Fall is typically an ideal time to launch a spiritual growth campaign. Since school is back and schedules are settling down for the next nine months, fall is a time when people are open to trying something new.
Spiritual growth campaigns are four- to six-week periods of time when every area of the church (age-graded ministries, small groups, etc.) focuses on something specific together.
Communications play an integral part of any spiritual growth campaign because it ensures your message reaches and resonates with your entire congregation. Effective communication will help to create a unified campaign experience for everyone in your church.
Here is how to develop a comprehensive communications strategy for your fall campaign.
1. Understanding Your Audience
Any communications endeavor must start with understanding the audience. It’s likely not as easy as it sounds. You don’t have one audience; you have multiple audiences—youth, families, seniors, singles, new members etc.
Spend some time thinking through the different audiences in your midst. Answer these specific questions about each group:
- What communications platforms do they use the most?
- What are they looking for in your church?
- What information do they need to fully support your spiritual growth campaign?
- What are the different ways they’ll take part in the campaign?
- How will you know if you’ve reached this group with your communications?
If possible, do more than just hypothesize about your audience’s needs and values. Ask representatives of your audience(s) themselves and run your conclusions through them.
2. Setting Clear Objectives
As a communications leader, it’s important you fully understand the goals of your church’s spiritual growth campaign. Are you trying to increase overall attendance, get more people into small groups, develop spiritual habits, etc.? Likely your church is trying to do all the above. Make sure you understand the priorities.
Once you have clarity around the campaign goals, align your communications efforts to those goals. Every communications task you take on related to the campaign should support one of those goals. You don’t want to waste resources on unconnected strategies.
3. Crafting Your Key Messages
Develop a central theme for your communications. Your theme should point toward your church’s key goals for the campaign.
Your key message is a simple sentence or slogan that you can repeat through a variety of channels and for a variety of audiences.
Make sure your key message(s) are both catchy and clear. If you must choose between the two, pick clarity every time. When people hear or read your key messages, it’s crucial that they understand their meaning and what you want them to do.
Test your key messages with your audiences and make sure they resonate with them.
4. Developing a Consistent Look and Feel
A consistent look and feel ensures your congregants instantly realize your communications relate to the campaign. Once you’ve chosen the colors, font, and logo you’ll use on the campaign, design a few templates for emails and social media posts.
Create a place on a network drive, and available to everyone who will communicate about the campaign. Store your logo and any templates you’ve created in this folder. Include a simple note in the folder that spells out the font and color choices (be specific, with corresponding Hex, CMYK, etc. codes). Even if you’re the only person creating content for the campaign, creating a note like this helps to make sure you don’t forget these key elements.
5. Choosing the Right Channels
Churches have never had more channels to use for communications. The primary challenge churches face in communications today is deciding which channel to use. The right channel is the one your congregants use.
While you have a variety of channels at your disposal, email, social media, and the web are the places to start.
—Develop a series of emails you deliver at least weekly that invite people to take part in various elements of the campaign.
—Plan social media posts in the platforms your congregants use that relate to different parts of the campaign. Try to post at least two times a week during heavy traffic times. Strongly consider investing in social media advertising to reach beyond your current followers.
—Prepare a spiritual growth campaign website using your agreed upon look and feel.
If there are other channels (such as printed fliers and traditional advertising) that you’ve found to be successful, leverage those as well.
6. Mobilizing Volunteers and Staff
Maximize your staff time by leveraging volunteers with experience in communications. As soon as possible, perform a quick survey of congregants trying to find potential volunteers.
Make a list of tasks that you’d like to find volunteers to help with. Organize a meeting of potential volunteers (those who showed an interest in the survey you sent out earlier). Help them understand your church’s vision for the campaign and how communications fit into that vision. Describe some tasks needed, and enlist people to sign up to help.
You’ll likely have staff on other teams performing communications tasks as well. Give them access to the templates and campaign assets you’ve created. Have a short training where you help them understand the communications messaging and values you’ve already established.
7. Measuring and Adjusting Your Strategy
Regularly monitor the effectiveness of your communications by keeping an eye on key metrics, including your social media engagement, open rate on emails, and the rate of people clicking on your CTAs.
Before beginning your communications efforts for the campaign, set some benchmarks for these key metrics. When your content falls below the benchmarks you set, adjust your strategy.
Don’t lose sight of downstream metrics like attendance and small group involvement. Be willing to adjust your strategy when what you’ve done fails to meet leadership expectations.
Getting Started
Launching a communications strategy for your fall campaign can seem daunting. It ranks right up there with Christmas and Easter as the three biggest events on a church calendar in many churches today. (In some ways, the campaign may be even more important than those holidays.)
Take a deep breath and follow the plan above. Get ready for your church’s best campaign yet!
For more about how to engage your congregants this fall, check out our free guide, The Fall Church Communications Playbook: The Ultimate Guide to Re-Engaging Your Church Family.
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