Someone in your leadership meeting is going to ask about numbers like attendance. They always do. Participation is down slightly from last quarter. The Easter campaign reach was good, but first-time guest retention is unclear. The social posts are getting impressions, but engagement seems flat. Someone says the website traffic is up. Someone else asks if that’s translating to anything. The conversation drifts toward metrics that are easy to pull and hard to interpret, and the communications director sits across the table trying to explain why the numbers don’t fully capture what’s actually happening.

This conversation happens in nearly every church, every quarter. And it stays frustrating because nobody has agreed on what success actually looks like.

Why the Default Metrics Fail You

Attendance, giving totals, and social impressions are the three numbers most churches default to because they’re easy to pull. They’re not useless. But they measure habits, exposure, and activity, not life change. A person can attend for three years and never move an inch spiritually. A person can show up once, broken and skeptical, and walk out with something that redirects their entire life. The first shows up in your database. The second might not show up anywhere.

Giving totals has the same problem. A church that measures the health of its ministry by fund contributions is training its ministry teams to serve the budget instead of the mission. The question “did this campaign increase giving?” is a different question than “did this campaign move people toward Christ?” Treating them as the same question is how communications work loses its theological grounding in the service of ministry.

This doesn’t mean you stop tracking attendance or giving. It means you stop treating them as the primary indicators of whether your communications strategy is working.

What You Should Be Measuring Instead

The metrics worth building your strategy around are behavioral. They track whether people are moving, not just whether they’re present.

Second visit rate.

The gap between first-time guests and people who come back is one of the most honest signals your communications produce. Someone coming back means the experience matched what your communications told them to expect. Someone not coming back often means it didn’t. Track this number. Ask why when it drops.

A first time next step.

When someone takes a first action beyond attending, signing up for a group, submitting a prayer request, volunteering for the first time, registering for a class, that’s a behavioral shift. Communications either helped create that moment or failed to. Build intake processes that ask people what prompted the decision, and that data starts connecting your work to outcomes.

First time giving.

Not giving totals. First-time givers specifically. Someone giving for the first time isn’t primarily a financial event. It’s a belonging event. People don’t give to organizations they feel detached from. A first-time gift, especially from someone who has been attending for months, is a signal that they’ve crossed from spectator to stakeholder. Track it as a discipleship indicator, not a revenue indicator.

Volunteer hours and first-time serve commitments.

Generosity isn’t only financial. Someone giving their Saturday to serve is giving something harder to part with than money for a lot of people. Track how many people serve for the first time following a specific campaign or series. That’s a measurable outcome of communications work.

Care and outreach participation.

Who shows up when someone in the congregation has a need? Meal train sign-ups, benevolence referrals from outside the church, mission trips, and local outreach registrations. These are indicators of a congregation becoming more generous in posture, not just in giving. Communications that consistently point people outward should produce movement in these numbers over time.

God story submissions.

Build a mechanism for people to share what God is doing in their lives and track the volume and themes of what comes back. A spike in submissions following a series on a specific topic is evidence that the message connected personally. The content of those stories tells you more about mission effectiveness than any analytics dashboard will.

The Relay System You Should Consider Building

Most of these metrics live inside ministry departments, not within the grasp of the communications team. The care pastor knows when his calendar fills up after a sermon series on getting help with grief. The small groups director sees enrollment spikes after a focus. The volunteer coordinator knows when a serve team video produces a wave of new applicants. That information exists, but it typically stops at the ministry leader and never makes it back to the people who helped create the moment.

Building a relay system means making it a standing expectation that ministry leaders bring outcomes back to the communications team. Not as a report, but as a rhythm. A monthly conversation where the student pastor mentions that three kids made decisions during a series that the communications team helped build. Where the recovery ministry leader says someone showed up because of the video. Where the connections team reports that a family came back because of a follow-up text.

This isn’t about credit. It’s about the connection to the mission. Without that relay, communications work feels like production. With it, it feels like the teams are ministry partners.

The relay doesn’t happen automatically. You have to ask for it explicitly, explain why it matters, and build it into the regular cadence of how your team relates to ministry leaders. Start with the leaders you already trust most. Expand from there.

Getting Leadership to Care About the Right Numbers

The hardest part of this isn’t building the measurement systems. It’s shifting what leadership pays attention to for measuring health.

Don’t walk in and tell them their current metrics are wrong. Walk in with questions about a broader picture. Here’s what the data shows. Here’s what the data can’t show. Here’s what I’m hearing from ministry leaders about what’s connecting. Here’s what I think we should be asking that we’re not asking yet. Bring more to the table rather than arguing against what’s already there.

Over time, as the new metrics start appearing consistently in leadership conversations, they become part of how the church evaluates its own health. That shift takes longer than a single meeting. It takes showing up quarter after quarter with honest, specific, mission-connected data until the room starts asking for it.

The Systems That Make This Possible

None of this happens without infrastructure. A few things worth building:

Your ChMS needs a field for “how did you hear about us” and “what prompted this decision” on every Connect card and next step form. That data connects communications activity to behavioral outcomes over time.

A simple shared dashboard where ministry leaders log meaningful conversations and outcomes monthly, not a formal report, just a running record of stories and numbers worth tracking.

A quarterly communications review that includes ministry directors, not just the communications team. Bring the metrics, bring the stories, ask what’s connecting and what isn’t.

A story submission pathway on your website and in your app that makes it easy for people to share what God is doing. This doesn’t have to be elaborate. A simple form with two or three questions is enough to start.

What You’re Actually Responsible For

You’re not responsible for a life change. That’s God’s work, moving through the ministry of the whole church. Your job is to remove the barriers that keep people from encountering that ministry and to build the on-ramps that make it possible for someone on the outside to find their way in to discover faith.

Measure whether those on ramps are working. Track whether people are moving. Pay attention to ways people are falling through the cracks between systems. Build the systems that surface the stories and begin to look at leading metrics instead of lagging ones.

The numbers will never tell the whole story. But the right numbers will tell you enough to keep building faithfully and give your leadership a benchmark for general health.

Last week, we looked at three patterns that keep church stories from landing. The process summary that documents what happened without showing why it mattered. The statistics update that mistakes numbers for meaning. The testimony with no tension that skips past the honest parts and goes straight to the resolution.

This week, I want to show you what it looks like when a story is done right, because there is a real difference, and it is worth understanding specifically enough to replicate.

A few years ago, I watched a church air a VBS volunteer video during a Sunday service. It featured one woman, probably in her mid-sixties, sitting in a chair in what looked like a classroom. No fancy backdrop. No motion graphics. Just her, talking.

She started by saying she almost didn’t sign up. Her husband had passed away several months before, and she looked right into the camera and said plainly that she did not feel like she had anything left to give anyone. She said she felt old, tired, and irrelevant. The idea of spending five days in a room full of third graders sounded more like a punishment. She signed up anyway because a friend asked her to, and she didn’t know how to say no.

Then she described what happened. Not in broad strokes. In specifics. A boy named Daniel, who reminded her of her son at that age so many decades ago. The way the kids argued about who got to sit next to her at snack time. A moment on Wednesday afternoon when a little girl grabbed her hand during prayer and held it for the whole prayer without letting go. She said that by Thursday, she had stopped thinking about what she had lost and started noticing what was still here. A gift of youth that needed her experience, patience, and love to share Jesus with them.

By the time she finished talking, there was not a dry eye in the room. And signups for the next year’s VBS were higher than they had ever been.

Why That Story Worked

This video had a real person in a real situation that people could recognize and relate to. Grief. Loneliness. The feeling of not having enough left to be useful or even be needed in meaningful ways. Those are not unrealistic experiences. Half the people in that sanctuary had felt some version of what she was describing, and when she named it, they were able to resonate.

It had honest tension. She did not walk into VBS confident and capable. She walked in defeated and reluctant. That reluctance is what made everything that followed meaningful. Without it, the story is just a nice lady who volunteered and had a good time teaching kids for a week.

It had specific details. Not “the kids were great,” but Daniel, who reminded her of her son. Not “it was meaningful” but a little girl holding her hand during prayer on Wednesday afternoon and not letting go. Specific details are what separate a story from a summary. They create pictures. Pictures create a feeling. Feelings are what move people to internalize and act.

And it had a real resolution that didn’t oversell itself. She didn’t say God completely healed her grief or that everything was better now. She said she stopped thinking about what she had lost and started noticing what was still here. That is an honest and human description of what hope actually feels like when you take time to be grateful and seek God. It is believable precisely because it doesn’t claim more than it can deliver.

The Question That Opens Everything Up

In your pre-interview conversations, there is one question that tends to unlock the real story faster than anything else. It is simply this: What were you afraid of?

Most people, when asked to share a story, start with what happened. When you ask them what they were afraid of, you can steer them towards honesty. They access the part of the experience they didn’t think to or were afraid to talk about, the doubt, the resistance, the reason they almost didn’t do the thing they’re now grateful they did. That is the part of the story that connects with people who are sitting in the same place they were in before it happened.

Follow that question with: What surprised you? And then: What do you know now that you didn’t know then? Those three questions get underneath the version someone has rehearsed and into the experience they actually had.

The Standard Worth Holding

A story is doing its job when someone watching it thinks about their own life and choices. Not about the church’s program or the ministry’s success or how impressive the production is. Their own life. Their own fears, questions, and even hopes. These are weighty emotions to connect with.

When someone finishes watching and thinks, "That sounds like something I’m going through, or I wonder if that could happen for me, or I didn’t know the church had something for people like me,” the story has done what no announcement or graphic or email can do on its own. It has made a connection that is personal, real, and inspirational.

That is what you are aiming for every time you point a camera at someone and ask them to tell you what happened. Not a perfectly polished promotion. Not a ministry highlight hype reel. Aim for a true account of one person’s experience that gives someone else permission to hope for their own chance at life-changing hope.

Hold that standard. It is worth the extra conversation before the interview and the extra time. Be willing to go past the surface and find the honest thing underneath that might just connect with people in a raw way. The people sitting in your congregation every week are carrying more than most of us know. A story told with that kind of truth can reach places that nothing else will.

You have a communications intake system. You built the forms and set the lead times. You wrote the guidelines, got them approved, sent them to every ministry leader, and walked through them at the all-staff meeting. For about six weeks, things ran more smoothly than before. Requests came in with enough time to actually do the work well for once. Then the children’s director needed something in a 1 day turnaround. Then the senior pastor had an idea on Friday night for a graphic he wanted for Sunday morning. Then the Women’s team forgot to submit their slide content until the day before.

What a Policy Actually Does

A request intake process is extremely useful. Lead times matter to have the bandwidth to do things well. Having a shared understanding of how communications work gets submitted, reviewed, and executed is legitimate and worth spending the time to build. None of that is inherently wrong.

But a policy is a description of how things should work. It has no authority of its own. It can’t enforce itself. It doesn’t follow up when someone bypasses it. It doesn’t sit in the room when a pastor decides his Friday night idea is urgent enough to warrant a Sunday morning exception. A policy is only as strong as the culture that has agreed to it and holds fast to it. And in most churches, that culture doesn’t exist yet when the policy gets written and rolled out.

