Help! I'm A Church Communicator!

More advice from Uncle Abbie: Never explain what you are doing

2008-11-26T09:08:00.000-08:00

NEVER EXPLAIN WHAT YOU ARE DOING. This wastes a good deal of time and rarely gets through. Show them through your action, if they don't understand it, fuck 'em, maybe you'll hook them with the next action.

-- Abbie Hoffman, Revolution For The Hell Of It

I often feel the urge to explain what I'm doing. As I plan and promote SmiteFest, I've been trying (mostly with success) to stifle that urge.

Explaining what you're trying to communicate is not the same as communicating it, and you run the risk of killing the living story you're telling.

Jesus occasionally explained his parables to his disciples, but I think that was because he was training them to carry on his work. They needed to understand the mechanics of the stories so that they could go out and tell them.

Photo: Life

Valuable communications resources from the Diocese of Olympia

2008-11-24T10:42:00.001-08:00

If you're an Episcopal Church communicator in the Diocese of Olympia, you owe it to yourself to check out the home page of the Diocesan Communications department and make friends with the fine people featured on it. They can help you do stuff.

Some of the resources they offer:

Matching funds
You can get matching funds for your external communications efforts through the Small and Simple grants program. (Hang on to those receipts.) TRUE STORY.

Expertise and information
Norah Joslyn, the Director of Diocesan Communications, is skilled and knowledgeable, has many helpful contacts, and is happy to share her expertise with you. I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP.

Publications
The Diocese puts out three publications that you can use to promote your church and its activities. SERIOUSLY, GET WITH THAT.

Episcopal Voice
The Diocesan monthly newspaper. Submissions are due by the first Monday of the month. The announcement or article will then run in the following month's issue. (For example, to get something in the June issue you'd send in the announcement by the first Monday in May.) Making this deadline requires planning ahead for events far in advance, and good internal communication.

Across the Diocese
An e-newsletter that goes out to churches every Friday. Submissions are due by the preceding Wednesday or Thursday.

FYI
A paper newsletter that goes out to churches on the third Monday of the month. Submissions are due by the first week of that month.

Graphic design
The Diocese employs a graphic designer who can help you create professional-quality business cards and letterhead. BAM.

Printing
The Diocese also has its own print shop. Ask about rates and availability for printing basic spot-color materials. PRINTASTIC.

If you're not in the Diocese of Olympia, locate the equivalent office in your own Diocese and let them know you're interested in learning about the resources they make available to church communicators. They might have exactly what you need.

What if you're not Episcopalian? Find out what's on the next rung up the organizational ladder from your church, and start digging through its website. For example, a Google search for "southern baptist" communications brought me to the website of the California Southern Baptist Convention. After some browsing and many u-turns I found contact information for the Convention's Communications Group Leader.

If there is no ladder, just you and your church...well, that's a topic for another post. Probably several.

Behold my grandest project yet!

2008-11-21T16:37:00.001-08:00

SmiteFest: The Advent
Originally uploaded by Wade Rockett

Churches: You need to have an email address

2008-11-21T13:07:00.000-08:00

I've learned to my astonishment that not all churches have email addresses. Seriously. Some of them have NO email addresses AT ALL. Not even a free Hotmail account.

Guys, email is 1990s technology. It's beyond mainstream. People want to use email more than they want to talk on the phone. If you are interested in communicating with people, you need an email address.

Ideally, you should get one with your church's domain name: for example, office@redeemer-kenmore.org. Before I arrived with my fancy-pants Web ideas, Redeemer had a verizon.net mail address that started with a "p", which I guess stood for "parish". Or maybe 'piscopal.

Simply put: if your email address matches your Web address, you look like you have your act together. It also means that the last word people read when they look at your email address is the name of your church, and not the name of the company that hosts your email for you. stbarnabaschurch@superawesomemail.com gives SuperAwesomeEmail the last word -- not you.

You can set your email account(s) up through the company that you used to purchase your Web domain. If you're a little more ambitious and don't mind getting a bit nerdy, you could also route that stuff through Google Apps Standard Edition, so that your email services are powered by Gmail. This is a really good thing. Gmail is easy to use and has tons of storage space. Google Apps also gives you the ability to create shared documents and spreadsheets, calendars, and collaborative Sites for planning events and managing information and resources. Cost: free.

What can I learn about communication from Abbie Hoffman?

2008-11-16T08:22:00.000-08:00

Abbie Hoffman was an amazing communicator, conveying the ideas and messages of an alternative culture through bold, provocative statements and actions. In one famous incident, he organized more than 50,000 people to travel to Washington, D.C. and attempt to levitate the Pentagon. In another, he and several others entered the gallery of the New York Stock Exchange and threw fistfuls of money onto the traders below.

Which is closer to how Jesus and the Apostles communicated: Abbie's actions, or sitting at a keyboard writing press releases?

I'm reading Abbie's book Revolution For The Hell Of It and paying close attention. An excerpt:

Then being understood is not your goal?
Of course not. The only way you can understand is to join, to become involved. Our goal is to remain a mystery. Pure theater. Free, with no boundaries except your own. Throwing money onto the floor of the Stock Exchange is pure information. It needs no explanation. It says more than thousands of anti-capitalist tracts and essays. It's so obvious that I hesitate to discuss it, since everyone reading this already has an image of what happened there, I respect their images. Anything I said would come on like expertise. "Now, this is what really happened." In point of fact nothing happened. Neither we nor the Stock Exchange exist. We are both rumors. That's it. That's what happened that day. Two different rumors collided.

