Your email, website, and social aren’t supposed to do the same job.
I’m deep in a communications plan for a client right now, and every part of it is built from scratch. The audience profiles come from who’s actually walking through that specific church’s doors. The messaging themes come from that congregation’s real history, real tensions, and real strengths. The tone, the priorities, the sequencing of what gets fixed first, all of it is shaped entirely by that client’s context and goals. Two churches down the street from each other would get plans that look nothing alike, because their people and their problems aren’t the same.
One idea from this plan is worth pulling out and sharing on its own, though, because it’s the kind of thinking that applies underneath the custom work, not instead of it.
Every channel needs one job.
Not one job among several. One job, full stop. The website’s job is to be the place where the complete, accurate, up to date version of everything lives. The email’s job is to give people a quick regular orientation to what matters right now. Social media’s job is to show people who you are before they ever walk through your door. Print supports whatever’s already happening somewhere else, it doesn’t repeat it.
Here’s what usually happens instead. A church or nonprofit doesn’t have clear roles for each channel, so every channel starts trying to do everyone else’s job at once. The weekly email tries to be the full information hub, so it grows long and dense and eventually unreadable on a phone. Social media becomes a highlight reel of things that already happened, so it stops helping anyone unfamiliar understand what the organization is actually about. The website goes stale because nobody feels responsible for it, since the email is already “handling” that information.
None of this is a content problem. It’s a structure problem, and it shows up in wildly different organizations for the same underlying reason. A two hundred year old Presbyterian church and a scrappy nonprofit three years into its life can land in the exact same tangle, even though everything else about their plans would look completely different.
The fix isn’t more content or better graphics. It’s understanding and accepting what each channel is actually for, and then having the discipline to let it do that one thing instead of everything.
If your org’s channels all feel like they’re competing for the same job, that’s usually the real issue. Not a lack of effort. A lack of division of labor.
Go disrupt something,
Christen