This is why the intake form becomes a source of resentment instead of relief, both to you and the ministry submitting the request. You built something that was supposed to create order, and now you’re the person who keeps pointing to it while everyone else finds reasons why their situation is different. That’s not a policy problem. That’s a culture problem wearing a policy’s clothes.

What Actually Can Change Behavior

Culture in a staff environment changes through relationships and repeated experience, not just documents. The ministry leader who blows past your deadline does it because, in his experience, you’ve always found a way to make it work anyway. The senior pastor bypasses the process because nobody has ever shown him what the process actually produces when it’s respected. The student pastor submits on Tuesday for a Thursday need because she genuinely doesn’t understand what good lead time makes possible.

These are not malicious people. They’re busy people operating on assumptions that your policy hasn’t displaced, because a policy can’t displace an assumption. Only experience and collaboration can do that.

So let them experience it. When a request comes in too late to do well, produce what the time allows and be honest about it. Not as punishment. As information. “Here’s what we were able to do with two days. Here’s what we could have done with ten.” That conversation, repeated over time with grace and without resentment, does more than any intake form ever will. It makes the value of the process visible in a way that a document never can.

When I worked in corporate, the creative team faced many unsustainable requests. I would always nod and make notes, and then ask my favorite 7-word phrase: “Who do I send the invoice to?” Once leaders understood there was a cost associated with rushing through something or producing something at the level they desired, they were able to process the cost of doing business. Usually, the collaboration landed at a reasonable return based on their own prioritization. Suddenly, the ACDC song for the CEO walkup didn’t seem so important when they understood the cost of licensing a streamed event.

People just need to understand the limitations associated with doing good work in the right way.

The Relationship Underneath the Process

The ministry leaders who respect your process consistently are almost always the ones who trust you. They’ve seen what you do with good information and adequate time. They know that submitting early isn’t bureaucratic compliance; it’s how they get better work for their ministry to flourish. That trust gets built one project at a time, through showing up ready when they give you what you need, and through being honest, not punitive, when they don’t.

This means the communications director’s job isn’t just the execution of creation. It’s an education, and the most effective education happens through celebrating results, not defining more rules. Stop trying to protect your process through policy language alone and start making the process worth protecting through the quality of what it produces and celebrating the wins of ministries who work within your systems.

The One Thing a Policy Is Actually Good For

When a genuinely unreasonable request lands, a documented process gives you something to point to that isn’t just your personal opinion. “Our standard lead time for a project this size is ten days” is easier to hold than “I don’t think that’s enough time.” The policy doesn’t solve the problem, but it depersonalizes the boundary, and that matters in a staff culture where everything can quickly become relational. Your written rules of engagement get to be the bad guy in the conversation.

Use it for that. Don’t use it as a substitute for the harder, slower work of building a staff culture that actually understands why the process exists. That’s the church culture that you’re after. The policy is just scaffolding to hold room for relationships.

A few years ago, I watched a church video celebrating a backpack drive they had organized for kids at a local school. The production was super solid. The music was absolutely beautiful, and matched the editing so cleanly. And from start to finish, the video showed volunteers sorting supplies, loading boxes, and delivering bags into the back of a van. Animated graphics showed how many backpacks were collected. There was the ubiquitous shot of the church logo on the side of a van.

What was not in the entire three-minute video was a single child from the school. Not one family appeared that had received help. Not one moment of actual human connection between the church and the community it was trying to serve. It was a thorough and well-produced account of a logistics operation.

That church did something genuinely good. They served real kids with real needs right in their own community. But the video failed at the one job a story is supposed to do, which is make someone watching it feel something true about what happened and why it mattered.

That failure is more common than most realize, and it usually comes from one of a handful of patterns that are worth learning to recognize to avoid.

The Process Summary

The backpack video is the clearest example of what I call the process summary. It documents what happened rather than telling the story of why it mattered. It answers the question “what did we do?” when the more important question is “what changed for someone because we did it?”

Process summaries feel like storytelling because they have a beginning, middle, and end. We had an idea. We organized people. We executed the plan. But they leave out the only thing that actually connects with a viewer, which is another human being whose life looks different because of what happened.

Any time you are planning a recap video, a ministry highlight, or a campaign story, ask yourself whose life is in this. Not whose effort, not whose leadership, not whose organizational achievement. Whose life. If you cannot name a specific person whose story runs through the content, you are probably building a process summary, and a process summary rarely moves anyone who doesn’t see the purpose in the story.

The Statistics Update

A different church put together a VBS recap video that opened with an aerial drone shot of the building, cut to slow-motion footage of kids running through activities, and then displayed a series of graphics. Attendance up 12 percent from last year. 847 hot dogs served. 6 new outdoor games added to the rotation.

Anybody watching that video felt like the church accomplished something great, a big VBS program. The numbers were impressive in a spreadsheet sense, but they communicated nothing about why VBS mattered, what happened in a child’s life that week, why the volunteers gave up five days of their summer, or why anyone watching should consider being part of it next time.

Numbers can help frame a good story, but they aren’t the centerpiece. When you lead with metrics, you are telling your audience that the most important thing about what happened was how much of it happened. And the only way to be successful next time is to do more. What matters is not necessarily how many kids attended. It is what one kid experienced, and whether that experience changed something for them. The story is about the volunteers who poured into the kids’ lives for a week.

Use data to provide context when it serves the story. Never use it as a substitute for one.

The Testimony With No Tension

This one is the most painful to watch because it usually involves a real person who genuinely wants to share something meaningful. They sit down in front of a camera, and when asked to share their story, they describe a progression of positive experiences that led them to a positive outcome. It sounds grateful and sincere, but doesn't connect with a greater purpose.

I once watched a baptism video where the person being baptized said, “I just felt like it was the right time, and I wanted to take that step, so here I am.” That was the entire testimony. No context about their life before they made the decision. No honest account of what had been hard or confusing or broken. No moment where something turned. Just a pleasant summary of a decision made by a person who apparently had very few obstacles to making it.

What was missing was everything that happens before the decision. The doubt or the resistance. The understanding of the need for repentance and the joy of realizing you are a new and forgiven creation in Christ. The thing they were carrying that made faith feel impossible, irrelevant, or too risky. That is the part of the story that makes someone in the congregation lean forward, because that is the part that resembles their own life.

Without the before, there is no contrast of the after. Without the tension, the resolution has no weight. And a story without weight is just words.

What All Three Have in Common

Process summaries, statistics updates, and tension-free testimonies all share the same root problem. They communicate from the church’s perspective without giving context for everyone else. They report on what the church did, how the church measured it, or worse, how easy it is to be a Christian in today’s world. They protect the organization, and they protect the storyteller from vulnerability, but in doing so, they protect the viewer from feeling or connecting with something real and much bigger than any of us.

Good storytelling requires giving up some of that protection — within reason. You have to use good judgment and not overshare to distraction. It requires finding the honest, specific, sometimes uncomfortable truth in the middle of someone’s experience and trusting that the people watching need to hear it.

Next week, we will look at what that actually looks like when it works, and what you can do to help the people you film get there.

The video goes live Sunday morning, and it’s clean. The graphics loaded correctly. The lower thirds are timed right. The transitions don’t call attention to themselves. Your handouts got trimmed correctly. Nobody says anything, because nothing went wrong. You pack up, drive home, and start Monday with a new pile of requests.

Three weeks later, a file is exported at the wrong resolution, and the announcement slide looks blurry on the main screen. Your phone buzzes before the service ends.

This is the rhythm of the job. Excellence disappears into the background of weekly noise. Failure gets noticed immediately and feels like dejection. And somewhere in the middle of that rhythm, if you’re not paying attention, something starts to shift in how you relate to the work.

What Actually Happens To Your Identity

It starts small. You find yourself hoping someone mentions the series graphics in passing. You check to see if anyone engaged with the post you spent two hours designing. You feel a quiet deflation when a video you’re genuinely proud of only gets twelve views and no comments. None of that reaction is unusual. It’s human. The problem isn’t wanting your work to be seen. The problem is what happens when it becomes the thing you need in order to feel like the work was worth doing.

The congregation isn’t thinking about the communications director when the service moves them. They’re thinking about God, about the message, about the person sitting next to them. That’s exactly how it should work. A good communications infrastructure is like good infrastructure. And no one notices it until it fails.

The people who burn out fastest in this role are usually the most talented. They care the most and have an amazing set of skills. They put the most of themselves into the work they create. And because the work is invisible when it succeeds, that care keeps going out without much coming back. Over time, it stops feeling like stewardship and starts feeling like a transaction where the other party never pays.

The issue with tying your self-worth and identity to the things you create is that you remove God from His rightful place in your heart. You are now in control of measuring what you are worth. God made you as distinct and immeasurably different than any other of His creations. How dare we reduce down His great work to assigning ourselves our own value based on something so minuscule?

The Specific Version of This in a Ministry Context

There’s a layer to this that’s particular to working in and for a church. In a corporate creative role, you can point to revenue, conversion rates, and campaign performance. The metrics are measurable and perceptible. In a church, the outcomes you’re actually working toward, changed lives, deepened faith, people finding their way to God, are largely invisible and impossible to attribute. You produced a video about the recovery ministry. Someone watched it at 11 pm on a Tuesday, alone in their car, and decided to come on Thursday. You may never know that happened, much less how to measure the success of the things you do in earthly terms.

This means the feedback loop that most creative professionals depend on, the one that connects effort to outcome, is almost entirely absent. You work in faith. Not metaphorically, but quite literally.

This is not some achievable problem to fix. It’s a condition to understand and make peace with. That peace doesn’t come automatically just because you’ve named it; it takes work to be comfortable in releasing control of your identity.

What a Healthy Relationship With Invisible Work Looks Like

Release starts with being honest about what you actually need as a creative and separating that from what the work is supposed to provide as service to your church. Wanting your team to know you’re doing good work is reasonable for anyone. Wanting your senior pastor to occasionally acknowledge the communications team is admirable. Building those needs into your relationships directly, through honest conversations with your supervisor, through team rhythms that include genuine recognition, is appropriate and worth pursuing.

What isn’t sustainable is outsourcing your sense of worth to the congregation’s reaction, or to whether leadership spontaneously notices the effort behind the finished product, or worse, attaching that sense of worth to a metric like attendance at an event.

The other piece is building your own standard for what good work looks like, one that doesn’t require external validation to feel real. You know when something is well-made with genuine purpose. You know when you took a shortcut versus when you did the work of digging in deeper. Holding yourself to your own honest standard is more durable than waiting for someone else to confirm it.

I hear the word excellent all the time in church culture. What I think most people attribute that word to is perfection. Last time I checked, there’s only one perfect dude. Excellence is making a change for the better, doing something better today than you did yesterday. Excellence is a path, not a destination.

There’s also something in the theology of this worth sitting with. The book of Colossians tells workers to do everything as unto the Lord, not unto men. That instruction exists precisely because human recognition is unreliable as a standard before the Lord. It’s not a command to stop caring about your work or trying to accomplish what your supervisor is telling you, by no means! It’s a command to locate the value of the work in something more stable and sustainable than how people respond to it.