Compare this with the Rev. Richard Helmer's statement in his recent essay "Claiming Our Moral Authority":

Moral authority is an odd thing. Claim it as an abstraction, and no doubt we'll be laughed out of the town square in this day and probably in any age. My learning as I dug through the accounts of the New Testament in search of Christ's example, was that Jesus and his earliest followers never went into a town or village waving their moral authority credentials in people's faces. They simply began to heal the sick, restore sight to the blind, and proclaim the Good News.

They shall know us through the secular media

2008-11-16T07:57:00.000-08:00

When I'm talking about the church to people outside the church, I must always keep in mind that most of their knowledge about Christianity probably comes from:

Linus' recital in A Charlie Brown Christmas
Frightening news reports about the Religious Right
Jesus Christ Superstar (which I think of as: Judas Was Right)

Also possibly:

The Chronicles of Narnia, assuming they see the connection
Books and articles by New Age, New Atheist, and self-help authors about how wrong and harmful the Christian view of Life, and Universe and Everything is compared to their own

The "less is more" approach

2008-11-10T11:18:00.000-08:00

A Unitarian church gets its message across using four words and a squiggle. Nicely done.

Volunteers: Matching Time and Talent with To-Dos

2008-11-09T18:40:00.000-08:00

Even for a relatively small church like ours, a position like this could conceivably be a full-time job. There's a lot to do.

But! I already have a full-time job. So do most people in the parish. So how do you get everything (or anything) done? Well, ideally by getting lots of talented and motivated volunteers to share the workload. This is a challenge in itself.

Sometimes it's hard for me to ask people to volunteer their time and energy. I'm getting better at this, though, because it's blindingly obvious now that I can't do everything myself.

Sometimes people aren't able or willing to help. Thing about volunteers is, they can always say no.

And sometimes -- I think this is a very common problem --- people are able and willing to help but neither of us knows exactly how. For example, take the person who offers assistance, but is only available for short bursts of time. What job can I assign them that only takes, say, an hour? Most of what I'm working on right now requires a sustained effort.

Maybe I could ask them to do research:

"Find a resource online that explains how to do this and send me a summary with a link."
"Find five existing examples of this project we'd like to do."
"Call around and find out how much it would cost to print this brochure."

Thanks to one volunteer, we now have wireless Internet access in the Education building. And another volunteer is learning how to use WordPress and Flickr so he can help out with the website once he has free time again later in the year.

If you're a church communicator, how do you make the most of your volunteers?

Hello World!

2008-11-09T15:49:00.000-08:00

A couple of years ago, shortly after my wife and I started coming to Episcopal Church of the Redeemer, I spoke to the then-webmaster offering to help make updates and improvements to the church's website.

Old church hands in the audience can guess what happened. In short order, I was the webmaster. Sucker!

I used WordPress software to set the new site up as a blog. That way, I explained to everyone, multiple people in the church could easily post news and announcements to the front page. The parish secretary, ministry leaders, anyone could take the reins of church communications without the webmaster ever having to be involved. Instant communication! Fresh web content every day! Everyone knowing everything! It's a new era!

Again: sucker.

I was the only person who posted news and announcements to the website. Worse yet: I had a hard time even getting people to tell me what was going on at the church. I found myself frantically scribbling notes during services as people got up to speak, and taking the weekly bulletins home to transcribe for the website.

I started bugging people about improving communications within our church, and with the world outside. HAD I LEARNED NOTHING YET?? Because in short order I was honored with an invitation to become Director of Communications for Redeemer, a volunteer position tasked with (yes) improving communications within our church, and with the world outside.

So here I am. My deceptively simple mission: Make people aware of what's happening in the church, and when.

Sure, sure. That's easy. We just need a process for getting information out of people's heads and into the appropriate media to inform everyone else. And a way to convince the information-owners to participate in that process. And to train them in that process.

We'll also need to determine which media is appropriate to get different types of information to various audiences. We'll need to identify people who have the talents and skills to produce that media -- designers, copywriters, videographers -- and we'll have to convince them to volunteer their time and energy doing that. Oh yeah, and all that stuff needs to be published. And distributed. Wait, what's the budget for all this? Is there a budget? Okay, we'll have to create a budget.

Wow, this could get expensive. Are there other sources of funds we can tap into? Deals we could make? Must research that.

This is getting pretty huge. Where should I start? Maybe I should do a survey to see how people prefer to get their information now, and build my strategy around that. If I did that I'd need to write the survey, figure out how to get it to people, tell them it exists and convince them to respond, collect the results, and AAAAAAAARRRRRGH

::dies::

So, yeah. I have a lot to get my head around. And I need help.

This blog will chronicle the things I learn, the mistakes I make, and the resources I discover. I also sort of hope that other church communicators will discover this blog and leave comments with their own tips, resources, and best practices for keeping their congregations informed.

And any advice on how to avoid going crazy or burning out along the way, por favor.