Lessons of an Immersion-tern: Communication
This is the second post in a new series on the things I've learned about ministry while interning for Immersion and Justin Wise this summer.
You can view Part 1 (Details) here.
Good communication AND coordination is a MUST.
This cannot be stressed enough. There are obviously a whole host of things that make good communications, but there a few that stood out:
- Simplicity counts. See Kem Meyer. Sometimes (okay, a lot of times), you just need to streamline and reduce all the clutter.
- Find out what works for your audience. Ours is generally young, so must of our communication happens through social networking. In fact, we stopped sending our weekly e-mail update because nobody was actually reading them.
- Don't overwhelm people. Sending out 50 tweets/status updates/e-mails a day will simply push people farther away.
- You need good communications both internally within your staff, and externally. I think the internal part often gets forgotten. The entire staff doesn't have to be involved in what's happening, but they should at least know. That's my opinion at least.
Along with these, you must enable and trust volunteers/other staffers to take over communication/coordination roles. Without that element, you'll end up with weekly burdens that are too much to bear. That part also ties into the first post in the series about details.
I also think it is wise to have some kind of weekly/monthly/yearly plan for your communication efforts. For instance, Immersion has Team Leader updates that go out every Monday at about the same time. If that kind of plan can be utilized for almost all communication efforts, it would hugely efficient.
Having said that, I also think that communications can go overboard. There has to be a balance between social media, web stuff, live announcements, etc. It must be kept simple while still being effective. In an ideal world I think it would be great to have one communications person who kind of does everything as their full-time job. Seeing as how that's not always possible (especially with smaller ministries like Immersion), there must then be communication between staffers as to how communication with congregants is done.
Questions:
- How do we effectively keep track of all our communication efforts (web, paper, live)?
- What's the most effective way to communicate between staff members about the overall communication efforts of the ministry?
- How do we create an overall communications plan that covers everything we do? How then do we stick to that plan and get 1 or 2 people simply focused on that? Is that even possible?
What do you think?