The Practicality

The validation you actually need isn’t coming from the people you serve. It was never supposed to. The people who can give you what you need are the ministry leaders who are closest to the life change that’s happening every week. Most of them just don’t think to bring those stories back to you.

So ask them to. Ask the student pastor to tell you when a kid finds Christ through a supporting piece you helped build. Ask the recovery ministry leader to tell you when someone shows up because of something they encountered through advertising. Ask the connections team to tell you when a family came back because of a follow-up message. Those stories exist, and they’re happening all the time. They just usually stop at the ministry leader.

That relay isn’t vanity. It’s the thing that connects your work to its actual purpose, and there are outcomes there to celebrate. You just can’t assume credit for work the Holy Spirit is doing. Just celebrate together and keep hope that you may not be a part of the harvest, but you followed God’s heart in the planting.

One more thing worth naming directly. Past work is a helpful reference point, but don’t let it be a destination. If the best thing you’ve ever made is two years old and you’re still holding it up as the standard, it’s time to ask hard questions about how you are growing in your creative work. Growth in this means that what you made last month should make you a little uncomfortable comparing it with what you made last year. Look back occasionally to see how far you’ve come. Then continue to look forward. That’s the only direction worth driving.

The most common reason church videos fall flat has nothing to do with the camera settings, lens choice, the lighting temperature, or even the edit. It has everything to do with what happened before you ever pressed record.

Most church video interviews go something like this. Someone sits down in front of a camera, a well-meaning staff member asks them to share their story, and what comes out is a polished, surface-level summary of events with a tidy spiritual bow on the end. It looks really good with all that B-roll; however, it moves nobody. The congregation moves on, the video gets posted, and three days later, nobody remembers what it was about.

That outcome is almost always the result of an unprepared subject and an unprepared interviewer. People don’t naturally tell their stories with shape and tension and honesty on the first take. They tell them the way they think they’re supposed to tell them, especially when there’s a camera with intimidating red lights blinking and pointed at their face. Your job as the person behind the interview is to help them find the real story underneath.

That work happens in the conversation before the camera is even placed on a tripod.

Start With a Pre-Interview

Before you schedule a shoot, sit down with the person you’re filming. No camera, no crew, no pressure. Just a conversation. Tell them you want to hear their story before you film anything, and then actually listen and take notes.

Ask open questions and follow the thread. What was your life like before this happened? What were you feeling at that point? When did things start to change? What surprised you about the experience? What do you know now that you didn’t know then?

Let them talk. Don’t rush toward the resolution or a call to action yet. The tension in the middle of the story is where the connection lives, and most people want to skip past it because it’s uncomfortable. Your job is to stay there with them long enough to find the honest part.

What you’re listening for in that pre-interview is the moment. There is almost always a specific moment in someone’s story where something turned, where they made a decision, where they encountered God in a way that was undeniable. That moment is the center of the video. Everything before it is context. Everything after it is evidence that the moment was real. When you find it, you know what the video is actually about.

Know the Structure Before You Film

A story that moves people has a recognizable shape to it. There is a person with a real life and a real problem. Something happened that they couldn’t solve on their own. They found help, or help found them. They made a choice. God showed up, or didn’t. Circumstances or hearts are changed.

That shape is not a formula. It’s just an honest account of how transformation actually works. When a story follows that arc, people recognize it because they’re living their own version of it. They lean in because they want to know what happened next, and they resonate with the person’s feelings. And if the ending involves something they’re still hoping for in their own life, they walk away thinking about it for days.

Before you film, map the story against that arc. Where should the person start the story? What’s the honest problem they were facing? Who or what helped them? What did they have to decide? What changed? If you can answer those questions clearly from your pre-interview conversation, you’re ready to film. If you can’t, you need another conversation.

The church is never the hero in this story. The person is. Your church is the guide, the community, the place where help was found. That distinction matters because it keeps the video from feeling like a promotion and lets it function as what it actually is, which is an imprint of emotions with your audience.

In the Interview, Ask for Specifics

Vague answers produce vague videos. When someone says “it was really hard” or “God really showed up,” those phrases feel meaningful to the person saying them, but communicate almost nothing to someone watching. Your job is to get underneath the general and find the specific.

When someone says it was really hard, ask them what hard looked like on a Tuesday morning. When someone says God showed up, ask them how they knew. When someone says the church was there for them, ask them to describe one specific moment when that was true. Specifics create pictures in the mind of the viewer. Pictures create emotion. Emotion creates connection. That is the chain you are trying to build.

Also, ask about the past. People are often so eager to get to the good part of their story that they undercut the tension that makes the good part meaningful. If the viewer doesn’t understand what someone was carrying before the change happened, the change doesn’t land with any weight. Spend real time in the before. Help them describe and formulate it honestly. That is not dwelling on the negative. That is building the foundation that makes the transformation impactful and relatable.

Let the Camera Catch What the Conversation Finds

Once you have done the pre-interview work and you know what the story is, the filming itself becomes much simpler. You are not searching for the story while eating up space on your SD card. You are capturing something you have already found and helping your interviewee express it in vulnerable ways.

In the interview, create conditions that feel like a conversation, not a performance. If the person is stiff or over-rehearsed, give them permission to start over as many times as they need until you believe what they are saying. Ask the questions that got the most honest responses in your pre-interview. If something genuine surfaces that you weren’t expecting, follow it. Sometimes, the best moments in a church video testimony are often the ones nobody planned for, and I didn’t see coming.

And when it’s over, don’t just hand the footage to an editor and walk away. Sit with what you captured and ask whether the story you filmed is the story you set out to tell. Does it have tension and honesty and resolution? Does it make a viewer think about their own life? Does it lead somewhere, or does it just end? If the answer is yes to those questions, you have something worth sharing.

I see so many conversations from church creatives about the right approach for lens choice, but not very many tips on making someone feel like they can trust you with their vulnerability on camera. When true stories are told honestly, they are the ones that stay with people and inspire them to take action.

The request comes in on a Thursday afternoon. A sticky note left on your keyboard. An email with no subject line and a laundry list of deliverables. A Teams message that just says “Hey, can you make something for Sunday?” No brief. No context. No accountability.

You make the thing. You send it over. Nobody responds. Sunday comes, and the graphic is different from what you designed — someone changed it in Canva at 11 pm the night before, or worse, it didn’t get used at all. You only find out about it when you walk into service.

This is the part where most articles about church communications tell you to build a request intake form and a policy document. Get leadership buy-in. Set clear deadlines. Communicate your process. And yes, those things matter and are a part of protecting your creative boundaries. Build systems.

But most advice doesn’t actually address what’s happening underneath this scenario. Because the problem isn’t that leadership doesn’t know your process. The problem is that they don’t think your process applies to them. Or they are operating under their own siloed communication strategy, out of what they feel is a necessary justification to get things done.

How the Order-Taker Role Gets Built

Nobody starts a church communications job planning to be a production assistant. But the role gets built over time, one small concession at a time. You take the last-minute request because you don’t want to seem unhelpful. You let the copy changes slide because it’s not worth the fight. You skip the discovery meeting because the ministry leader seems confident they know what they want. You make the thing, get it done, move on.

When you consistently absorb work without asking questions, you’re telling everyone around you that your job is execution. When you never push back on a timeline, you’re communicating that your time exists to serve other people’s lack of planning. To compoundingly perpetuates and exacerbates the issue. When you make changes without comment, you’re confirming that your creative judgment is optional. Nobody had to say any of that out loud. You demonstrated it through your behavior.

This isn’t about absorbing the blame for being a people pleaser. It’s about recognizing that authority in a church staff environment isn’t assigned; it’s established. Your title doesn’t determine how people treat your role. Your consistent behavior does.

What Leading From Your Actual Position Looks Like

There’s a version of this conversation that turns into resentment. The comms director who has been stepped on enough times that every late request feels like a personal attack. That’s a real place that a lot of leaders won’t name or discuss, and it’s not a useful place to work from. It’s not beneficial to yourself, the people you lead at your church, or to the leaders you influence around you.

Start with the intake. Not a form for its own sake, but a genuine practice of asking questions before you open the design tools. What is this for? Who is it trying to reach? What do you want them to feel or do? What’s the follow-up plan? These aren’t bureaucratic hurdles. They’re the questions a partner in ministry should ask. An order-taker takes the order. A leader asks why and how we can collaborate for something more beneficial to everyone.

Then show up in the rooms where ministry decisions get made. Not to audit what leaders are planning, but because of the communications perspective. You need to help ask the questions: Who is the person on the outside of this ministry we are reaching for, and what will they actually experience as a part of this ministry? This is a legitimate contribution to any ministry planning conversation. Your version of the church’s brand voice and audience research shouldn’t sit in your office. It’s supposed to inform how every ministry communicates, both in a specific context and church-wide. If you’re not in those conversations, you’re not doing the job with the end in sight. You’re just fulfilling the requests that fall out of the conversations you are not a part of.

The Harder Conversation

There are some churches where the authority problem isn’t something you created. Where the senior pastor has genuinely never thought of communications as a strategic function. Where the staff culture treats the comms director as a vendor, not a leader. Those environments are real, and walking into one requires a different kind of patience and perseverance.

But even there, the starting point is the same: define what your role requires, operate accordingly, and make the case through the quality of your work and the clarity of your questions, not through a policy document that nobody reads, and not through frustration that slowly poisons your posture toward the people you serve.

You won’t fix a dysfunctional culture through one intake form. You won’t earn a strategic role by being the most organized person in the building. You earn it by consistently showing up as someone who understands the mission well enough to serve it above yourself, and who cares about it enough to ask good questions even when it slows things down and becomes uncomfortable.

The order-taker role exists because someone keeps filling it. Stop only filling it. You are a child of God, called to shape and lead others to Christ through bringing unity to your ministry leaders around you.

It usually surfaces in a staff meeting. Two ministry leaders realize their upcoming events are on the same weekend. Both need volunteers. Both need promotion. Both believe their thing is the more important thing. The conversation gets tense, someone defers to avoid conflict, and the meeting moves on. But the underlying problem doesn’t go away.

In most churches, ministries operate like small independent organizations that happen to share a building, a budget process, and a senior pastor. Sometimes, they develop their own culture, their own calendar, their own way of doing things. Over time, that independence hardens into culture, and when resources get tight or the calendar gets crowded, what started as competition transforms into visible friction.

The communications director sits in the middle of all of it. Every request lands on the same desk. Every deadline bumps into another one. And the team trying to hold it all together is the one most aware of how disconnected the whole operation actually is.

But that position in the middle is also a huge opportunity. The communications director is often the only person in the building with a clear view of what every ministry is doing at the same time. That visibility, used well, is one of the most valuable things you can bring to your church’s leadership culture.

The Real Cost of Siloed Ministries

When ministries operate independently, the congregation experiences it even if the staff doesn’t fully see it. Two events on the same weekend pull the same volunteers in different directions, and both suffer for it. An outreach campaign runs the same week as a major internal initiative, and neither gets the attention it needs. The adult ministry and the children’s ministry are both trying to reach the same parents without knowing the other is working on it.

