Now, let’s really jump into communication. You have a team and a plan and opportunities for people to be involved. Now what? How do you communicate it? 99.9% of the time, a person’s initial response will be to communicate it through the church. Stage announcement, slide, email, social media, bulletins (does anyone still have those?). But this is not the right response for a lot of reasons. First of all, you have very little control over those forms of communication. They are generally planned months in advance, and sometimes they are very strategic, meaning, there is a very limited scope of what they will communicate. So, let’s just pretend for a second, you will never get any kind of church wide communication. Can you still communicate? Of course you can! Not only can you communicate, I’m convinced this is the best kind of communication. And this kind of communication needs to happen even if you do have church wide communication. Organic, word of mouth communication, is really what is going to make your ministry grow. Think back to those forms of communication you’d like to use through the church. Email – no one reads their email anymore. Slides – assumes people actually get in their seats before worship starts. Stage announcements – will likely come from someone who has no idea what they’re talking about, so there’s not any passion behind it. A friend told me that she could have heard Care Communities communicated every weekend for a year, but never would have joined one until she knew me. Do not under estimate your influence in communicating your ministry. Go back to the team you just built. Every single one of them needs to have the responsibility of communicating. Let me give you an example. Before I came on staff, meaning before we really had any consistent church wide communication, we had about 400 volunteers total. All of this was organic. This past November was our first one that our Lead Pastor mentioned Stand Sunday at the beginning of his sermon. We even had a video before the sermon. And guess what? We had one of our worst responses ever. I think there are more reasons for that, such as people no longer needed to interact with a human to get the information that they needed because we’re on the church’s website, but we had very few people sign up for events. Slowly but surely, people have continued to get engaged, but it was not the fire hydrant we expected. Last month was our first full sermon devoted to caring for orphaned and vulnerable kids. It was fantastic. The sermon was called No More Fatherless. Our next step was to attend FAM Night – a new event created to get as many people engaged in our ministry as possible. And that worked. We had thousands of people donate items and show up to pack bags for kids in foster care. So we had a lot of people engage in a transactional opportunity. But yet again, the signups for our relational and incarnational opportunities are lower than average. I think there are a lot of reasons for this, but please, let this be evidence that communication does not equal volunteers.
So what does an organic communication plan look like? Think about it this way. You’re going to have the greatest influence with people you are naturally connected to. That may be your group, the people you serve with, and the people spend time with. Think about your friends that are well connected, that are group leaders, and are generally for you and your passion. There are also communication platforms you can create, such as a Facebook page. You may want to ask your church if you can use their name or not. To create graphics for events, use T
I would recommend not even attempting to get church communication until you have some movement in your ministry. That way, along with communicating the why, they can celebrate what has already happened. When you do ask for communication, go with a clear, well thought out plan for what you’d like. Don’t expect the church to do anything for you. You can find a Communication Plan template under the “Church Ministry” tab.