Church Marketing Podcast

Email marketing isn't for only the most savvy or the mega churches. Any church of any size can capitalize on email and transform it into their strongest tool for communication. Most churches find themselves completely absent from sending any type of email or completely over-saturating their subscribers with too many emails. In this episode of the Church Marketing Podcast we debunk email marketing myths, we address email marketing mistakes, we pick low hanging email marketing fruit and we build a checklist of tips you can implement right now to get your email working for you and generating response for every ministry in your church.

Every week you produce that same bulletin. It's like wrangling livestock trying to round up everything that needs to go in this titanic printed mess. You know it's not dying anytime soon so you've gone out and tried to find examples of other church bulletins. You've posted in Facebook Groups asking to see examples, you've searched Google for "church printed bulletins" hoping to find something that will help you spice up that black and white classifieds you've been producing. In The Sunday Bulletin Episode of the Church Marketing Podcast you will be challenged to answer very specific questions for your church and the answers you provide will fuel the discussion you have with leadership about how you are going to improve the weekly print piece and drive more engagement through this destined-for-the-garbage communication outlet.

There are two types of social media mistakes: those that can't be avoided and those that can. It's as simple as that. No matter how much training, education and experience you have working with social media the ever changing technology and social landscape means that we are constantly having to adapt - a mistakes will be made along the way. Those mistakes are the ones you cannot avoid. On the flip side there are may mistakes that can easily be avoided and sometimes all you need is someone pointing out to you the low hanging fruit right in front of your eyes. In The Social Media Mistakes Episode we take a look at an article from ChurchTechToday.com identifying 3 mistakes that continue to plague churches on social media as well as additional social media mistakes that are easily correctable. Are you a church social media expert thinking that maybe this episode doesn't apply to you? Think again. Everyone has room to grow, including the host and you will leave this conversation with at least one investigative assignment and most likely one corrective course of action to take.

You know how you operate week in and week out. What you don't know is how the church across town (or across the country) operates. Often we learn the most by observing the practices of others and in this episode of the Church Marketing Podcast you are invited to peek at how National Community Church in Washington D.C. operates their communication and social media. From why, to what and how, discover a new spin on what you may already be doing and be inspired to grow your practices.

Are you keeping the three c’s of communication in mind when creating content for your church? In this podcast Dave Shrein talks with Ryan Holck about how utilizing these three c’s will help communicate the mission of your church more effectively. Convey details. Connect heart. Creatively deliver.

You've been asking the question since April: How can we use Periscope at our church. You've probably launched a broadcast showing your band playing, or maybe a baptist but the question remains - why and how should I use Periscope for my church. In this episode of the Church Marketing Podcast Ryan Bilello joins Dave Shrein to talk about the power of using social media to network within the church and how an app like Periscope and a technology such as live streaming will allow your church meet the networking needs of others in a way you have yet to experience.

Consistency, niche and unique voice... these are the three traits necessary to maintain a successful website blog. As you pursue your communication strategy, it is as important as ever to make sure that you maintain a consistent publishing rate with content relevant to your mission presented in a voice consistent with your church's personality. In The Communication Schedule Episode, Kevin Hendricks walks us through the process of creating, curating and keeping a healthy communication schedule - otherwise known as an editorial calendar.

WIIFM? These five letters represent the most powerful filter that every piece of copy for your organization must be passed through. When you have this concept of WIIFM at the forefront of your mind your writing becomes more compelling and your call to action becomes more effective. So what does WIIFM stand for? "What’s In It For Me?” And that is the question your readers, viewers, congregation members, visitors are asking themselves when they interact with your church. In The Website Content Episode, Mike Kim takes us through the mental shift that we all must make. We must move from writing for ourselves to writing for others.