Beyond the logistical problems, there is a deeper issue. When each ministry tells its own story without any awareness of the others, the congregation gets a fragmented picture of who their church is and what it’s actually trying to do. One week, it’s about serving the community. The next week, it’s about internal discipleship. The week after that, it’s about giving. Each of those things is real and good, but without a connective thread, people can’t see the larger vision they’re being invited into.

Where there’s no vision, the people perish. A congregation that can’t see the vision won’t move toward it. They’ll show up for a while, but they are missing the pull of something bigger.

What the Communications Director Can Actually Do About It

The most practical thing you can do is create visibility. Most ministry leaders don’t know what their colleagues are working on. Not because they don’t care, but because nobody has built a system that shows them. When you share a communications calendar that every ministry can see, when you run a monthly planning meeting where teams present what’s coming up, when you facilitate a conversation between the women’s ministry and the care ministry, who are both trying to reach women in crisis, you are doing something that nobody else in the building is doing. You are helping people see each other.

That visibility can change things in a big way. Ministry leaders who can see what their colleagues are working on can begin to find connections. The small groups pastor realizes his fall launch would be stronger if it coincided with what women’s and men’s ministries are up to. The serving team realizes they can feed people into the discipleship track instead of treating serving as a final destination.

These connections don’t always require a mandate from senior leadership. Most times, they just require people to be able to see each other clearly. Your job is to create the conditions for that to happen.

Help Ministries Support Each Other, Not Just Coexist

There is a difference between ministries that avoid conflict and ministries that actively support each other. A healthy goal is the second one.

When you are working with a ministry leader on their promotion, ask them who else in the building is trying to reach the same set of people. Ask what happens to someone after their event is over and where the natural next step leads. Ask whether there is a ministry that could benefit from hearing about what they’re doing, or that could provide something their participants need.

Those questions feel simple, but they reorient the entire frame. By asking good questions, you can move ministries from “how do we get our event in front of as many people as possible,” into “how does our work connect to what God is doing in someone’s life across the whole church?” And it tends to produce more useful programming as a byproduct of unity.

When ministries start handing off people to each other intentionally, the congregation experiences something hard to manufacture through communications alone. They feel guided on a path that is leading them somewhere. They feel like the church knows where they are, where they’re going, and has thought about how to help them get there. That is one of the most powerful things a church can offer in a culture where most people feel like nobody is paying attention to them.

Celebrate Collaboration When You See It

I heard a great quote one time: “You replicate what you celebrate.” When two ministries work together on something, celebrate it. When a ministry leader credits a colleague for making their event better, lift that up in a staff meeting. When a story captures a life change that happened because someone moved from one ministry to the next, tell that story as a whole-church story rather than a single ministry win email.

Over time, the culture learns what is valued through celebration. If what gets celebrated is individual ministry success, you will get more competition. If what gets celebrated is collaborative impact, you will get more collaboration.

It’s not complicated, but it isn’t easy. It requires someone paying attention and being intentional about what gets recognized. That someone is usually you.

The communications director who helps ministries see each other clearly, find their connections, and tell a shared story is doing something that goes well beyond communications. That is organizational leadership. And it is one of the most meaningful things you can contribute to the health of your church.

Here is what happens in most churches during the announcement time. Someone walks to the front with a stack of notes or a slide clicker, reads through a list of events with dates and times, says “you don’t want to miss it” at least twice, thanks everyone for coming, and sits down. Some of the congregation smile politely. Half of them look down, scrolling Instagram. Nobody remembers what was said by the time they get to the next song.

The problem is not that people don’t care. The problem is that the announcement slot has been treated as an information delivery system when it is actually one of the most valuable connection moments your church has all week. You have a room full of people who have chosen to be there. They are present, at least physically. And the first thing you do with that attention is read them a calendar.

That’s worth reconsidering.

The Announcement Slot Is a Pastoral Moment

Think about what announcements are actually supposed to do. At their best, they help people understand what is happening in the life of the church and why it matters to their lives specifically. Announcements should connect the programs and events your church offers to the real needs and questions people carry through the door. They make someone sitting in a row by themselves feel like there is something available to them that’s worth pursuing.

It starts when you write the announcement. Instead of thinking about what information needs to be conveyed, think about who is sitting in that room and what they are carrying today. The woman who is going through a messy divorce and doesn’t know if the church is secretly judging her. The young couple who just had their first baby and are completely overwhelmed. The guy in the back with his arms crossed, who has been attending for three weeks and still doesn’t know a single person. What does each of them need to hear?

When you write with people in mind, the announcements stop being a list of events and become an invitation with meaning. Here is something for you. Here is why it matters. Here is what to do next.

Three Things Every Announcement Needs

Every announcement that takes up time on a Sunday morning should be able to answer three questions clearly.

Who is this for? Not “everyone” and not “anyone who is interested.” A specific person or life situation. Parents of teenagers. People walking through grief. Anyone who has been attending for a few months and hasn’t found community yet. When you name the person, the right people lean in and everyone else gives you permission to keep going because they know you’re not wasting their time.

What will it do for them? Not what will happen at the event, but what will change for the person who goes. They will find people who understand what they’re going through. They will learn something they can use this week. They will have a moment to breathe that they haven’t had in months. The event is the how. This is the why. Lead with the why.

What do they do next? One action. One link or one place to go or one person to talk to. Not three options. Pick one way that works best and use it consistently so people learn where to go.

If an announcement can’t answer those three questions, it probably isn’t ready for the stage. That is not a harsh standard. It is a helpful one. It protects your congregation from information overload and protects your ministry leaders from the false comfort of thinking that a stage mention equals people showing up.

Keep It Short and Keep It Few

The length of the announcement time is inversely related to how much attention survives it. Every additional minute you spend at the front is a minute you are asking people to hold their focus on something that is not the reason they came. Most congregations can give you two or three announcements before attention starts to drop off significantly. After that, you are talking mostly to yourself.

This means you have to make decisions about what actually earns stage time. Not everything does. A tiered approach to your communications helps here, because it gives you criteria for what belongs in front of the whole church and what belongs in a targeted email or a group text.

The ministry leaders whose events don’t make the cut will sometimes push back. That is a conversation worth having, and having it clearly and kindly is part of leading well in this role. Help them understand that a targeted communication to the right audience is more effective than a general announcement to a distracted room. That is not a consolation prize. It is a better strategy.

Who Should Deliver Them

This question matters more than most people realize. The person delivering announcements sets the tone for how they land. A speaker who is energetic, clear, and genuinely believes in what they’re saying can make an announcement feel like a warm invitation. A speaker who is reading off a slide or rushing through a list makes the whole thing feel uncomfortable, like a formality.

Wherever possible, the person delivering an announcement should have a real connection to what they’re announcing. The pastor who genuinely loves the couples ministry talking about the marriage retreat will land differently than the singles director reading the talking points. Authenticity in the room is worth more than a polished read. If you can find people who have experienced what they’re inviting others into, let them be the voice of it. Even thirty seconds of honest personal testimony in an announcement changes how it lands.

Sunday morning is not your only communications channel. But it is the one where your whole community is together in the same room. Use it like that matters. Because it does.

Most church communicators did not get into this work because they wanted to write catchy marketing copy. They got into it because they care about people and believe in the mission of the church. And yet, without much intention behind it, a lot of church communication ends up reading like an urgent promotion: urgent, transactional, and maybe even just a little bit pushy.

You’ve seen it in use. You may have written it. The email with the subject line that says “Don’t Miss This.” The social post that counts down the days until registration closes. The stage announcement reminds people that seats are filling up fast. Each of those choices comes from a real desire to get people there, to help them not miss out on something genuinely good. The intention is right. The approach is what’s potentially creating the problem.

People today are surrounded by messaging that is trying to get something from them. Every app, every platform, every inbox is full of asks. People have learned to be skeptical. They have developed a finely tuned radar for the ask, and they filter it out almost automatically. When your church communications trip that radar and when they feel like an ad rather than an invitation, people stop engaging. And worse, they begin to associate that feeling with your church.

One Small Shift Can Change Everything

There is a question that should sit underneath every piece of copy you write for your church, and it is this: Are we communicating what we want from people, or what we want for them?

The distinction between these is not subtle. It changes the entire frame of the message from the receiver’s perspective.

When you write from what you want from people, the message is about your needs. You need seats filled. You need volunteers. You need registrations before the deadline draws to a close. The person reading it can feel that even if the words are polished and the design is beautiful, the underlying ask is about the church’s agenda, not theirs.

When you write from what you want for people, the message is about their lives. You want them to find community because you know loneliness is one of the heaviest things they carry. You want them to serve because you’ve watched people discover their purpose and find fulfilment through it. You want them at the retreat because you’ve seen what happens to someone when they finally have two days to breathe and be still before God. The event is the same. The communication is completely different.

Read back the last three things you’ve published and ask which frame they were written from. The answer will tell you a great deal about why people are or aren’t responding.

Write to The One Person

One of the most common mistakes in church copy is writing to a crowd. The announcement addresses “everyone,” the email opens with “Hey church family,” the social post speaks to “all of you.” This sounds inclusive, and it feels safe, but it communicates to no one in particular. The most effective copy is written to one specific person. Not a demographic, not a category, not “young families” or “empty nesters,” a real person whose life and needs you understand well enough to speak into it directly.

This is where the persona work from earlier in this series pays off. When you know who Marcus is, the forty-one-year-old who hasn’t been to church in fifteen years and is quietly wondering if there’s something more to his life, you can write to him specifically. You can name the thing he’s carrying without naming him. You can describe the experience you’re inviting him into in terms that speak to what he actually needs, not what your church wants him to know about itself.

When you write to one person with that kind of specificity, something counterintuitive happens. Everyone who shares that person’s experience reads it and feels like it was written for them.

Lead With the Personal Need, Not the Program

Church copy almost always opens with the program. The event name, the date, the speaker, the cost, and the registration link. All of that information is necessary, but none of it is why someone decides to say yes. People say yes because something in the message connected with their life. A question was answered. A tension it is named. A hope it gave language to. The program is the container. The hope of connection is what fills it.

Try leading with the person’s experience before you introduce the program. Instead of opening with the name of the retreat and the dates, open with a question: Have you had a moment recently where you looked at your life and wondered how you got so far from yourself and God? Then introduce the retreat as the response to that question. Now the program has more context for someone. Now it means something before anyone knows the price or the location.

This works for small things, too. A bulletin announcement for a grief support group doesn’t need to open with the group name and the meeting time. It can open with a single honest line: Grief can be one of the loneliest experiences a person can go through. We want to walk with you in the hurt. The details follow. But the person reading it who is in that place already knows the message is for them.

Make the Next Step Obvious and Easy to Follow

Even the best copy fails if the call to action is unclear or requires too much effort. Your call to action should tell people exactly what to do, make it easy to do, and give them one clear reason to do it now. Not three reasons. One.

And make the action feel small. Not “register for the marriage retreat,” which sounds like a commitment. Try “find out if this is for you.” Not “join a small group,” which sounds permanent. Try “come once and see what it’s like.”

