Newsletters: from boring and bragging to outstanding outreach

Whether you create your church newsletter on paper, in electronic format or both, periodically, take time to restructure it in ways that turn it from an often dreaded publication chore into one of your most powerful outreach tools. You can do this by evaluating your mission and then identifying your niche ministry targets and creating newsletters specifically for them.

Evaluate your mission

Creating and producing newsletters is extremely costly both in terms of people hours and the money it takes to create, reproduce and send them out. With this in mind it is important to take time to evaluate why you are producing your ministry newsletters.

That “WHY” comes out loud and clear in every issue you produce whether you intend to or not.

For ineffective church newsletters the biggest WHY that often comes out is that the church is doing the newsletter for what I call “family bragamony” purposes. These are publications that only make sense to you if you are part of the current church family. They are primarily focused on how great the people are who are already attending the church and have the effect of saying (even though this is never intended) “this is an insider group, newcomers aren’t welcome.”

If you doubt that is true, look at your newsletter. Do you have contact phone numbers or emails by every event? Do you have announcements like these:  “Men’s Bible study at our usual location.”  “Youth Group, same time, same place!” “The Pot Luck will be great as always—ya’ll come!”

A newcomer has no idea what you are talking about.

While reporting on church family news and giving updates is important, we might want to add evangelism and outreach as additional reasons WHY we do the publication.

This isn’t difficult to do. We can add an outreach emphasis simply by adding an invitation to newcomers. For example, just add something like:

All events of  Our Church are open to EVERYONE!

Please join us if you are new or perhaps have been around a long time, but mostly just attended Sunday mornings.

Each event has a contact phone number and email address and we welcome your questions and would love to tell you more.

One powerful outreach tool— be sure each activity from children’s and youth events to home Bible studies has a contact phone number and email for more information. It’s simple, but essential and sadly, so often left out.

Identify your niche targets and create publications specifically for them

One of the most exciting trends I have seen as I travel around North America teaching communication and marketing seminars to churches is the creation of niche newsletters.

All successful marketing theory tells us that the more narrowly we can niche (divide, segment) our audience into parts interested in the same thing, the more successful our marketing will be. The way this translates into the church is that it can be helpful in addition to doing an overall church newsletter to decide what more narrow audience you want to focus on and reach in your community. Then do a newsletter specifically for them.

Examples of niche newsletters

I have seen some great examples of this in especially in niche newsletters designed for PARENTS of teenagers and children. Note I said PARENTS, not the kids themselves. You still need newsletter to tell the youth group what’s going on, but most churches do something like that. These are a separate publication because the churches who do them  realize that parents need lots of help today. The best ones target a specific age area: parents of grade school kids, high schoolers, etc.

The church creates a newsletter that reaches out to parents, encourages them, gives them helpful tips and ideas. In addition the church also offers resources from the church to help them: youth and children’s programs, mom’s morning out, whatever. It clearly invites everyone in the community to take advantage of these programs.

Another great niche newsletter I saw recently at a large church conference I was teaching at was a newsletter for married professional couples. It was full of chatty tips on how to find time for romance, how to communicate when both of you have a crazy schedule, etc. To be honest the graphics, the layout, the whole “design” of the publication was pretty bad if I was evaluating it from a “design” standpoint. Did I care? NO! I snatched one right up and read every word.

These sorts of publications can be incredibly powerful outreach tools. They position the church as a resource for help; the pastors as resource people and they provide solutions to real-life problems. Which is easier to invite someone to church or to say, “I really found this article helpful with my kids. I think you’ll enjoy it”?

Think through the niche groups in your church—parents of  kids and teens and married couples at all sorts of life stages, seniors—then find some of the spiritually mature folks in that group and ask them to put together a newsletter to help others. Don’t worry about layout (though Microsoft Publisher has great newsletter templates that are easy to use), the content and heart in the publication is what is most important.