June 22 was a sad day at Park Community Church, we lost a dearly beloved friend… our weekly program.
What is often the bane of all communications people, church secretaries, and
grammar police… the weekly program… passed away.
*moment of silence* *moment of celebration*
On June 22 we debuted @Park, our new way of communicating to our church on a monthly basis. Call us crazy, but for us it just made sense. Here’s why:
- we are a young church… not young in the sense of how long we’ve been around (20 years), but in the sense of age… our average age is 29
- we are a ‘mobile’ church… all of our people work in the Loop and live by their Crackberries (aka Blackberries) and are single, Facebooking, texting, and Twittering
- on any given week we were just shuffling the same information in our programs around, adding maybe 1 or 2 new things each week. Our content was just stagnant.
- we invested a lot of time and energy to revamping our website.
- all of our event registrations were already through the web and everything in our weekly program pushed people to the web for more information or to sign up.
- we threw away programs people left behind like crazy
The Pro’s of this choice…
- budget savings… we cut our monthly printing budget 75% going this route
- environmental savings… we’re not killing as many trees. It’s a “green” choice and one that people in our church would rally behind.
- in terms of our organization, it forced our ministry leaders to plan out their events way in advance and caused them to be more organized instead of waiting to the last minute… which tended to be how we did everything.
- it forced us to prioritize and condense. We went from publishing everything to being careful to choose what would further the mission and vision of our church. And we had to do so in a few sentences versus a whole paragraph.
The Con’s of this choice…and what we did about them…
- what about people who aren’t there on the Sunday you hand them out? Easy. We hand them out on the last Sunday of every week and subsequent weeks they are available at our Guest Services table. We make reference to them each week in our announcements on stage and tell people to pick one up if they want to know what’s going on.
- what about first time visitors and the visitor card? Well, we put visitor cards in the backs of all of our chairs and direct first-time visitors to stop by Guest Services. We’ve actually gotten more of those cards back than the ones we put in our programs!
- what about sermon notes? We always had a page for sermon notes, so to remedy that problem we created inexpensive sermon notepads that are in the backs of all of our chairs. If people want to take notes, that paper is there!
- what about things that change or are left out? We are now continually driving people to our website… and enews can catch what may have been left out.
Surprisingly,this was an easy sell to our staff, but I was unsure how it would be received by our church… and the response (having done this for a month now) has been great. People love it! It’s got everything they need to know, it’s compact, it’s simple, and it’s something that they can pass on to a friend.
Inside each month’s edition we include:
- A main event and testimony (‘my journey’) relating to it
- Information for people who are new to our church
- Key events – we squeezed in 22 events for August
- Ways to Connect – service or volunteer opps
- Teaching schedule for the month – series and speaker
- Maps and directions to our church campuses
- Our contact info and vision statement
Final thoughts… while this decision made sense for us, we know it’s not for everyone. Not everyone is mobile and connected like our church is, but what I can say anyone can take away from this is: know the primary way your audience receives information and communicate to them that way!
For some churches it might be sticking to a program and not putting a lot of energy into the web, for others it might mean reducing print and using print to drive people to the web.
It’s all about knowing your context and your audience!
Kem Meyer did a great post on this convo about print vs web… check it out!
