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Your church has a great deal to communicate—ministry updates, upcoming events, volunteer opportunities, and community announcements. All of these things and more must be communicated both externally and internally.
Your church has a great deal to communicate—ministry updates, upcoming events, volunteer opportunities, and community announcements. All of these things and more must be communicated both externally and internally.
The challenge is reaching the right people with the right message on the right channel. Thankfully, technology gives church leaders plenty of options for tools to choose from. Here’s an overview of the types of tools you’ll need and some tricks for maximizing their effectiveness.
Regardless of the size of your church’s team, your staff needs an internal suite of tools to do their work. At a minimum, this includes an email inbox, a calendar, and collaborative documents.
This is a few of the most basic applications bundled together into a single environment. Many of these suites will have tools that cover some of the other categories below, including video, chat, files, and note-taking.
Sometimes you need to get a quick answer from someone. Or you don’t want to bother them with an email or text message. That’s why chat tools like Slack are so helpful—they cut down on cluttered inboxes and speed up collaborations.
The key here is to distinguish between messages that should be shared in a chat vs. an email vs. a meeting. Don’t let your people get confused about which channel to use. Chat is better for quick check-ins and email is often preferable for longer communications that need to be documented.
No matter what kind of projects you’re working on at your church, you need a place to save and share files across your team. That could be everything from text documents, images, videos, and beyond. This requires a multi-user file-sharing system.
Be sure to share one single system across your entire team including volunteers. Then work hard to keep your files updated, clearly labeled, and organized into folders. This cuts down on time trying to find the right file, or losing a file and having to start over again.
Running a church requires many moving parts and countless tasks that need to be accomplished. This doesn’t happen by accident, and won’t be efficient without a clear system. That’s where a project/task management tool comes in.
The beauty of any project management tool is begin able to assign projects to people and set deadlines. This keeps people accountable and every project moving forward on time. Just ensure that everyone is bought into the tool and checks in on their tasks regularly.
More church teams embraced remote work since the pandemic. Many church functions still require a physical presence. However, offering a virtual option makes things accessible to more people. So you need to have a video chat tool.
Most of these tools are similar to one another, and many come standard in office suites. There will always be technical difficulties with cameras and dropped calls. But having a universal tool that works with your calendar function is essential to scheduling online meetings.
Unique to churches compared to other organizations is the need to plan for Sunday morning worship. This includes everything from planning worship songs, selecting Scripture verses, managing sermon series, and handling church announcements.
There’s a smaller range of tool options because they’re all specifically designed for churches. However, this can also be an advantage because it means each has the features you’ll need. The trick is finding a tool that integrates with your existing systems and has a good user interface.
The church is not a building, nor is it the church’s staff. A church is made up of people—those members of your community who come to worship, volunteer, and donate. Having a record of these people and their interactions with your congregation is virtual to effective ministry.
Like worship planning software, these databases are usually created specifically for churches. In the business world, these are known as Customer Relationship Managers (CRMs)—a single database with contact information and tracking different engagements over time. The most challenging part of this is keeping the records updated, which is why this is sometimes a full-time dedicated position within the church.
If you hope to communicate with an external audience, social media is an obvious place to start. This can include a wide range of channels—including Facebook, Instagram, and beyond. But rather than managing each of these networks separately, you can find a tool that streamlines your efforts.
Using a social media management tool allows you to schedule posts on multiple channels, manage user engagements, see analytics, and communicate internally with your team. If you’re serious about using social media at your church, having a management tool is a major boost.
Email marketing is different from individual email communications. But both are equally as important. Individual emails are sent specifically to a few people. Email marketing refers to wider emails sent to a list of people using a mass email tool. Don’t try to email the entire church from your personal Outlook or Gmail account.
Choosing the right email marketing platform requires a connection with your people database. These two systems must communicate with each other to make sure your email list is updated. You need to send the right emails to the right people.
Not everyone communicates frequently using email or social media. However, text messages are a reliable and consistent way to reach people directly in their pockets. Like email marketing, this shouldn’t come from your personal cell phone, but rather an official management tool.
Be careful about overdoing it with text messages. People are more willing to give up their email than they are their cell phone number. Sending too many texts from the church can cause them to unsubscribe and miss out on future messages.
That’s a lot of different church communication tools serving a wide range of functions. But don’t be overwhelmed. You’re likely using a few of these tools already—either personally, professionally, or both. So these shouldn’t be unfamiliar to you or your congregation.
It can take a while to find the right tools and build up your communication stack. Start one tool at a time and grow from there. Get input from your staff on what they prefer and collaborate on the decision. Onboarding a new tool takes time but saves you time in the long run.
Keep in mind that many of these tools have significant nonprofit discounts that apply to churches like yours. Even if the cost of the tool seems too much, you may be able to save just by being a ministry. It never hurts to check.
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Breeze has been incredible. Their customer service, commitment to innovation, and their product are top-notch. I love the features, the ease of use and the mobile applications.
All of our database needs have been more than met, it's easier to use than the last database we had, and the price is amazing - what a value this has been to our church! All of our staff can use this software and they do regularly. We use it to track…literally anything a church could possibly need to track regarding it's attenders.
Breeze has been a great asset to our church and congregation. Especially from an administrative standpoint, it has been the most adaptable and easiest church database I have ever used. The features from blast emails to giving on-line, and texting have been one of our greatest assets. Thank you!
We switched from a major, web-based ChMS to Breeze and our decision is confirmed every day. We are a medium size church and we use Breeze for contributions, member management, event checkin and a few other applications custom to our church. I had trouble getting any staff to use our previous ChMS but almost all staff are using Breeze. The product is very well designed, extremely easy to learn and use and customer service is incredible.
Breeze has opened the communication highway for our congregation and staff, with very little training. Because members can update their own records and search easily for other members - and map their locations, send emails and text right from Breeze, they love it and our data is more real-time accurate. Our ministries are stronger, because they can trust the data in Breeze, which is easily accessed anywhere, anytime.
Breeze is the first ChMS my volunteers have actually embraced. That's because it's so easy to use. The software is very flexible and gives us the opportunity to make decisions based on actual data we've collected and not just hunches or stories we believe to be true.
I cannot say enough about Breeze. Their customer service is so friendly, you feel like you have friends and family helping you get started, they're prompt to reply and will do whatever they can to help you get things sorted out. It's been so easy to learn, our staff is loving it and best of all even our staff who are not computer savvy find it a breeze (pun intended). We are just thrilled by our choice.
From the start of our process looking for an online solution, Breeze has exceeded all our expectations. Fast data import, fast and friendly customer support, and we can’t say enough about how much we like the program itself. Very well designed and user friendly. On a scale of 1-10, Breeze gets a 15 from us!
