Getting the Most out of (Smarter) EMAIL

I’m not as tech-savvy as Dave and the other BetaChurch.org folks (I still glaze over whenever people start talking CSS and web standards and the like), but I do know a good tool when I see one. And for me, as a busy pastor and church planter, a good tool is almost anything that saves me time and helps me connect with people.

EMail seems like a tool that should do that.

I’m not as tech-savvy as Dave and the other BetaChurch.org folks (I still glaze over whenever people start talking CSS and web standards and the like), but I do know a good tool when I see one. And for me, as a busy pastor and church planter, a good tool is almost anything that saves me time and helps me connect with people.

EMail seems like a tool that should do that.

But in my experience, email never really delivers as much as I hope it will. Sure it is cheap, quick, and easy — but is anybody really reading it? Is it really an effective communication tool? Is it working?

In several ministries I have worked with in the past, we used email for a variety of purposes: general communication, announcements, cancelled events, prayer requests, scheduling of meetings, etc.

Sometimes it worked well, but often not.

In my current ministry role as Lead Pastor/Church Planter of St. Paul’s Collegiate Church, I rely heavily on email, but for some very specific purposes.

THREE MISTAKES I MADE WITH EMAIL:

1. Mixing of Personal with Ministry.
When I started, I tried using one email system (that means one address, one contact/address book, one filing system). The problem I had was that it was almost impossible to keep my contact list clean and even more difficult to give it to anyone else in the church to use (because they usually got my grandmother’s email address along with the elder list!).

I also tried managing multiple ministries out of the same account using group lists–on more than one occasion I sent things to the wrong list (have you ever gotten nailed by “auto-fill” when you are in a rush and not trying to shoot out an email between appointments? Not pretty!)

For email to be effective for me I needed to have better email “boundaries”.

I’ve solved this problem by using free email systems along with email addresses linked to our domain name. It might juts be me,

2. Too much email.
I think the biggest mistake churches make with email is either not using it enough (so no one thinks of it as a valid form of church communication) or using it way too much.

Since it is still Lent, I will confess that I was in the “too much” camp. It is so easy while sitting at your desk to fire off emails about everything that seems important (and maybe important) but the net effect is that people start ignoring your emails altogether.

We discovered the “less-is-more” approach pretty early on at St. Paul’s. As much as possible, we send one email a week. We call it, conveniently enough, the “Wednesday Weekly”. Rarely is there something so important that comes up that we can’t wait for the Wednesday Weekly. This is the only email that goes out to the entire church.

3. No Comprehensive Communications plan.
The third mistake I made was not having email integrated into a comprehensive communications plan for the church.

What do we communicate when to whom and how? Email is one tool, but certainly not the only one. We needed to figure out how email fit into our broader communications strategy.

THREE PRIMARY PURPOSES FOR EMAIL:
In order to figure out how and when to use email, we also needed to understand the rest of our communication strategy.

(A little side note here… I have worked for many ministries and churches and been a part of many more. A consistent and major problem in virtually every ministry I have seen, been a part of, or consulted for has been communication. And always lack of communication. Bad communication destroys community, erodes trust, allows the mission to be thwarted, and opens up windows for people to hijack the agenda… bad communication is poison to the Church!)(OK…rant over)

As part of our overall strategy for communications–which in our case heavily relies on our public website and our “inside website”–we decided that email needed to fulfill three primary purposes: (1) Vision & Values Reinforcement; (2) information availability; and (3) driving people to our website.

The tool we use is, as I mentioned above, our “Wednesday Weekly”–a weekly email newsletter that is sent out to the entire church every Wednesday at midnight like clockwork.

1. VISION/VALUES
I agree with Andy Stanley on this point: leaders cannot cast vision enough! A huge part of my job is to articulate, clarify, and cast vision, as well as motivate people to give their time, talent, and treasure to the vision. And the reality is that vision leaks. It really does. So I use our weekly email to highlight and clarify our vision as a church. Often the lead article is something that reinforces our vision or our values as a community. And by constantly reinforcing these ideas, it helps build the kind f community that we are hoping to buld. Erwin McManus talks about this as “cultural architecture” and it is such a key concept.

Now don’t get me wrong: email i snot the only tool we use to reinforce vision and values. We preach on this stuff all the time, we talk about it almost incessantly, we do “vision moments” at both our weekend and mid-week services, we blog on these ideas–and then we reinforce it all through our weekly email.

2. INFORMATION
In any community there is a basic need for information. We have tried really hard to keep “announcements” at our weekend service to 2-minutes or less (and we’ve been pretty successful) so we need another method for getting information out (as well as for collecting information).

Our Wednesday Weekly always starts with our “Top 5″ — five things that you need to know this week. For people who are too busy to bother reading a weekly newsletter, hopefully they will at least look at the “Top 5″ headlines–each one linked to more details on our website.