You are not trying to get someone to make a life decision the moment they read your email. You are trying to get them to take one small step in the right direction.

Lead with their life experiences, not your program. Speak to one person honestly enough that everyone who needs it recognizes themselves. And make it easy to say yes.

That is not a sales pitch, it’s an invitation.

At some point in almost every church communications director’s career, a well-meaning volunteer bypasses the ministry staff entirely and shows up at your desk with a flyer they made in Microsoft Word with a request to get it out to the whole congregation. Or a ministry leader goes directly to the pastor to lobby for stage time on something the communications team already assessed and placed in a lower tier. Or a longtime member calls the church office to ask why their community group wasn’t featured in the newsletter.

Each of these situations feels like a small fire. But they’re all symptoms of the same underlying problem: nobody has clearly defined who has the authority to decide what gets promoted, through which channels, and at what level of visibility.

When that question doesn’t have a clear answer, the default answer becomes whoever asks most persistently or with the most relational leverage. It’s usually the person with the lead pastor in a text thread. That is a political, not a communications strategy. And it produces communications that reflect the church’s internal power dynamics rather than its mission and true purpose.

Why This Question Is Harder in a Church Than Anywhere Else

In most organizations, the communications or marketing function has a defined mandate and an understood authority to make decisions about what gets promoted and how. In a church, that clarity is much harder to establish because the relationships are pastoral, the stakes feel spiritual, and the people making requests genuinely believe their work matters. And because it does matter, it feels weighty.

Nobody is wrong to care about the women’s retreat, the men’s Bible study, or the benevolence fund drive. Every one of those things has real value. The problem isn’t that people care about their ministries. The problem is that without a shared framework for how decisions get made, every request becomes a negotiation and every communicator becomes a referee.

The goal as a comms team is not to take authority away from ministry leaders. It is to build a shared understanding of how authority and oversight work so that decisions are made based on mission alignment and audience impact rather than on who got to ask the pastor first.

The Framework That Removes the Politics

The most practical tool for this is a clearly defined tier system that every ministry leader understands and has agreed to in advance. When your church has a documented framework that says Tier 1 events receive full channel support, Tier 2 events receive a standard package, and Tier 3 events receive targeted support to their specific audience, there is clarity. When that framework is based on audience reach and mission alignment rather than ministry preference, the decision about what gets promoted and how is no longer a judgment call made under duress. It is a category determination made against agreed criteria.

This matters because it moves the conversation from “why didn’t we get the email blast” to “here’s what tier this event falls into and here’s the support package that comes with it.” One of those conversations is personal. The other is procedural. The procedural conversation is much easier to have consistently and without damaging relationships.

Building this framework requires a conversation with your senior leadership before you roll it out to ministry teams. You need pastoral buy-in for the categories and the criteria, because the first time a well-loved ministry leader pushes back on a Tier 3 designation, you need to be able to point to something your senior pastor has already affirmed. Without that backing, the framework collapses the moment it meets its first test.

When Someone Goes Around the System

It will happen. A ministry lay-leader who doesn’t like the answer they got from the communications team will take their case to the pastor. A congregant who wants their event promoted will call the church office directly. A well-connected volunteer will ask a staff member to mention something that didn’t go through any approval process mere moments before they step on stage.

When this happens, the response from senior leadership matters enormously. If the pastor accommodates the request without checking with the communications team, it sends a clear message that the system can be bypassed by anyone with enough relational capital. If the pastor redirects the person back to the communications process, it sends an equally clear message that the system is real and that everyone operates within it.

This is one of the reasons the communications director needs to be in genuine partnership with senior leadership, not just executing directives. The system only holds if leadership holds it. That means your senior leaders need to understand what the system is, why it exists, and what happens to team culture and communication quality when it gets undermined.

It’s worth having that conversation directly and proactively beforehand, not in the moment when someone has already gone around the process. A good call happens when everyone is calm and thinking clearly about what they actually want the culture of respect to look like.

The Posture That Makes It Work

A framework without the right relational posture becomes a brick wall. The communications director who uses the tier system to say no to people, protect their own workload, and enforce compliance will eventually find that ministry leaders resent the process and look for ways around it. That’s not what this is for.

The framework is a tool for having better conversations earlier. When a ministry leader comes to you with a request, the tier system gives you a shared language for discussing scope, timing, audience, and fit without making it feel like a rejection. It creates space to ask the more important questions: Who is this for? How does it connect to where we’re trying to take people? What would make this more effective? What’s the story underneath the event that we should be telling?

Those questions should feel like collaboration. And when ministry leaders experience the communications team as a genuine partner in helping their work land well, rather than a gatekeeper deciding what deserves attention, the political dynamic shifts entirely.

A church where every ministry knows its role and how it aligns with other ministries, trusts the process, and works within a shared system is a church that can communicate with coherence.

Walk into most church staff meetings, and you will find something that looks a lot less like a unified team and a lot more like a collection of small organizations with competing values sharing a building and resources. The children’s ministry is protecting its place on the calendar for room requests. The women’s ministry is making the case for its next event to take priority over a men’s event. The young adult pastor is frustrated that his initiative keeps getting buried under the upcoming missions trip.

Everyone is passionate. Everyone believes in what they’re doing, and that what they do in ministry is the most vital part of what the church does. And everyone is, in their own way, working against each other — not out of malice, but because nobody has helped them see that they are actually on the same team, running the same play, toward the same goal.

Maybe this isn’t your church. If it isn’t, praise God, you work in a healthy environment.

This tension of being set against each other for resources and time is one of the most common and most costly dynamics in church communications. And it is something the communications director is uniquely positioned to bring awareness to and change.

How Ministries Become Silos

It usually starts innocently. Each ministry has its own budget, its own calendar, its own volunteers, and its own sense of mission underneath the main vision of the church. Over time, those boundaries can harden through trials. Ministries develop their own communication styles, their own email lists, their own social media accounts, their own way of asking people for things. They stop thinking about how their work connects to the person sitting next to them at the staff table and start thinking almost entirely about their own corner of the church.

The result is a congregation that receives fragmented, competing messages. All of them urgent, all of them asking for something, none of them clearly connected to a shared purpose. People stop knowing what their church is actually about because every ministry is telling a slightly different story about it.

And underneath all of that disunity, the mission gets lost.

The Comms Director as a Unifying Force

Because the communications director touches every ministry, they have a view of the whole picture that the individual ministry leader may not have. The comms team can see when two events are competing for the same space in the same week. They can see when the women’s ministry and the care ministry are both trying to reach women in crisis without knowing each other’s opportunities to minister. They can see when the stories being told across ministries, taken together, paint a coherent picture of a church that is genuinely making disciples — or a disconnected one that just has a lot of programs.

Transformation can happen when you stop facilitating individual ministry requests and start soliciting conversations between ministries. When you can point to events where the children’s pastor and the family ministry director can be aligned, and ask them how their work can be connected. When you invite the small groups team and the serving team to look at their calendars together and find the places where they are accidentally competing, and the places where they could instead be deliberately supporting each other. You can help make meaningful change in your staff culture when you frame the communications planning meeting not as “who gets the announcement slot this week” but as “how are all of these things working together to move people forward?”

That is a different kind of leadership. It requires more than design skills and project management. It requires the ability to see across the organization to help people understand that their success is not independent of the people sitting next to them.

What It Looks Like When It Works

When ministries stop siloing and start collaborating, a few things change that are worth naming.

Their calls to action begin to align with the church at large. Instead of every ministry asking people to come to their thing, ministries begin to ask people to take a next step that makes sense, given where they are. The person who just went through the newcomer class gets invited into a small group. The person in the small group gets introduced to a serving opportunity. The person who shows up to serve starts hearing about mission work. Each ministry is aware of the others and actively handing people forward rather than trying to keep them in their own orbit.

Their stories start to serve each other. The women’s ministry has a story about a woman whose life changed through community. That story is also the children’s ministry’s story, because her kids are now in their program. That story is the small group’s story, because the group she joined is where the community happened. When ministries learn to share stories generously instead of using them as personal promotional material, the whole church’s narrative becomes deeper, more authentic, and more unified.

As this changes, people in the congregation start to experience the church as a community rather than a collection of programs. They feel guided rather than pandered to. They feel like there is a clear path forward rather than a hundred competing trails.

The Practical Starting Point

You don’t necessarily restructure an organizational culture shift towards health in a staff meeting. But you can begin shifting it by asking different questions the next time a ministry brings you a request.

Instead of “What do you need from us?” ask “Who else in this building is trying to reach the same person you’re trying to reach? Does that ministry know about how your opportunity aligns with theirs?” That question plants a seed. It invites the ministry leader to think beyond their own agenda without making them feel like their agenda doesn’t matter.

Do this consistently, across every ministry, over time. Introduce the language of shared mission in your planning conversations. Create moments where ministry leaders can hear what their colleagues are working on and find the natural connections. Celebrate publicly when two ministries work together on something instead of running parallel events for the same audience.

The goal is not organizational efficiency, though that is a welcome side effect. The goal is a church where every ministry understands that they are not a single destination. They are part of a journey that someone is taking toward Christ. And when they start to see it that way, they stop competing for space on the calendar and start asking how they can help each other clear the path.

That is when your work becomes something more than simply communications. That is when it becomes service.

If you’ve worked in church communications for more than a week, you’ve experienced the event promotion scramble. A ministry leader appears at your desk — or sends a message at 9 pm on a Tuesday — with an event happening in ten days, a rough idea of what they want it to look like, and an expectation that you’ll make it happen. You pull something together, it goes out late, the design is rushed and sloppy, and the copy isn’t great. Somehow the event still happens, and everyone acts like it went fine.

The scramble is a systems and support structure gap. Most churches don’t have a defined process for how events move from an idea to promotion to execution, which means every event becomes its own improvised ad hoc emergency. The communications team carries the weight of that chaos in the form of late nights, compromised work, and a nagging sense that nothing is ever thought out in enough time.

A good event promotion workflow fixes this by making the process predictable and achievable with timelines. When everyone on staff knows what the system is and what it requires from them, the scramble stops being the default mode for asking for help.

Here is what a functional workflow actually looks like.

Step One: The Request

Every event that requires communications support should begin with a formal request based on a reasonable timeline. Not a hallway conversation. Not a text. A documented submission that captures everything the communications team needs to do its job well to help the ministry accomplish its goals.

Your request form doesn’t need to be complicated or complex. It needs to answer a few essential questions: What is this event, and what is its purpose? Who is it for? What is the date, time, and location? What action do you want people to take? What is the registration or sign-up process? Are there any existing assets — a speaker bio, a logo, approved imagery? And critically: when was this request submitted relative to the event date?

That last question is not administrative. It determines what kind of support the event can receive. A request submitted eight weeks out has room for a full promotion campaign. A request submitted ten days out gets what can reasonably be done well in ten days — which is not the same thing. Building that expectation into the request process protects the quality of your work and teaches your ministry leaders that the timeline matters.

