Episcopal Church Foundation Vestry Papers - for leading congregations

Too much communication can be a bad thing.

This probably sounds incongruous with my regular litany of all things communication. And don’t get me wrong: I fervently believe that effective and strategic communication is critical to the vitality of congregations, dioceses, and church institutions.

But the rub is deciding what constitutes effective and how it fits within a larger strategy.

Here’s a case in point: We have worked hard in our diocese to encourage communications. We’ve tried to empower leaders by giving them access to an array of communication tools. We offered training and assistance.

What I forgot to do is make sure the use of the tools fit within a larger strategy of effective communication. Suddenly seven or eight people were creating and sending electronic newsletters to our diocesan lists. Each newsletter was focused on a particular area of ministry and shared important and interesting information.

The problem, though, was that we were bombarding recipients with four, five and six e-mails in a week. We didn’t coordinate and structure the information so that there was a primary reliable source, with certain e-mails sent to smaller, targeted audiences. We pushed it all out there without giving the audience the tools to help prioritize and weed through the information.
I began to fear that we were diluting our contact with the diocesan audience by sending so many different newsletters. I worried that instead of dutifully reading all of them, many people would feel overwhelmed by e-mail overload and simply hit delete.

So we stepped back and re-calibrated. We developed some practices that I’m hoping finds the sweet spot of effective and strategic communication instead of too-tightly-controlled communication. 

We’ve asked staff and leaders to contribute news and event information to the diocesan electronic newsletter, which is sent out once or twice a week. But we also encouraged these leaders of different ministries to develop a monthly newsletter with focused information and resources. These newsletters will be sent to our wider audience as well as newly developed lists of people particularly interested in the ministry. So for instance, a monthly newsletter about campus ministry will go to both the wide diocesan audience, to college students and to student affairs offices. Our conference center’s newsletter will be sent to local residents as well as to the diocesan database. 

We’ll see how this works over the next few months. We may need to tweak the practices again. 

But I learned an important lesson (again): Just because we can doesn’t mean we should. Just because we have so many tools doesn’t mean that we need to brandish them all, every day, for every occasion. 

We must always ask ourselves how best to share the information, how our audience needs to receive it, so that we create and support a connected community.