Church Comms Today: A playbook

OK, so what are faith leaders and community group leaders to do in light of the decline of social media? What is a new playbook for reaching, teaching, and engaging in online and hybrid spaces? I have a few thoughts:

Focus your best efforts on methods that maximize your reach and control.

• Email Newsletter(s) – Yes, I'm listing this before website. Your weekly primary email newsletter send is the single most impactful "touch" you provide your community after Sunday morning, and it has the potential to reach a lot more of your people in light of changing attendance patterns. What's most important? Compelling subject line, and a piece of real content up top that is meant to nurture your community, not just get an announcement in front of their eyeballs. If there is something consistently interesting that indicates your community care more as much about readers' needs as the organization's needs (or at least holds them in a good balance), more and more people will open your newsletter.
• Website – Needs to prominently feature service times. Needs to avoid insider language (and there's way more of that than most church leaders realize). Needs lots of info about next steps to connection: newsletter sign-up, what to expect when visiting, people to contact with questions or to sign up for things, etc. More photos, mostly of people. Fewer words, mostly to welcome and explain the unfamiliar. It should look good on a phone. Make sure to claim your My Google Business page so people using Google Search and especially Google Maps to look for churches get sent to your website properly.
• SMS – I do think many communities should considering having some kind of text message-based strategy for reaching members or especially sub-groups directly in this way. This, rather than social media, is the most effective hedge against people not reading their email for "get the word out"-type content. There are services that can help you with this.
• Private Discussion Tool – You've probably noticed that most of the action that used to take place publicly or in groups on Facebook is now happening via tools over which conveners have more control about post visibility and moderation: Discord, Mighty Networks, church database portals like Realm Connect, etc. Worth considering if you have the bandwidth and want to do online or hybrid formation/community in convened, formal ways.

Focus your social media efforts on what's working best for your community

Seriously, if posts of a certain type aren't getting any engagement, especially after some attempts to improve them, stop doing them. I no longer think "Is this church active on Facebook?" is a meaningful litmus test for people checking you out online.

Probably Facebook and/or Instagram will get most communities the best bang for their buck. There's a good chance these efforts may include:

• Photos of People – People love seeing photos of their friends pop up on their timelines. Make your community visible to itself.
• Behind the Scenes – Let the social platforms complement your more official stuff with playful, informal content about how your community operates. I've noticed that Nurya Love Parish has been rocking this approach in her new role.
• Spiritual Nurture – Especially in formats "native" to a particular platform. Give your people a chance to encounter prayer, art, and sacred story according to your good judgment. Personal connection is especially helpful: let folks see your face, hear your face, or recognize your words as authentic and familiar. If you can't create spiritual resources, periodically share high quality ones, with enough of an intro and "getting started" info that people will actually use them. Try gathering groups to practice them together. If you want to leverage sermons for this purpose, it's better to excerpt and link than to share in full.For all but the most niche communities, err on the side of authentic / practical / no-shame / beginners' mind rather than pious / specialized / your favorite practice or author from seminary. Be careful and self-aware about how you use the word "we."
• Sensibly Targeted Ads – At the very least, design an appealing, jargon-free Facebook and/or Insta post with details about Christmas and Easter observances, plus maybe also Ash Wednesday and Pet Blessing, then boost that post to one or more relevant zip codes.

Leverage your assets appropriately

All this digital communication stuff will take as much time and money as you will give it, and chances are you don't have a ton. Share the work among staff and responsible, mature lay leaders. A few quick thoughts.

• Budget for Tools – During the "Networked" era, venture capital subsidized our ability to use these tools for free. You now need to plan to spend money to use the best tools most effectively. Our household budgets have largely caught up to the need to subscribe to things again. Church budgets need to too.
• Be Realistic – For all but the most dedicated volunteers, tasks that need to happen weekly (or even monthly), ideally with minimal supervision, with some degree of professionalism, are NOT good tasks to delegate beyond people being compensated for the labor.
• Watch for Passion – But some people love to take and post photos, love to tinker with tech, love gearing up for a big fundraiser or other community event. Recruit carefully, establish guidelines, check in periodically.
• Don't Dismiss Digital – Social media may be changing, but the digital mediation of our lives is probably here to stay. Especially if you're clergy or other staff, there is almost certainly some way you can take an aspect of your job and vocational calling that you love doing and wish you could do more and to practice it in a more public and accessible way using some digital tool. Do your best to make the time on some kind of realistic periodic basis.

I'm not sure this "playbook" looks all that different from how it did 10 years ago, except for the guidance to focus more on your owned media and less on (usually free) platforms where a third-party algorithm controls your access to the people you've worked hard to connect with.

Two Links

1. I still assign the fantastic Speaking Faithfully by Jim Naughton and Rebecca Wilson. I learned to practice much of what’s important here from watching them and reading their book. The excellent messaging and planning exercises there are as relevant as ever, even if the SM landscape has changed somewhat. Buy it if you don’t have it.
2. These days I don’t have bandwidth for consulting or accompanying folks who are working on this stuff. But my former teammates at Learning Forte have some great offerings if you’re looking for more structured training and thoughtful feedback.