We also use the weekly email to highlight strategic events and ministry opportunities coming up. It is a source of information for those of us in the church.

But we also use it to collect information. For example, for the last few weeks we have been sending out brief surveys about a number of topics in the church as part of the weekly email. We simply ask people to answer a few quick questions through an online survey. This creates a feedback loop that is critical to the leadership of the church. We use a built in survey/form feature that is part of our Church Community Builder-driven “inside website”, but you could also use a service like SurveyMonkey to do the same thing.

3. WEBSITE
The third thing that we use our email to do is to drive people back to our website. We made a decision early on that the primary tool we would use for communication in the church was our website. As often as we would say “if you want to know X, go to the site” we still had a hard time getting people in the habit of using the site.

Our solution? Almost every article or piece of information in our weekly (or any email we send out) links back to the website. A “vision article” may be posted on our blog and we only put the introduction on the email.

Information on how to sign up for an event, additional resources, or more information may all be linked back to the website. One of the primary goals of our email is to get people onto the website on a regular basis–and it works! Our web traffic on Wednesdays and Thursdays (after the weekly email comes out) is much higher than any other time of week!

And over time, people have gotten used to going to the website on a regular basis for information, sermons, blogs and more.

THREE TOOLS I COULDN’T LIVE WITHOUT:

Here are three tools, when it comes to email, I couldn’t live without from a ministry perspective:

1. ConstantContact
ConstantContact is a web-based email management system, designed primarily for business but also ideal for churches and other non-profits. It allows me to format emails anyway I want, including an array of pre-designed HTML formats (we use one of these for our Wednesday Weekly). But more importantly, it is where we keep the official church email list (seperate from my personal contact list), lets us track the percentage of people are actually reading our emails, the number of people who “click through” (i.e. follow a link back to our website or any other link we put in), and also to track “bounces” — that is, bad email addresses.

The advantages to all this tracking is huge. By knowing how many people read the email and click through, I have a better sense as to whether this is an effective form of communication. (For those wondering, a pretty good email for us is one that is read by over 50% of our list and where over 50% of those who read it click through. According to ConsantContact, the average across the system is a read-rate of 36% and a click-through-rate of about 15% — makes you realize that email can’t be your only tool!)

It also allows us to keep a “clean” database and weed out bad email addresses, etc. The system also includes an “opt-out” feature so people can get off your list, as well as the ability for “subscribers” to update their own information (which saves me a ton of time!).

All of this and a lot more for less than $12 a mmonth (non-profit rate).

2. GMAIL
I confess it. I love GMAIL and I pretty much love all things Google these days. What i love most about GMAIL is the threaded conversation feature, endless storage, and Google-powered searching of your archived mail.

GMAIL also allows you to check multiple accounts, so I have all my email addresses (personal, ministry, etc) go through GMAIL. Upon arrival, all my email is labled and categorized. I don’t have to worry about losing an email because I can pretty much kepe them all and then search by name, keyword, etc. Plus, the threaded conversation feature keeps my inbox and life much more organized. I highly recommend GMAIL for pastors!

3. Church Community Builder (CCB)
CCB is an integrated web package designed specifically for churches. It can either be used as your complete website (I don’t recommend this) or as an integrated part of your website (which is what we do).

It includes online database, donor tracking and receipting, the ability to set-up groups/ministries with calendars/discussion boards/etc. It all inludes forms (remember the survey I talked about earlier), interacts seemlessly with credit card transactions (if you are set-up for them) and a whole bunch of other cool features. But the EMAIL is one of the best parts of it.

Everyone in the database (i.e. everyone in your church) has a profile that they can control and customize. Anyone with access to the database (which s password protected and you control who has access to what) can email people through CCB–either without knowing their email address or allowing them to see the address (again, based on your cutsomized security settings).

From an email perspective this accomplishes two things: (1) each person can keep their records updated which saves the church office a lot of headaches trying to keep emails and contact information up-to-date; and (2) it gives access to everyone in the church to be able to contact and email people which is great community builder. The other nice feature in terms of email is that each “group” or “ministry” automatically creates a “group email list”. So when I want to email the Elders, I do it through CCB. If I want to email all my LifeGroup Leaders or Promiseland Volunteers, I do it through CCB. I’m telling you, it’s great!

A guy a used to work for when I was a cook used to always say that the key to life was to “work smarter, not harder.” While it’s a bit of a cliche, it is also very true. EMail is only helpful as a ministry tool if it actually makes our lives easier and furthers our mission and vision. EMail can be a great tool–you juts need to be smart in how you use it.

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Rev. Ben Dubow is Lead & Founding Pastor of St. Paul’s Collegiate Church in Storrs, CT. He’s single, loves to cook, and only liked technology that actually makes his life (or at least his ministry) more effective and efficient.