Church Admin | Team Communication

Its been a long time since I visited this topic. Its not because I haven’t thought of it or haven’t wanted to take a look at it but because I feel that even though Impact Church has some great ideas, we still don’t do this as well as we could. That being said, I am not going to represent myself as any kind of authority on this particular topic. I am also very open to anything anyone wants to add to my thoughts on this matter. So lets take a look at it, shall we?

We use a few printed tools as well as a few virtual tools.  Any of the printed tools can be found in generic PDF format in my Shared Resources widget to the right.

Printed Tools

Weekly Bookmark
Event Info Card
Serving Matrix
‘Engager’ Worksheet

Virtual Tools

Weekly Update
Upoc (Online SMS manager)
Google Docs
Church Blog

Ready to read more?

Printed Tools

The Weekly Bookmark is the staple of our Sunday morning communication with our church members/attenders. The Weekly Bookmark includes Pastor Jeff’s weekly teaching notes, contact information for the church, announcements and a ‘week at a glance’ section where church attenders can check out what events are happening in the coming week. There is also a tear-off on the bottom with lines to fill in names, contact info and whatever else we would like to collect from them any given Sunday.

The Event Info Card is not the kind of thing we put out regularly. This is something that we create based on what information we need to communicate. We use a blank template for our purposes so that we don’t hand out things that are over filled with info. The latest example is the Info Card for our Soak summer family camp.  Just the facts.

The Serving Matrix is a simple tool that we print poster size and keep posted on a wall at church on Sundays.  This is put up as a constant reminder and as a quick reference for anyone at Impact Church to see how they can get involved.  It is sized so that if someone wants to get involved all they have to do is put their nametag on the grid and someone can be in touch.

The Engager Worksheet is a new one that we haven’t spent too much time on yet.  I don’t even know if it can be called a worksheet.  Essentially ‘engagers’ are people that have a natural flare for communicating.  These are people that can’t help but have a chat with anyone within range and are always good at getting a crowd together.  The worksheet is a cheat sheet that is filled with all of the vitals for up coming events or activities.  Our ‘engagers’ can use this information and spread it around.  This concept is honestly a reaction to some instances of ineffective communication we have come up against in the last month or two.

Virtual Tools

The Weekly Update is simple.  Its an email that goes out to the entire church and contains the upcoming announcements.  The announcements that go out in this email are reflected on the weekly bookmark.

Upoc is a neat tool that we found by accident.  We found it when we were trying to figure out a good way to keep our prayer network informed.  It is similar to Twitter, a tool that many bloggers are familiar with.  The difference is that Upoc is a customizable tool where people can join groups.  It can be set to be broadcast or interact.  Someone can join the group without signing up for anything and can just text in JOIN from their phone and they are in.  Google it, you will definitely find it useful.

Google Docs is a great tool.  We use the spreadsheet functions a lot because we can create lists of people and can then open it up to collaborators to comment and edit as needed.  Pastor Jeff uses a spreadsheet to track his teaching series.  It is available for us to check out and we can plan out teaching artwork and other themes around his teaching schedule.  We are starting to migrate some of our efforts to CCB since we can take notes and add comments to people in the database as we work on projects.

The Church Blog is another simple tool.  I am not sure how many people that attend Impact Church are subscribed to the blog but we tend to put up everything from general prayer needs to events on the blog.  Its just another avenue to present information.

This is just a sampling of some of our more reliable forms of communication.  We are constantly working to keep ahead of the curve to effectively communicate to our team.  I find that if something works it won’t work forever.  The most reliable thing we can do is word of mouth and picking up the phone.  After all, we are pastors – we should always be working hard to stay close to our people.