Step Two: The Assessment

Once a request comes in, the communications team makes a decision about how to prioritize the workflow with all other requests. This is also where your tier system — if you have one — does its job. The tier designation will define what events are supported by what channels of communications based on practical criteria like audience size and purpose. A whole-church event gets a different communications investment than a targeted ministry gathering, and that distinction should be made deliberately rather than by whoever asks the loudest or puts their request in first.

Assess the event against your church’s mission and values. Ask who it’s for, how many people it realistically will attract, and how it connects to what your church is trying to accomplish in making disciples. Then assign it a tier and define the channel mix accordingly. What goes in the bulletin? What makes a social post? What earns an email? What gets stage time? Answering those questions in the assessment phase and building a strategy means you’re not making those decisions under pressure later.

Step Three: The Promotion Timeline

With the tier and channel mix defined, build a backwards timeline from the event date. Different channels need different lead times, and a promotion campaign that starts too late is one of the most common reasons events underperform.

As a general framework: your awareness-building content — anything designed to let people know something is coming — should go out three to four weeks before the event. Your engagement content with the specific details, the registration push, the story or testimony that makes the event feel worth attending, should run in the two weeks prior. Your last-chance reminder belongs in the final week. And your follow-up content, including any story capture or next-step communication, should be planned before the event happens, not after.

Write this timeline into a shared document that both the communications team and the ministry leaders can see and reference. Transparency about what is going out and when reduces the number of “can you add one more thing” requests that derail a planned system.

Another piece to consider is leaving room for flexing when something big does happen, or the Spirit moves surprisingly. We want to create a system that people can build expectations around what we can accomplish, but not lock them out of support by holding hard and fast to the rules when you can make exceptions.

Step Four: The Execution

Copy is written, graphics designed, emails scheduled, slides built, and stage scripts drafted. With a clear timeline and a defined channel mix, execution becomes a production schedule with repeatable tasks rather than a reactive sprint, guessing what the definition of “done” is. Assign owners to each deliverable and set internal deadlines that are earlier than the actual publish dates. Review everything against the clarity standard you hold for all your communications: Is it clear who this is for? Is the next step obvious? Would someone who has never been to your church understand and find value in it?

Step Five: The Debrief

Most churches skip this step entirely. The event ends, the team exhales, and everyone moves on to running after the next thing. But the debrief is where you get better together.

After every significant event, take thirty minutes with your team to answer three questions: What worked in our communications approach? What didn’t land the way we intended? And what story came out of this event that we should be telling? The answers shape how you approach the next event, and the story question ensures that the life change happening in your church doesn’t disappear the moment the event is over.

A workflow is only useful if it’s actually used. Document yours. Share it with ministry leaders and refer to it often. Review it quarterly and adjust what isn’t working. The goal is not a perfect system that traps people in a prison of rules, but a flexible one where you can safely ask for the time you and your team need to develop and execute something meaningful in the service of that ministry and the people they lead. So the next time a ministry leader walks toward your desk with a crazy idea and a tight timeline, you both already know what the expectations are and how to tackle it.

If you’ve ever sat in a communications planning meeting and heard the phrase “we want to reach everyone in our community,” you’ve encountered one of the most well-intentioned and practically useless statements in church marketing strategy.

Everyone is not an audience. Everyone has no felt needs in common, no shared fears, no single reason they might or might not walk through the doors of your church. When you try to speak to everyone, you end up with messages that are broad enough to include all people and specific enough to move none of them. It sounds inclusive; however, it functions insincerely.

I encourage you to refer back to the last article: Researching who actually lives in your community as a foundation. But data alone doesn’t tell you how to communicate. To get there, you have to take what you’ve learned and turn it into something your team can actually use. That’s where audience personas come in.

What a Persona Actually Is

A persona is not a marketing trick imported from the corporate world. It is an act of empathy. It is the practice of taking everything you know about a real segment of your community and giving it a human face — a name, a story, a set of concerns and hopes and habits — so that when your team sits down to plan a campaign, write an email, or design an event, they are thinking about a person rather than a demographic category.

Done well, a persona keeps your team honest. It asks a harder question than “what do we want to say?” It asks, “Would this person care about what we’re saying, and would it reach them where they actually are?”

Churches that build and use personas communicate with a specificity that helps reach the people in their communities. Not through bigger budgets or better designers, but because they have done the work of genuinely understanding who they are talking to and what matters to their community.

How to Build One

Start with the research you have — the demographic data, the community conversations you’ve read, the feedback you’ve gathered. Look for patterns. Who are the distinct groups of people your church is positioned to reach? You don’t need to account for every possible person. Three or four well-built personas will serve you far better than a dozen thin ones.

For each persona, work through the following:

Give them a name and a life situation. Not a demographic label — an actual person. Something like: Marcus, 41, works in logistics, divorced two years ago, has his kids every other weekend, grew up going to church, but hasn’t been in fifteen years. A name and a situation make the persona feel real enough to think about honestly.

Describe what their week looks like. What are the pressures on their time? What are they worried about? What do they do on Sunday mornings when they’re not at church? This isn’t about judging their choices — it’s about understanding their lives so you can communicate into them rather than past them.

Identify real felt needs. Not what you think they should need, but what they would tell you if you asked. For Marcus, it might be that he feels like he’s failing his kids spiritually and doesn’t know how to fix it. It might be that he’s lonely in a way that’s hard to name. It might be that he’s curious about faith but assumes the church would feel foreign and even judgmental of his life decisions. Whatever it is, name it specifically.

Note the barriers that would keep them from showing up to belong in corporate worship or outreach events. What’s the reason they haven’t walked through your door yet? Is it that they don’t think church is for people like them? That they’re afraid of being the only one who doesn’t know the songs? That they’ve been hurt by a church before and haven’t fully gotten over it? These barriers are exactly what your communications need to address — not by arguing against them, but by making them feel irrelevant through a different kind of invitation.

Finally, describe how they actually receive information. Do they scroll Instagram in the evenings? Do they listen to podcasts on their commute? Are they in neighborhood Facebook groups? Do they read email? The answer to this question determines which channel has any hope of reaching them at all.

How to Use What You Build

A persona sitting in a folder is worthless. A persona your team references every time they plan something is one of the most useful tools in your communications strategy. You can see a practical example of my church’s persona slides here.

Print them out. Put them on the wall of your planning space. When a ministry leader brings you an event to promote, ask “which of our personas would genuinely be interested in this, and what would move them to say yes to a next step in faith?” When you’re writing email copy, read it back and ask whether your persona would open it, read past the first line, and know what to do next.

This is not about reducing people to a dataset profile. It’s about refusing to hide behind abstractions and assumptions about the people whom God has placed within the sphere of your church’s reach. Real people are specific. Real needs are specific. Real communication has to be specific, too, or it simply doesn’t connect.

Your congregation and your community are full of people like Marcus — people who are closer to finding connection at your church than you might think, waiting for a message that feels like it was written for them.

Build the personas. Use them as a staff to empathize and understand how to communicate.

Not who attends. Not who volunteers. Not who gives. Who lives here — the families in the neighborhood, the apartment complex down the road, the people driving past your sign every single day who have never once thought about walking through your doors?

Most church communications strategies are built entirely around the people already inside the walls. The messaging only reflects their language, their preferences, and their stage of life. And that makes sense on the surface — you’re talking to people you know. But if your church exists to reach the community around it, and your communications are designed only for the people already there, you have a gap that no amount of creative design will close.

You can’t speak meaningfully to people you don’t know. And most churches, if they’re honest, don’t really know their community. They know their congregation.

Start With the Data That’s Already Free

Before you run a focus group or commission a survey, there is a significant amount of information about your surrounding community that is already available to you at no cost.

The US Census Bureau’s website at census.gov gives you detailed demographic data for any geographic area you want to look at — age breakdowns, household income, family structure, education levels, racial and ethnic makeup, and more. You can pull this data by zip code, by city, or by a custom radius around a specific address. Spend an hour there and you will walk away knowing things about your community that most of your staff have never thought to ask.

Your city or county planning office is another underused resource. Most municipalities publish community development reports, housing studies, and neighborhood assessments that contain detailed information about who is moving in, where growth is happening, what the economic pressures are, and what the community identifies as its greatest needs. This information is often sitting on a city website, unread.

Local school district data can tell you a great deal as well — enrollment trends, the percentage of students on free or reduced lunch, and languages spoken at home. These numbers paint a picture of who is raising families in your area and what those families are actually navigating.

None of this requires a budget. It requires curiosity and a few hours of focused research.

Go Where People Are Actually Talking

Demographics tell you who is there. Psychographics tell you what they care about, what they fear, and what they’re searching for. To get that, you have to go where people are having real conversations.

Local Facebook community groups and Nextdoor are genuinely useful for this. Spend time reading — not posting, just reading. What questions are people asking? What frustrations keep coming up? What do people in your community celebrate and what do they grieve? You will find felt needs surfacing in those threads that no demographic report will ever show you.

Google’s search tools can also tell you what people in your area are actively looking for. What questions are people typing into search engines related to topics your church speaks to — loneliness, addiction, grief, parenting, financial stress, meaning? Those searches represent real people with real needs, looking for real answers. Understanding that landscape helps you communicate in a way that connects with where people actually are, rather than where you assume they are.

And then there is the simplest research tool available to you, one that costs nothing and is almost never used: walking around. Drive the neighborhoods near your church. Eat at the local restaurants. Shop at the stores your community uses. Talk to people. Ask questions. Listen without an agenda. There is no data set that replaces the understanding you gain from simply paying attention to the place God has put you.

Turn What You Learn Into Something Usable

Raw data is not a strategy. The goal of all this research is to build a working picture of the people your church is called to reach — specific enough to inform how you communicate, and honest enough to challenge assumptions you didn’t know you were making.

Take what you find and write it down in plain language. Who are the three or four distinct groups of people who live in your community? What does life look like for each of them? What are they worried about? What do they want for their kids? Why might they be skeptical of a church, and what might make them curious enough to show up?

When you can answer those questions with any degree of specificity, your communications become valuable to people. The sermon series promotion becomes a way to address something real that people are dealing with. The outreach event is designed to meet a real need rather than simply filling seats. The social post speaks to someone’s life rather than announcing your schedule.

This is what it means to communicate to your community rather than at it. And it starts not with a message, but with the willingness to go learn who you’re actually talking to and what they care about in life.

Set aside time this week — even just a few hours — and start with online tools. Look up your zip code. See who is there. Let that be the beginning of a conversation your church has been meaning to have with its community for a long time.

Every church communications director has heard it.

You’re standing in the lobby after a service, or in the break room on a Monday morning, and someone says it — casually, almost apologetically — as if they’re doing you a favor by letting you know: “I didn’t know that was happening, why wasn’t it in the bulletin?”

And somewhere in the back of your mind, a quiet alarm goes off. Because you know exactly how many times you announced it. You put it in the bulletin for weeks. You sent the email. You posted it on three platforms. You had someone mention it from the stage. You updated the website. You did everything right, and somehow this person — a regular attender, not a first-time guest — had no idea.

So what do you do? Most of us reach for the same solution: more. More channels. More posts. More repetition. We add a text blast to the rotation. We send a second email blast. We ask the pastor to mention it again next week. We assume that if people aren’t getting the information, it must be because we haven’t said it enough.

