The Biggest Fix
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 […]
Please stop saying your church is welcoming
A word that means everything means nothing. I’ve been doing this work for years now. I have never once had a church describe itself to me without using the word welcoming. Not one. That should tell you something. If every church is welcoming, the word has stopped doing any work. It’s not describing anything anymore. […]
If I ran your nonprofit’s social media
Nonprofits that teach their audience about the problem they solve build more trust than nonprofits that just ask for support. If you run a nonprofit, your social media has one job that matters more than any other. Teach people about the problem you exist to solve, and teach them how you solve it. Not the […]
Some of you had questions. Here’s what I said.
A few thoughts on email length and YouTube strategy. Happy almost-Fourth. I’m keeping this one short because you’ve got a long weekend ahead of you and so do I. A few of you wrote back after recent emails with follow-up questions, and two of them came up enough that I figured I’d answer them here […]
If I ran your social media
Here’s what I’d actually do. (This one’s for churches. Non-profit subscribers, I’ve got you covered next week.) If you handed me the keys to your church’s social media accounts tomorrow, I wouldn’t post every day. I wouldn’t chase every platform. And I definitely wouldn’t keep doing whatever you’ve been doing since 2020. Here’s what I […]
The irony of sending an email about how nobody reads emails is not lost on me.
But stay with me. Right after I floated the idea that nobody is really reading our email newsletters on a Communicators Club Zoom call, I opened my inbox to find an email from my online pilates studio with the subject line: “respectfully, i can’t do it anymore.” The first line read: “I’m SO done with […]
Your website isn’t about you.
Theological language has its place. Your homepage probably isn’t it. I’ve been working with a client recently on writing website copy (also known as “brand story”) for their church. When the pastor saw the first draft, her feedback was that it lacked theological language. I understand the instinct. But here’s what we had to work […]
Disrupting your communications rhythms
You have my permission to do everything differently this summer. This came up on a recent Communicators Club Zoom call. Someone mentioned that they scale back their newsletter frequency over the summer, and a few others were quick to say they do something similar. More were genuinely surprised I was on board with that. Someone […]
Five Years In
In 2020, I didn’t set out to build a company. I was responding to what I kept seeing. Churches and faith-based nonprofits were doing thoughtful and faithful work. Many struggled to explain it clearly online. Websites felt outdated or overwhelming. Social media became a source of pressure. Communications lived at the edge of someone’s role […]
Introducing the Communicators Club
Friends, I know how isolating communications work can feel—especially in a church or nonprofit setting. Whether it’s your whole job, part of your job, or something you somehow ended up doing, you’re often figuring things out on your own. This idea actually came from my friend Jaime Cowan, a long-time and deeply experienced communications professional. […]