NEW Columnist for ECC: Gayle Hilligoss! First article: Business E-mail 101
Editors note: Effective Church Communications is thrilled and honored to announce that Gayle Hilligoss, founder of Success Systems, Inc., a training and development firm providing resources to church office professionals, and a personal hero of mine and role model to me, has graciously agreed to share her wisdom with us in a series of articles on church office basics.
For many years Gayle taught seminars to thousands of church office professionals and her newsletter PROfile was a continual training tool and inspiration to many. Here is the the first of many articles that will equip and encourage you to do your work as a professional as you serve our Lord. Her first article is on email basics, something we often think we know well, but often make mistakes in that do not reflect the quality our Lord and church deserve.
but often make mistakes in that do not reflect the quality our Lord and church deserve.
Business Email 101
Everyone knows at least one—a coworker who copies emails to everyone, a friend who forwards every email crossing her screen, an acquaintance who writes in all caps, another who uses a signature with a slow-loading graphic, a neighbor who packs every message with smileys and LOLs.
The frustration of dealing with these kinds of big-time senders often makes us give more thought to the premise that all communication has rules for proper usage. Could we use email more effectively ourselves?
Some email essentials to consider:
Realize email is not private.
Never put anything in an email that you wouldn’t want passed along (probably numerous times) with your name attached. It could happen. Absolutely avoid sarcasm, criticism, rants. Email can last virtually forever.
Follow writing protocol.
Business email shouldn’t look like a teen’s text messages. Spelling and grammar are important. Keep your messages brief and to the point; stick to the subject. Make messages more readable by breaking text into paragraphs; leave a line between each of those paragraphs. Short, bulleted lists are effective for making points.
Use proper upper and lowercase.
ALL CAPS is shouting; all lowercase looks dismissive. For emphasis use boldface, italics, or asterisks before and after the word you want to stress.
Fill in the subject field.
Say what the email is about—not just “Hi” or your name. If you need a reply, note it: Reply Please. Keep the subject line short and specific.
Choose the appropriate form of reply.
Explore CC, BCC, Reply, Reply All; know how and when to use each option. Send mail to the person you want to read and respond to your message. Send copies only to others who need to know. The names of those who get CCs are seen by the others; those who get BCCs are not visible to other recipients.
Use “Reply All” only when all in the group need your input.
Someone sends you and 20 others a question—what size T-shirt do you want for the fundraiser? Reply to the sender only; no one else cares about your size; getting the mail only clutters their mail boxes.
Reply in a timely manner.
Business email requires some sort of reply generally within a day. Not to reply, however briefly, is simply rude. Copy the relevant part of the incoming message in your reply; by the time the sender gets your “I agree,” he may have forgotten what he asked.
Know when email is not appropriate.
Very important or complex matters are best conveyed by phone, visit, or handwritten note.
Avoid “cute” fonts, multi-colors, and graphics attached to your regular email.
Some programs don’t handle these well and they often slow down downloading. Likewise, use a formal email address for business communication; janejones@aol.com will serve you better than jollyjane.
Be courteous about forwarding mail to groups.
Ask recipients before adding them to any list you regularly forward to. Many choose not to receive miscellaneous messages—political, inspirational or informational alerts and the like.
If you forward an email that was itself forwarded to you, highlight and forward ONLY the message you want to pass along.
Otherwise you will be sending along addresses, personal notes, and probably several copies of the pictures and message in the original email. Don’t feel you must forward every message that tells you to do so. Much of this email is pure hoax.
When addressing email to a group, use BBCs (blind courtesy copies) and not the To or CC function.
Not only is it impolite to broadcast email addresses, but few recipients enjoy wading through a list of addresses to get to the message—especially if the message requires printing. By using BBC, each recipient sees only two addresses—her own and yours.
Get acquainted with Snopes.com.
If you feel you must forward a “startling fact,” check it out before passing it along—and do the checking yourself. Often e-mails falsely say they’ve been verified as true; you don’t want to send along misinformation.
Avoid attachments if at all possible.
