How Do You Communicate?

I am frequently asked this question, “How do you communicate to your church?” Here’s a list of ways that we, Henderson Hills, use to regularly communicate to those attending our services:

• Weekend bulletin – articles are agreed upon by a team of people on Monday. Each article is 80 words or less. There are no graphics in the bulletin. It is written from the perspective of someone who is new to the church.
• Bulletin inserts – periodically we allow bulletin inserts that would inform people of a specific need or opportunity. Examples might be Ladies Retreat, Men’s Retreat, Camps, VBS, etc.
• Web site – this is our major form of communicating with those within and outside of our church. Weekly 35% of those visiting our web site are first time guests. Doing informal surveys, we have found that almost everyone has visited our site before coming to our church for the first time.
• eNewsletters – different ministries currently have eNewsletters that they send out monthly. These are phasing out at the end of this month. They are being replaced with the blogs that are available through our website.
• Email – our pastors correspond with our congregation and teams through this media on a daily basis.
• Interior signage – posters, banners, rotation slides on our LCD TVs throughout the building. We limit the number of slides to 8 so that they can be viewed in a short period of time.
• Small Group Newsletter – it is produced for our Small Group leaders weekly and distributed through Small Group boxes on campus and electronically for the groups that meet off campus.
• Blogs - we are able to use blogs through our web site. Individuals can subscribe either through an RSS feed or email subscription. They are the new way we are communicating with specific groups.
• We do not use platform announcements – about 4 months ago we stopped giving platform announcements on the weekends. This has helped our worship experience but caused panic and some confusion within the congregation. We are having to retrain them to read the bulletin and go to the web site.
• We also have ‘potty’ publicity – this is information in both the men’s and women’s restrooms in the stalls and above the urinals. I know…this sounds weird, but it’s very effective.
• Facebook – both our college and student ministries are using Facebook to communicate with students in and outside our church. In fact, it’s one of the reasons why we took more High School Students to camp last year than any of the other previous camps.

How do you communicate to those attending your church?