But here’s the thing. More is rarely the answer. And chasing it will burn you out without solving the problem.

The Real Problem Is Not Frequency

When someone says, “I didn’t know about that,” they’re not telling you that you failed to communicate. They’re telling you that the information didn’t reach them in a way that stuck. Those are two very different problems, and they require two very different solutions.

We live in one of the most over-communicated moments in human history. Your congregation is managing hundreds of messages a day — from their inboxes, their social feeds, their group chats, their news apps, their kids’ schools. By the time your church email lands, they’ve already decided, consciously or not, whether it’s worth their attention. Adding volume to that environment doesn’t break through the noise. It only becomes part of it.

The instinct to repeat the message is understandable. There’s an old marketing principle that says a person needs to see something seven times consistently before they internalize it. But that principle doesn’t always help in a world of smartphones and social media, where the average person is fielding a thousand messages a week. What it actually tells us today is that the burden is on the communicator to be relevant and clear — not just persistent.

Start With Where People Actually Are

The question isn’t “how many times did we say it?” The question is “did we say it in the right place and time, in the right way, and to the right people?”

Most church communications strategies are built around what the church wants to say, not around how the congregation actually receives information. And the reality is that your congregation is not a monolith. A 68-year-old who has attended for 30 years and a 34-year-old who started coming last spring are not consuming information the same way. Your young families aren’t necessarily reading the printed bulletin. Your older members may not have notifications turned on for the church app. Your college students aren’t opening emails.

Before you add another channel to your rotation, do the diagnostic work. Survey your congregation — even informally. Ask people: Where do you actually look when you want to know what’s happening at church? What’s the first place you check? What’s the one thing you actually read every week? The answers will probably surprise you. And they will tell you exactly where to put your energy.

Not Everything Belongs Everywhere

The second piece of this is tiering your information — being intentional about which messages go to which channels at what times and why.

When everything is promoted everywhere at the same volume, people tend to tune it out to push against the onslaught of noise. Your bulletin becomes ignorable wallpaper. Your emails get deleted immediately. The announcements from the stage become the time people check their phones.

A better approach is to match the message to the medium and the audience. High-priority, whole-church information belongs in your highest-attention channels — a personal word from the pastor, a well-crafted email, a clear and simple slide before service. Targeted ministry information belongs in targeted places — a specific group text, a ministry-specific email list, a poster in the hallway where that group gathers around the coffee machine or check-in. The goal is not to reach everyone with everything. It’s to reach the right people with the right thing at the right moment.

When you begin to make patterns of valuable and inspirational messaging located in places people will find them, something shifts. Your congregation starts to trust that when you communicate something, it matters. They stop filtering you out because you’ve stopped crying wolf.

Clarity Carries Further Than Volume

There’s one more piece that often gets overlooked in this conversation: clarity.

Inspiration that’s easy to act on travels further than information that requires effort to decode. If your announcement requires someone to remember a date, a time, a location, and enter a long registration link in a phone browser — and those things are buried in the third paragraph of an email — you’ve lost most people before you imagine. If your social post has the same billboard energy as every other post you’ve published, it won’t stop anyone’s thumb from scrolling.

The most effective communication is specific, immediate, and requires the smallest possible action from the recipient. One message. One ask. One next step. Make it easy to say yes through inspiration. Answer the question for the user, “What’s in it for me?”

The next time someone tells you they didn’t know about something, resist the urge to reach for more. Instead, ask a better question: Did we say it in the place they actually look, in a way that was clear enough to act on?

If the answer is no, you don’t need to say it louder. You need to say it smarter.

If you're running the communications show by yourself, the key to surviving (and thriving) is learning how to lead effectively, even if you’re working with limited resources. In my book, I talk a lot about the importance of building a culture of collaboration and leadership within a communications team. But what if you don’t have a team? How do you still lead when you're the only one making decisions, creating content, and executing the strategy?

The answer is simple: You lead through structure, collaboration, and intentional delegation.

Start by looking at the big picture—your church’s mission and vision—and use that as your foundation. This foundation is what will drive all of your communications and your strategy, even if you're the only one crafting the message. Everything you communicate needs to be tied back to the gospel and the church's overarching goal of drawing people into discipleship. The more intentional you are in making sure every piece of content either reflects or ties into this mission, the more effective your communications will be. When you lead yourself this way, you don’t just create content; you create content that matters.

Next, you’ll want to lean on the resources around you. You might not have a full team, but you likely have other staff members or volunteers who are talented in areas like graphic design, social media, video editing, project management or even event planning. Even if it’s just one person, you can still collaborate with them to elevate the work you’re doing. Reach out to them with specific tasks, set clear expectations, and offer positive constructive feedback. Just because you don’t have a large team doesn’t mean you can’t delegate—it just means you’ll need to be more strategic in your approach.

As I talk about in my book, leadership isn’t just about overseeing tasks—it’s about coaching and mentoring others to grow alongside you. This is a place for you to grow as a leader as well, dropping the need for perfection in lieu of helping another grow in their passion and talents. Even if you don’t have a full-fledged team to manage, your leadership will be much more effective if you take the time to guide the people around you. Encourage your volunteers, involve them in appropriate decision-making processes, and let them be a part of the church's communications journey. Giving people a sense of ownership will not only lighten your load but also invest them in the success of your communications strategy.

I contend each of our churches, no matter the size, have at least one really talented person who can add something amazing to your efforts, they just haven’t been asked yet.

Another essential element in managing communications as a one-person department is making sure your time is spent wisely. The key here is planning. In my book, I talk about how the communications director needs to be a master of planning and time management. Having a clear editorial calendar is essential. Plan ahead for the entire month or even the quarter so you can prioritize your tasks effectively. Block out time for content creation, meetings, strategy sessions, and even self-care. The more structure you create around your work, the easier it will be to balance everything on your plate.

If you’re finding yourself constantly responding to immediate needs or last-minute requests, consider creating systems for your church’s communication needs that have attached deadlines. Create templates for event promotions, social media posts, and email newsletters, so when something needs to go out, you can quickly plug in the necessary details and have a polished product ready to go. You can also develop a library of assets—photos, graphics, videos, and even written content—that can be reused or modified for different occasions. This way, you’ll spend less time redoing work and more time focusing on strategic planning.

And finally, be transparent about your limitations. It’s easy to get caught up in the idea of doing it all and being everything to everyone, but as a one-person department, you can’t be everywhere at once. Communicate with your pastoral staff and leadership about what is and isn’t possible. Set realistic expectations for what can be accomplished within the constraints of your time and resources. If there’s a big project that needs to be done, ask for help or let others know when a project might take longer than expected. Being transparent about your workload not only sets clear expectations but also builds trust among your team.

In addition, being honest about your limitations opens the door for future collaboration and resource allocation. As your church grows and your communications department expands, you’ll be able to build a more robust team to support your efforts. But until that time comes, leading a communications strategy as a one-person department is a lesson in prioritization, efficiency, and collaboration.

I will write an article later about the ethical use of AI, so I don’t want to dive deep here into my thoughts on it. I would conclude that services like ChatGPT and Claude.ai are great tools, but you don’t need to relinquish creative thought to these tools. They are only as smart as the collective opinion of the internet, so don’t expect them to have good theology for writing copy. Do however, use them as labor saving devices for project management or idea sparks to create outlines from. I often use them to do research on topics where I need to know people’s opinions and objections on a subject. Remember, it’s a tool, not actual intelligence.

To sum up, being a one-person communications department doesn’t have to feel like you’re constantly running on empty. By focusing on your church’s mission, collaborating with volunteers and staff, planning strategically, and being transparent about what you can accomplish, you can lead your communications efforts with purpose and effectiveness. Open up to offering opportunities to people around you. And remember, even if you’re flying solo for now, the goal is always to lead people into deeper connection with the gospel and with each other—something that is always worth investing in, no matter how small the team may be.

One of the biggest challenges church communicators face is that traditional metrics—like attendance, website traffic, or social media likes—are not always the best indicators of long-term success. While these metrics can provide a lot of insight, they don’t tell the whole story, especially when it comes to communicating the life-changing power of the gospel. Metrics like attendance, engagement, and giving are all lag measures behind metrics like life-change, growth in discipleship, and generosity. So, how do we know if our communications are having the right impact?

In my book, I emphasize that we need to shift the way we measure success in church communications. We need to go beyond the surface-level metrics and focus on the deeper, more meaningful outcomes that align with our church's mission and values. These metrics are more nebulous and mirky to define, but are worth the time to dig into. Instead of measuring how many people liked your social media post, ask yourself, "Did this message practically encourage someone to take a next step in their faith and how do I measure that?"

To get a clearer picture of success, start by defining what it is you hope to achieve with your communications efforts. Is your goal to build community, foster deeper engagement, or lead people toward discipleship? Maybe it’s all three, but it’s important to clearly define these goals and what success looks like before you begin measuring.

For example, let’s say you’re leading an outreach campaign to introduce new people to your church. Sure, the number of visitors who attend your services or sign up for an event is a useful metric, but what’s more important is whether those people feel welcomed and have a clear understanding of how to continue engaging with the church community. The most unkind thing you can do is be ambiguous. So define your new guests expectations, and them deploy communicating them. Measuring success in this case might look like tracking how many new visitors join small groups, sign up to volunteer, or follow a next step in faith. These metrics are a better gauge of success than counting a one-time attendance as they walk back out the door.

To track this, you need a system in place that allows you to track individuals’ journeys. If someone comes to your church and fills out a connection card, for instance, make sure that information is followed up with and tracked to see how they move through the process of integration. Are they coming back for a second visit? Do they know not just know about your groups, but actually become involved in one? These small but important steps can be a great indicator of success and impact.

It’s also important to measure the quality of engagement, not just the quantity. A post on social media with thousands of likes may seem like a success on the surface, but if those likes don’t lead to meaningful conversation, action, or spiritual growth, then the true impact is missing. Even worse, if they have traction due to contention in the comments, is that helpful to anyone? For example, measuring how many people share your posts or comment on them can be a better indicator of engagement on a post, so encourage and interact as people do. A comment or share indicates that the content resonated with someone to the point where they felt compelled to engage. That is a much deeper form of interaction than a simple like or view.

But here’s where it gets tricky—how do you measure spiritual transformation or growth through communication? It’s not like tracking a purchase or a digital download. Spiritual growth is often subtle and slow, making it harder to track in real-time. But there are ways to gather data that can reflect this growth, and it requires awareness from all staff and lay leaders for feedback.

Surveys are a great tool. Ask your congregation how they feel about the impact of communications on their spiritual lives. Do they feel more connected to the church? Are they more likely to engage in spiritual practices such as prayer, Bible study, or community outreach because of the messages you’ve shared? By regularly surveying your congregation, you can get a sense of how communications are supporting their faith journey and where improvements can be made.

Another tool is feedback from your pastoral team. If the communications department is doing its job well, your pastors should notice the impact on their ministry. Are more people attending services or coming forward for prayer or asking how to jump in? Are people actively participating in community events or groups? Pastors and ministry leaders are on the front lines of spiritual growth and can give valuable feedback on how well communications are helping fulfill the church’s mission.

