Church Admin | Team Communication

Team communication is the single most important component to church administration. Without it we can go no where. There are a lot of dimensions to team communication. There is the required communication between pastors, ministry leaders, oversight, your congregation and your community.  Each dimension of communication has its own set of tools. I will outline for you the biggest components of communication for Impact Church:

1. Church Management System (CMS)
2. Front End Website
3. Ministry Meetings
4. SMS
5. Print

Church Management System
I have gone into this with an appropriate amount of detail in my first Admin Series post, Church Admin | CMS.  I will only add here that you must emphasize training for your team.  The worst thing you can do is to say to your team, ‘play around with it and tell me if you have any questions’.  You have to expect to learn it for yourself and then after you have a good feel of how to use it, create quick training sessions for your team that will be relevant to their intended use.  Then, encourage your team as best you can to embrace it and use it for communication with their individual ministries.  Ministry leaders can organize groups, communicate with those groups and create job descriptions within them.  This is helpful for you as a church exec or admin because you have the ability to keep your finger on the pulse of the ministry as a whole if you can see the positions and how they are being filled.  A proper CMS will also help you manage your assimilation process as well as contributions.

Front End Website
This component of church communication is only starting to be a serious part of the church world.  A lot of church plants or otherwise young churches have long embraced the web as a means of outreach and communication.  It is important that if you intend your church to have a functional website then it must do 2 things: be easy to navigate and be regularly updated.  The finer points of a church website can take a while to explain so I will refer you to a post written by Vince about CMS (Content Management System), not to be comfused with CMS (Church Management System).  He goes into much more detail regarding how your church can use some of the free tools available to have a modern, stylish and functional website.  He also runs a home based business creating these sites, you can find more info at Simpledrive.net.

Ministry Meetings
I know this seems like a no-brainer but there are a few ways to make these meetings efficient.  Not everyone has these tools available but most church plants have something that will work.  The two things that we use in every pastoral staff meeting is Adobe Illustrator and a 50″ Plasma (in my living room).  You can easily use a projector that you have for Sunday worship if you don’t have a big screen TV with a VGA input.  I will run the Illustrator program on the big screen like a whiteboard.  This allows us to spitball and move discussion items around as needed.  I can add or subtract to items as the discussion flows just like a conventional whiteboard and at the end of the meeting a PDF is created and emailed to everyone that needs to have a copy.  I have found that this cuts down on missed items, miscommunication and its really easy to share the meeting topics and discussion with other ministry leaders and our oversight team.  If you want to check out the AI file that I use, I have it available for download in the Resources widget on the right side of the screen beneath my links.

SMS (Text Messaging)
This tool is one of the greatest instant communication tools because its available to anyone with a mobile phone.  And as you know, these days everyone has one.  We manage a couple of different purposes for SMS, one being a quick way to facilitate prayer needs to our praying people and two to communicate events and meetings between people that are involved in different groups.  We use a free web-based tool called Upoc.  If you have heard of Twitter this system will seem familiar to you.  The big difference being that you can create groups that can interact with each other rather than just broadcast.  This is helpful when planning events or meetings.  The originator can SMS one number and that will communicate with everyone in the group.  People can enroll from their mobile phone and they can opt out from their phone as well.  The sky is the limit for the options on this tool.  Just make sure that you keep an eye on who is enrolling in two way communication groups, it just takes one to spoil a good thing.  Carrier charges will apply to this system as well.

Print
This doesn’t require any explanation, so I will share with you what we are doing in print at Impact Church.  The two most regular things in print at Impact Church are name tags and bookmarks.  Name tags are great for a church for more than the obvious reasons.  If someone is a first time visitor they will receive a hand written name tag and that is a flag to everyone that he or she is a new visitor and should be given extra attention.  For the first few weeks of a persons attendance their name is italicized and that is an indicator that to anyone paying attention that they are still fresh to Impact Church and should be engaged as much as possible to keep them feeling welcome.  Lastly, as we review the nametags that have been pulled and not pulled we have a record of who is not coming around anymore and we can follow up with him or her appropriately.  This process will be covered in more detail in a future post.  Bookmarks are another weekly print item for Impact Church.  We do not put out a weekly bulletin because we don’t like to over clutter people’s lives and bibles and we also feel that its a waste of paper to reproduce the same information every week.  So, our bookmark is a half-sheet of card stock with the weekly teaching notes, announcements and a ‘week at a glance’ section to find iGroups, events and meetings.  The last section is a tear off part with a new visitor information card and a prayer request section.  First time visitors can tear off the card and drop it in the offering, at the Help Desk or at the Greeting table.  There is also an example of this bookmark in PDF form in the Resources widget on the right.

I imagine that a lot of this stuff isn’t new to anyone, but perhaps you can grab an idea or two and apply it to your ministry.  If you have any good ideas regarding church communication please pass them along, I would love to hear about them.