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

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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.

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.

Simple, our calendar is now based in Google. Google Calendars are really the perfect solution for any church, let alone a portable church with no central office. They are smart, easy to use and they offer subscription features so that lots of people can have access to info contained in them. Impact Church employs Google’s Partner Pages to run our email and calendars. Google’s Partner Pages offer a really cool data sharing experience for your church. Its like sub-leasing a virtual office from Google where everyone can share info. I will go into more detail on Google’s Partner Pages in Team Communication.

I assume that if you are reading this far into this post you have already had some experience with Google Calendars so I will skip the explanations of how to get one of your own. I will get straight to some applications from our model ministry, Impact Church. First, the calendar is something that is opened up during every staff meeting. We are constantly looking ahead and trying to plan our schedule in the most convenient and logical way possible. To accomplish this we use the calendar layers that are offered by Google. On our base layer is the Impact Calendar. This is the calendar that holds all of the church events including iGroups, staff meeting times and topics, trips and in-house events like baptisms or communion. The base calendar is tied to the general info account, info[at]impactchurch.tv. We recently added another layer called Murrieta Community Events. We populated this calendar from the city’s list of events. And yet other layers contain serving team rotations for all of our different ministries.

Why layers? The first reason for me is simply that I don’t want to navigate through all that information on one calendar. I can turn layers off or on as I need them. If I am looking for a specific city event I don’t need to try to differentiate it from all the iGroups and youth calendar entries. Also, having different layers makes it more convenient for our people to subscribe to the information that they need. At Impact, a large percentage of our people are accustomed to using technology to manage their lives. So, if they use iCal or Outlook or even Google Calendars to manage their lives, then its not overwhelming for them to subscribe to a specific serving schedule calendar because it won’t crowd their personal calendars with things like ‘Church Planter’s Luncheon’ if all they want is to know when they are scheduled to put up EZ Ups.

The last reason is that since its web based its constantly up to date and no one has an old version. If we need to make a change everyone is updated immediately. I personally use a Windows Smartphone to help me manage my life and it will automatically subscribe to all of my Google Calendars and keep my mobile calendar current on whats happening as well.

I know that our calendar use is pretty straight forward and its possible that many of you are using these tools already. But regardless of how common of a tool it is, its an invaluable component of the administration of Impact Church. It helps us to keep our calendar right in front of us all the time. The subscriptions that our people have to it keep us accountable to keep it accurate and its versatility makes it something that anyone at Impact Church can include in their lives. And as you already know, getting info to your people is always of the highest priority. If you haven’t already looked at Google Calendars for your church calendar I encourage you to spend an hour and get one, populate it and check out how it can improve the way you manage your itinerary.

Groups
The first and most important tool is the groups. This is the heartbeat behind every subdivision of people that we use. In Church Community Builder (CCB) the most basic collection of people is the Entire Church Group. From here you can email people, you can find contact info for them and you can see when they started attending. To further organize people you can create groups for anything. We use groups to produce nametags for Sunday morning, projects and for our iGroups or home groups. For our iGroups each group is named for the lead family and they are populated with the current attenders of those groups. The leader of these groups are given sufficient privileges to see the contact info for each person as well as their spiritual gifting as assessed by a shepherd or pastor. The leader can add or remove people to their group as well as see what events if any their people are registered for. They can see if there are any notes from a previous iGroup leader or shepherd or pastor regarding any aspect of that persons life. These options extend to our Jr. High and High School groups where the leaders can include information like school and grade. This is open ended since groups can be used for anything and are really the foundation for many of the higher level features of many of these systems.

Calendars & Events
In my experience calendars in the CMS are not very functional for general communication purposes. They typically don’t export to anything that real people use and often they are not very pretty. So, with that said I will be writing more about church calendars in the next issue of Church Admin. The calendars we use in CCB are strictly tied to events that occur in the context of its group. One example is the Murrieta Community Events group that we created this year. Impact Church is working to help City of Murrieta employees and event organizers create volunteer pools and participants. Since the city requires applications for volunteers we have a stack of them and often do recruiting on Sundays. As people fill out a form and we submit them to the city they get added to our CCB group Murrieta Community Events. This indicates to us that the individuals in that group are eligible for service in city events. The events are programmed into the Murrieta Community Events group calendar and when a group member volunteers for a specific event we register them in the system. This can be done by verbal confirmation or an email invitation can be sent with an option to RSVP. This simplifies the process of collecting volunteers for events and helps our pastors and administrative assistants keep track of who is registered for what. The same idea applies to any scheduled event that we are trying to make happen.

Assimilation
As a Star Trek fan this is a bad word to me, but its the best way to describe the process of someone visiting a church for the first time and taking them through the process of being a full time attender. CCB uses a great tool called Process Queues. These are completely customizable steps that can be assigned managers. Any church that has new visitors come along need to know who they are and have a measurable way to find out where they are in the courting process. At Impact Church we have a team of people that run our ‘Thanks for Coming’ ministry. This is basically assimilation and retention of visitors. It starts with a first time visitor that gives us their information for the first time and takes them through the process all the way to becoming part of an iGroup. Its an important component of shepherding people and can get quite cumbersome without the right tools. I will go into this topic in more detail in a later article.

Your church management system should also be able to track contributions, donors and tax records for those donors. I will not go into that here because this is a fundamental feature that can often be handled quite well by any single station software such as Logos. I would love to hear from you and find out how you are using any of these features of your CMS or if you would like to know in more detail how we are using ours.