy that has been built for the church).  By creating multiple channels of connection that have been customized for every person uniquely, you’re able to preserve the vital position of influencer that church leadership has, while simultaneously creating a sticky platform for enabling service and connection in the church.  Individuals engage at extremely high rates as they’re able to interact with people they know in first tier relationships (those they study the Bible with weekly, those they serve with on Sundays, etc.).  This same channel can then be leveraged by church leadership to achieve astronomical engagement rates around the shared identity of the church.

In Summary

Are you sending out weekly announcements over email and wondering why no one responds?  Stop broadcasting and start contextualizing.  Target your messaging and win your role of influencer through high value content that gets to the right people.  And remember, if you act like a marketer with your communication strategy, your people are one click away from being out of the loop of the church.

Be the original social network; be the church.