Episcopal Church Foundation Vestry Papers - for leading congregations

How do you know when to choose new media and when to choose old? We find answering this question a little bit like deciding between a Ferrari and a tractor without being told if we’ll be cruising on open highways or plowing a field. As a rule, you try to choose the right tool for your budget, and the right tool for the job. Now, let’s look at what that principle looks like in practice. Let’s start simple: On Sunday morning, or whenever your community worships, you probably want to hand people a piece of paper with announcements about parish life, calendar items, and reminders of upcoming events. The emphasis here is on refrigerator-type reminders for people already involved in the life of the church. However, if your communications-as-evangelism strategy works, you will have new people coming on Sunday morning to receive these same pieces of paper. For that reason, and because some of your members are less active than others, you need to include information about your congregation’s mission, priorities, and the events that bind it together in this material. For life beyond Sunday morning, we offer the following guidelines. When to Print 1. If you are a church organization, you may well have the need to print something about yourself for exhibits, conventions, and other gatherings at which you will en- counter people face-to-face. Be judicious. It is demoralizing in the extreme to wander the halls of a church convention and see the brochure over which you labored (and on which you spent scarce resources) stuffed in the recycling bin. 2. You may still wish to print a newsletter or newspaper that you mail to people’s homes. Doing so will increase the number of contacts that you have had with your audience over the course of any given month. Few people receive all of their information through a single medium, and it is entirely possible that someone who spends their working life online hasn’t visited the church website in a couple of months and is happy to read your print newsletter. 3. If you live in a community that allows churches to put brochures in tract racks around town, or in a community that is a tourist destination—in short, if your organization or the surrounding community receive a lot of walk-in traffic—it’s nice to have a brochure, palm card, or flyer. 4. Printed pieces are useful for marking special occasions or special purposes. They are essential in fundraising campaigns. They are well suited to reaching your com- munity with complex information that you believe is essential for them to read. When Not to Print There are many situations in which printed materials are indispensable, but there are also many church organizations publishing a print newsletter that doesn’t work very well because that is what those organizations have always done. Now might be the time to rethink that practice, keeping a few things in mind: 1. Print doesn’t communicate news very well anymore. If you only print and mail a monthly newsletter or newspaper, you have to accept that the method and speed with which much of your audience receives your news will be wildly out of sync with the method and speed with which it receives other kinds of news. It is better to communicate important news to your audience in more immediate ways—an email blast list, a listserv, group text messages, Facebook, or Sunday morning announcements. 2. Print isn’t a very effective use of your limited budget. Printing and mailing a printed piece costs money, and in most cases is more labor intensive than electronic media. In addition, it only reaches people who give you their mailing addresses or come to your events. 3. Print doesn’t make good use of informal photos that your members take at events. In fact, getting decent art for print publications is a challenge, because images and photographs need to be reproduced at high resolution. 4. Print requires skill, and few people can competently report, write, edit, design, and layout a good print publication (and keep up the mailing list). Hiring a designer to provide you with a good email newsletter template is cost effective, and if you use software that easily integrates photographs and video clips, a generalist can turn out a sharp email publication faster and at a higher quality than a print publication covering the same material. 5. Print doesn’t communicate especially well with younger Christians who are nearly always online. For a travel guide to the world of digital natives, read “Ancient Liturgy for Scruffy Hipsters with Smartphones,” a profile by Jason Byassee of Lutheran pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber and her Denver congregation House for All Sinners and Saints. “The Millennials who make up the church use social media the way they use oxygen,” Byassee writes. “If asked, they can discuss it. If deprived of it, they would suffer. Otherwise they don’t think about it.” If you are supplementing your online communications program with a print publication that includes well-written feature stories, meaningful spiritual reflections, excellent art, and just enough information about what your leadership is doing to en- sure transparency, then by all means, keep doing it. But if your print newsletter or newspaper is filled with information that people read online, or needed to read online weeks ago, then it might be time to consider whether it has outlived its useful- ness. If you cease to produce a regular print publication, it does not mean that you cannot mail your members letters to inform them of important news, produce a seasonal event calendar, or put out a special publication if news or occasion dictates.

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