Modernizing Church Announcements

Let's be honest, we're more focused on catching our breaths after a hearty praise and wondering if we'll be late to Sunday lunch than listening to church announcements.

Announcements are a part of the salvation support efforts a church provides. These are opportunities to collectively connect for discipleship. The gap is no one is actively listening to the church announcements in service and churches rarely have follow-up efforts. There are ways to modernize church announcements with little effort for big impact. Modernized church announcements have multi-touch follow-up plans with clear instructions in a noiseless environment.

Follow-up plans offer added layers of ministerial care and intentionality.

A church should be a safe space for all of God’s children, so its imperative to meet all learning styles in follow-up. I’d recommend a combination of email newsletters, text messages, videos, and social media content pointing to the up-to-date church website.

Let’s focus on email newsletters filtered through Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s “less is more” design minimalism principle as the average attention span is 47 seconds these days.

Essentials:

Every email newsletter should contain the church’s name, physical address(es), weekly service times, website URL, and at least one direct contact method.

The email newsletter is not a word dumping ground. Keep it short. The science speaks for itself: Are Your Emails Too Long? Here’s the Ideal Email Length (Backed by Research).

Prioritize what’s relevant for the timespan include a brief value proposition and key details. Images, videos and social media content are great to incorporate in the body.

Be creative with the email layout and design, but don’t be cluttered. Read Harvard University, beehiiv, Substack, and Mailchimp’s email design best practices.

Break up the sentences into short paragraphs. Lengthy paragraphs can be a turnoff.

Platforms:

Evaluate the tools you have at your disposal. Most website hosting platforms offer email capabilities. There are email newsletter platforms like Substack, beehiiv or Mailchimp. Identify your church’s needs to guide your decision-making process. I recommend focusing on an ease-of-use platform, ability to import and export contacts with self-service options, design features, and costs to start.

Data:

Whatever you decide, be sure you automate as much as possible. Manually adding email addresses to a newsletter platform will eventually become a forgotten and human errored task. To automate, you can embed a newsletter sign-up form on the church website then share the link. This way congregants are in control of signing up. beehiiv and Mailchimp offer easy sign up methods.

Track your email newsletters’ performance metrics. See what’s working well and where the opportunities are. Consider tracking and comparing over time as well as conducting A/B testing.

Church announcements are important. Churches have to strategically break through the noise to gain congregants’ attention to take the desired actions. Email newsletters might be the breakthrough tool for your church.