Of course, you can’t track every bit of success with hard numbers. Faith journeys aren’t linear, and people’s engagement with church communications might not show up right away. But over time, you will start to see patterns that tell a story. You’ll begin to understand which messages are hitting the mark, which platforms are most effective for engagement, and which initiatives are truly transforming lives.

I heard a smart leader once say that small steps in the right direction are more meaningful that running in circles fast.

Ultimately, the most effective way to measure success in church communications is by focusing on the impact your messages are having on the lives of individuals. The deeper and more meaningful the engagement, the greater the success. But measuring success goes beyond numbers—it’s about asking the right questions and using the right tools to track what truly matters.

If your communications efforts are not just about reaching more people but about leading them toward Christ, fostering community, and encouraging spiritual growth, then you’ll be able to see the true impact of your work. The next step is to create actionable plans based on those insights and constantly course-correct your strategy.

Remember that success isn’t just about achieving a goal; it’s about making sure your communications strategy is serving the people you are called to serve. So, take the time to regularly evaluate, adjust, and celebrate the wins—no matter how small. Whether it's someone signing up for a group or a visitor feeling welcomed, those are all wins in the life of the church and can be measured as part of your communications success.

In conclusion, measuring success in church communications requires shifting the focus from simple metrics to deeper, more meaningful outcomes. It’s about tracking how effectively your messages are helping people connect with the gospel, grow in their faith, and engage with the church community. Success isn’t just a number; it’s the lives that are transformed as a result of your work. Keep this in mind as you evaluate your communications strategy, and you’ll find yourself moving closer to the true measure of success.

The church’s communications strategy is ultimately about reaching people with the gospel and inviting them into the life of the church. But how do we make sure that our efforts are focused on the people who need to hear the message? How do we ensure that our communications are purposeful and targeted in moving people forward in faith, not just in awareness?

This question comes up often in church leadership forums and is one that often goes unaddressed in the hustle of weekly announcements and content creation. The reality is, without clear targeting and audience understanding, church communications can become scattershot—throwing content out and hoping it sticks to the right audience.

This lack of focus can result in disengagement and frustration, not just for the audience but for the communications team and church leadership as well.

The first step to solving this problem is to understand your audience. It’s easy to assume that “everyone” is the audience for your communications, but that approach can leave gaps in your messaging. You’re not speaking to a homogenous group of people; your church is a diverse group of individuals, each with different needs, challenges, and experiences. To reach people effectively, you need to understand them deeply—what motivates them, what challenges they face, and where they are in their faith journey.

In my book, I talk about the importance of audience analysis. When you know who your audience is, you can tailor your messaging to their needs. Are you speaking primarily to long-time church members who are involved in the ministry? Or are you reaching out to new visitors who may be unfamiliar with church culture and language? Are you having to reach both at the same time? Are you communicating with families, singles, young adults, or older generations? Each of these group dynamics has different needs, preferences, and ways of engaging with content.

Once you have a clear understanding of your audience, the next step is to create content that speaks directly to them. A generic “one-size-fits-all” message is not going to resonate with your specific audience. If you serve at a large and multigenerational church like I do, you have to run multiple campaigns at the same time, including those inside and outside the church walls, and in means and channels that younger and older folks resonate well with. It gets complex quickly, but it’s worth it for their sake.

It’s essential that your communications are tailored to address the specific interests and needs of each audience group and be in alignment with your other messaging to other groups. You don’t always have to create multiple versions of every piece of content, but it means you need to be thoughtful about how you craft your messaging in how each groups will receive it. Think about the language you use, the images you choose, and the stories you tell. Are they relevant to the audience you’re trying to reach while not isolating others?

Another powerful tool is segmentation. By segmenting your audience by behaviors or psychographic data, you can create more targeted, personalized communications geared around meeting needs. Segmentation isn’t just about grouping people by age or life stage like demographic data, it’s about understanding the unified needs within each group that span all your audiences. Tailoring messages around how your church adds value and meets needs across all your audience segments is a good strategy for larger communications arcs.

Building these audience segments both in demographic and psychographic slices also allows you to measure engagement and success more effectively. When you start tracking how different groups interact with your communications, you can make data-driven decisions about what’s working and what isn’t. Are new visitors engaging with your welcome emails? Are young adults participating in small group activities after reading your social media posts? If not, it’s time to reassess how you're tailoring your content to meet the needs of these groups.

It’s also important to consider not just who you’re reaching, but who you’re not. Church communications often miss the mark because they fail to consider those who might be outside the immediate church circle. Are you reaching people in the community who have never attended church but are searching for answers? Are your communications inclusive of people at different stages of life, faith, and understanding? It’s essential to broaden your scope to include not just the active members but those who are on the fringes or who may be encountering the gospel for the first time.

Asking these questions is key to developing a more inclusive, targeted communications strategy. By identifying who isn’t being reached, you can begin to craft messages that speak to their unique needs and concerns. This could mean engaging with the local community through service projects, creating resources for non-believers, or addressing real-life questions people have about faith in a way that is accessible and welcoming.

But how do you track all of this and ensure you’re hitting the mark? One of the best ways to do so is through regular feedback and evaluation. Don’t just assume that your content is working—ask for feedback. Have a conversation with your congregation and community using focus groups about how they perceive your church’s messaging. What do they feel is missing? What connects with them most? You might be surprised by the insights they provide.

Surveys, polls, and even informal conversations one-on-one can reveal critical information about how your messages are landing. You can also measure the success of your messaging through engagement metrics—likes, comments, shares, attendance and post event questionnaires. But don’t just focus on numbers; focus on the quality of engagement. Is the engagement meaningful? Are people responding in a way that leads to deeper connection and spiritual growth? That’s the true measure of success.

The ultimate goal of church communications is not just to fill seats or increase social media followers, but to connect people with the gospel and invite them into the life of the church.

And to do that effectively, we must be laser-focused on who we’re trying to reach, how we’re reaching them, and whether our messages are truly resonating with them.

A communications strategy that is genuinely aligned with your mission and audience will not only help you fulfill your church’s purpose but will also foster a deeper sense of community, engagement, and transformation within and outside your congregation. When you understand your audience, tailor your content to meet their needs, and continuously evaluate and adjust your approach, you are positioning your church to make a real, lasting impact in the lives of those you’re called to serve.

Is your church’s communications strategy truly aligned with your church’s mission and vision?

It’s easy to assume that your church’s communications are in sync, especially when the content is coming from a variety of different ministry leaders and team members. But when all of these voices aren’t unified, the messaging can become fragmented, and ultimately, the church’s brand—how it is perceived both inside and outside the walls—can suffer.

The reality is, when your communications are fragmented or disconnected from the central mission of the church, it not only confuses your congregation but also diminishes the church’s ability to fulfill its purpose in the community. Too often, the messaging strategies of different ministry leaders, event organizers, and pastors are out of sync. This lack of alignment can leave people feeling as though the church lacks direction, credibility, or a clear focus. The question remains: How can we ensure that our church’s communications are truly reflective of its mission?

At the core of a church’s brand is the promise it makes. The brand isn’t just about a logo or catchy tagline. It’s a reflection of the church’s vision and mission—a promise to the community about the kind of impact it strives to have. Every piece of communication—whether it’s a Sunday service announcement or a social media post—contributes to this brand promise. And when the messaging is inconsistent or contradictory, it undermines the trust and clarity that are vital for building relationships both within the congregation and with the community.

As communications directors, we are called not only to manage the messaging but to align it with the gospel and the church’s larger mission. But how do we do that effectively?

The first principle to keep in mind is clarity over cleverness. While it might be tempting to use clever phrasing or catchy slogans to grab attention, this can often lead to confusion. When the messaging is unclear or convoluted, it detracts from the church’s core mission. Instead, we need to focus on clear, direct language that communicates the church’s mission and values in a way that’s easily understood.

Clarity is not only about simplicity but also about consistency. One of the core principles from my book is that every communication should be unified with the mission and values of the church. Whether it’s the website, social media, or the weekly bulletin, each platform should echo the same message. This doesn’t mean the content should be identical on every platform, but it should reflect the church’s identity and vision consistently. From a sermon series promotion on social media to the words used in announcements during service, every communication should point back to the church’s mission.

Brand consistency is key, but it’s also important to have a clear structure in place that ensures consistency across all platforms. One way to achieve this is by creating a style guide for your church’s communications. This document should outline the tone, voice, and messaging that aligns with the church’s vision and mission. It’s not just about design; it’s about making sure that the way we communicate mirrors the church’s values. A style guide ensures that whether it’s a social media post or an email, the message is unified and resonates with the people who need to hear it.

Another essential step is collaboration. As a communications director, you’re in a unique position to help ministry leaders align their efforts with the church’s mission. Regular communication and collaboration with pastors, event planners, and ministry leaders is essential. You don’t have to do everything alone; in fact, the most successful communications strategies are those that involve input from different leaders in the church. Schedule regular strategy meetings to make sure everyone is on the same page and understands the core messaging of the church. It’s through these meetings that you can reinforce the church’s vision and mission, ensuring that every ministry and initiative is represented accurately in the church’s communications.

Building a church brand that aligns with the mission isn’t just about crafting the right message—it’s about creating an experience for your congregation and visitors that aligns with that message. It’s crucial to ensure that everything you create, from your website to your social media, reinforces the church’s values. For example, if your church’s mission centers on outreach and community, make sure that the content you’re sharing speaks to those values. Highlight stories of people serving others or participating in local missions. Share testimonies that reflect the life-change your church believes in. Every piece of communication should speak to how your church is making an impact in the lives of those inside and outside the congregation.

One way to evaluate if your church’s communications strategy is truly in alignment with the mission is through feedback. Don’t just assume everything is going well—measure it. Use surveys, focus groups, and engagement metrics to gather feedback from the congregation. After events or campaigns, ask how the message was received and whether it connected with the mission of the church. This will not only help you measure success but also guide your future communications efforts.

But how do you measure the success of a communication strategy that’s deeply connected to the mission? It’s not just about numbers—attendance and engagement metrics can give you some insight, but the true measure of success is whether the church’s message is resonating with its congregation. Is the church’s mission clear in everything you communicate? Do people understand what the church stands for and why it matters? Success means that the church is fulfilling its purpose and that its messaging helps people connect to the gospel and the community.

The goal of every church communication is to reflect the mission of the church—to be a unified voice for the message of Christ and the work He’s doing in the world. When communications are aligned with the mission, it becomes clear that the church is moving forward together. It’s not about what’s being communicated, but how that communication ties back to the gospel and the life transformation that it brings.

As communications directors, we are tasked with the privilege of ensuring that the voice of the church is clear, unified, and pointing to Christ.

In the end, the question we should be asking is not whether we’re making beautiful graphics or sending out enough posts, but whether our communications are truly aligned with the church’s mission. If the answer is yes, then we are on the right track. If not, it’s time to course-correct, unify our efforts, and make sure that every piece of communication points back to the Great Commission and the work God has called us to do.