You’ve witnessed the transition - gone are the days of members attending Sunday services 4-5 times a month. As a matter of fact, churches are fortunate if a regular attender will walk into the worship center twice in one month. The modern church must begin to reassess it’s model in order to keep up with an on-demand culture and if the conversation doesn’t begin now the risk of being irrelevant as individual organizations heightens dramatically. You may not have thought of it this way but through our mobile devices areas of our lives that might have once be separated into scheduled segments (church, work, school, personal, etc.) collide into one device. This means that we have more regular access to various parts of our lives and the church must compete with all the other areas. Where there is a challenge there is an opportunity. In The Live and Online Episode you will be challenged to engage mentally into scenarios that are playing out in front of us right now in the church. If you’re looking for steps 1, 2 and 3 on how to balance this shift, keep looking. By the end of this episode you will find yourself equipped with facts, figures, thoughts and realities that will serve to influence your church communication decisions now and in the future.

You know that communications span way beyond the pixels on a computer screen or the ink that's used on a print piece. The effectiveness of your communication is a sum of church mission, leadership vision, ministry events and details. In The Leadership & Volunteer Episode Deborah Ike takes us throughout the entire scope of church communications into the world of volunteers and utilizing volunteers within our communication departments.

How'd you like a shot in the arm of communication encouragement and strategy? In this very special episode of the Church Marketing Podcast Dave Shrein takes 60 minutes to moderate a hangout with four of the most influential leaders in Church Communication. Gerry True, Phil Bowdle, Kelley Hartnett and Mark MacDonald add their voices to the conversation of how do we pursue excellence in church communication given the many struggles communication leaders encounter. From thriving on limited resources to communicating effectively amongst your staff, our conversation is sure to encourage you in your context and reassure you that you're not alone.

The position of Communication Director (or Pastor) is fairly new. While many large churches (5,000+) have had someone in this role for a long time, the average church is just now discovering the need for someone to ask strategic questions about how their information is being communicated and received. The increase in noise (both online and in life overall) has revealed that the messages from the church are not making it onto calendars, into conversations and or translating into any type of measurable growth. In a scurry to keep up with the times churches are hiring individual to manage communications without a full understanding of what that even means. A communication director will begin to do their job and pastors realize their being told no more often or having to explain initiatives and decisions in greater detail than they have been accustomed to. No one is right or wrong in this scenario but the fact remains there is a giant gap between what pastors and communication directors see as furthering the communications of the church. In this episode Pastor Brian McCoy from Foothills Baptist Church in Phoenix, Arizona shares his experience working with a communications director for the past 4 months. Who is this director? It just so happens that I am the director (Dave Shrein). Throughout our time working together to improve the communication mechanisms at Foothills we've experienced significant wins, constant misunderstandings and a learning experience that has benefitted both of us.

Wanna hop on the wall again and learn from the success and failures of others? This is the 2nd episode focusing on awesome church communicators. In this episode we speak with two church communicators about branding, guidelines, volunteers and team building. There are literally hundreds of communicators who are in our Church Marketing Sucks family and it's about time we heard from them!

There is no better way to learn than to live as a fly on the wall as others talk about their successes and failures. While there are certain names we all know in church marketing and communication, there is one set of individuals that you have yet to hear from… our listeners. The Awesome Communicator Episode is all about highlighting the successes of our community for the benefit of our community. This is the first of two episodes where we talk with Church Marketing Podcast listeners about their 2014 experiences.

Social is a beast, mostly because there is an expectation for churches to have a presence on all networks, even if churches don’t understand all of them. Understanding a platform and then gaining clarity for our main church account is hard enough. Add to the ministries that want their own social presence. The key to conquering social for your church is to become clear on who you are and define what role social plays in communicating the message of who you are? What is the purpose? Christmas offers a very unique opportunity to discover what it is like to have a clear purpose because everyone is thinking about and talking about the same thing: Christmas. In The Christmas Social Episode we take a look at how churches can use social to connect with the culture around them and take advantage of the receptive attitude to the message of Emmanuel, God with us.

Every church has a different process for planning out various seasons of ministry or series’ of messages, yet the central element that is vital to every process is the idea of "The Approach." In The Christmas Planning Episode we examine series planning strategy. We also identify how to manage "The Approach" if you’re in an environment where planning and strategizing is not something that happens natural.

Does our communication drive visitors away? If you're looking to decipher how your communication is received by visitor, Jonathan Malm's new book, Unwelcome gives you a list of 50 ways your church may be driving away first-time visitors. Whether you've been working in the church since before you were born or if you're still in your first 12 months of vocational ministry, Unwelcome reveals simple ways churches can intentionally welcome more visitors with open arms.

There are a lot of online communities where knowledgeable experts on church media gather and share ideas. Often these forums present amazing solutions in terms that reach over the heads of green media directors or volunteers. In this episode we look at the essential media elements and media strategy which has the greatest impact on a church... without breaking the resource bank. There is a certain level of media competency that churches should strive for in order to make a connection with their surrounding cultures.

We know how we use social media for ourselves, but what should social media look like when a church uses it? While it’s typical for church culture to slowly adapt to new mediums and modes of communication, it is also typical that social media networks, protocols and trends change on a month to month basis. In this episode we take a look at how churches can overcome the challenges of their individual organization culture, budgetary restrictions and man hour limits in order to add meaningful contributions to social media. Dave even finds a way to work a mad men quote into the conversation

Jenny has been on staff as the communications director at National Community Church in Washington, D.C., for just over 12 months and in that time has had to build a communication department from the ground up. In the conversation, Jenny and Dave talk about how the Certification Lab was a huge learning event. The Certification Lab gave her the confidence she needed to make decisions on behalf of her church.

Who's visiting your website and what are they doing while they're there? If you don't know the answer to that question you're missing out on key criteria that can help you make decisions about every other area of your online communications (and offline for that matter). When you establish firm goals for what you want a webpage to accomplish and can measure those goals against analytic data, you have the information necessary to determine what you need to change about your website strategy. Also, discover the missing element that connects your church to Instagram.

School is back in session (though it seems earlier than when we were in school) and the fall is coming into focus. The You Episode is all about self-care. Entrepreneur Ahna Hendrix joins the Church Marketing Podcast from Vietnam to share how she practices self-care while living a lifestyle that demands nothing but complete and total focus. Also in the episode we look at the power of real photography on a website as well as an alternative way churches can approach using Pinterest.

It is much easier for a stakeholder to tell a story than it is to recite a mission statement. Communicators have the important role of telling the story of the organizations they represent in a compelling way so that when stakeholders walk away, they speak about the organization with language that is true of the mission. There are five elements of communication that we must use to filter every decision we make in what we do and do not say. If you’ve ever wanted a formula for being awesome at communications, this is the episode for you!

If you’ve had questions about how to recruit and use communication volunteers in your church, this is the podcast episode for you! Phil Bowdle lends his voice and experiences from West Ridge Church in Georgia, sharing from what he has done well and not so well as it relates to volunteers. We also touch on the topic of maintaining healthy relationships between the communication department and the rest of the church staff.

It’s completely normal for church communicators to feel alone in their role. It is a role fairly new to any church under 5,000 people. While many folks on a church staff have experience as a youth pastor, associate pastor, children’s director, executive administrator or any other given position… very few have ever been a church communication director.Our conversation guest today is Justin Wise and he represents just one of the many voices in the growing church communication community. Our conversation centers around the need for an organization to have a big idea or their “why” defined before moving onto the "how."I also discuss what to do if your organization lacks a big idea or if the stated big idea does not have an affect on what the church does.

This episode is in response to a request made in the comment section of a previous episode requesting information on Facebook and Facebook Ads. Josh Burns and I discuss our experience with ads as well as some best practices for getting started and using ads in the church world.

In our final sneak peek episode we talk about how to cater a message to your audience, balancing service times for attendance, knowing your audience and an item of recommended reading.

In this third sneak peek episode of our new podcast our conversation with Gerry True zero's in on planning ahead for Easter and other big events.

The second sneak peek of our new podcast includes a conversation with Josh Burns about social media invites for Easter.

An early sneak peek at our new podcast with special guest Phil Bowdle. We talk about Easter, invite cards, Facebook and more.