In most cases it is possible to include all the information in the body of the email. Because many people choose not to open attachments, if you must send one—especially a large one—it is best to ask first. Formats and firewall issues can be time wasting factors.
Use a signature.
For business mail include contact information: address, phone, hours. Generally, don’t attach photos or excessive extras: logos, mottos, verses, etc.
Re-read before sending.
Readers don’t have the benefit of seeing facial expressions or hearing the inflections of your voice. It is very easy for messages, especially those written in haste, to convey a meaning not intended. By the way, remember this when reading email from others; if their words come across unexplainably out of character, take another look. Perhaps you are simply misinterpreting the message.
And finally, never address an email until the message is composed and proofread.
Establishing this habit will save you from accidently sending mail before it’s really ready to go. I can imagine each of us could tell a story about the message that got away before its time.
Email is a wonderful tool. Using it well is a skill every professional can and should master.
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Multi-channel communication defined and why it is important
Multi-channel communication means making the most of every opportunity you have to communicate the gospel message.
Unfortunately this is not something most church communicators want to hear. In this time of ever-changing options for communicating in our churches, it is easy to be overwhelmed and we naturally want to simplify our communication workload. This desire is expressed by the question, “What is the best way to communicate with people today? Is it the web, email, or podcasting? Do we still need to do print? What works best to reach the most people?
When overwhelmed with channel choices, it is natural to want to narrow it down to one or two that will be effective.
I always feel bad as I answer because I know people want me to give them a simple answer and to tell them that one channel, especially if it is the one they prefer, is all they need, but I can’t do that. I can’t do that because to be effective in your church communication ministry, to fully fulfill the Great Commission, there is no one way.
Today to be an effective church communicator, you have to use every channel available to you.
It is the time of both/and, not either /or
No one channel will work because people aren’t any more alike in their communication preferences than they are in other areas of likes and dislikes. Some folks love to go online; others don’t have a computer. Some love words; others prefer images and videos. Some love to listen to podcasts; others don’t have any idea what a podcast is. Some text continuously on their mobile phones; some won’t read anything that isn’t on paper.
It’s challenging because all of folks just mentioned go to your church. We can’t simply pick out one way to communicate because the Lord has put us into a body of wonderfully diverse people and it is our responsibility to create communications that are useful for all of them.
To make this situation manageable for practical application in church communications, I’ve divided the many communication channels into three overall groups. It is much more difficult to communicate in all three channels, but I trust this section will encourage you and give you some strategic ideas how to be more effective as you work.
The three channels of effective church communication
Channel #1: Print
This channel consists of printed bulletins, newsletters, postcards, invitation cards, connection cards, instruction materials, printed matter of all kinds, sizes, and quality that we create in the church. Print, in color, black and white, and all its forms, is still one of the primary and most important ways we communicate with people today and will be for some time. Almost everyone has access to this channel.
Channel #2: Digital
This channel is the latest tool we have to communicate the gospel message and we use it in PowerPoint® presentations, the internet, our website, email newsletters, cell phone and small screen communications, and anything else that makes up the newest, latest, and greatest communication technology. This channel is still emerging, developing in new systems and tools, and is expanding constantly. Not everyone has access to this channel and speed of adaptation varies tremendously with age and socioeconomic groups.
Channel #3: People
This communication channel is often easily forgotten, but it is probably the most important in any church communication program. You can have the most beautifully designed bulletin and the most complete and functional website imaginable, but if the folks at your welcome center ignore visitors and prefer to chat with each other, if the person answering the phone (assuming a real person can be reached) is having a really bad day and takes it out on all callers, or if the members of your congregation ignore visitors, the most beautiful and cutting edge communications, no matter if they are in print or digitally presented, will be useless. People are the church—the church throughout the ages is made up of people. Our people are always the primary message delivery tool of the gospel, accessible at all times to all people.
We are living in a time of great communication transition
We need to keep this transition time in mind as we consider the various channels of church communication. A few hundred years from now, things may settle down a bit and everyone will perhaps receive messages beamed wirelessly into their brain stem in a way that can be turned on and off with the blink of an eye, but right now we are in the midst of the biggest communication revolution in the history of humanity and this revolution floods us with communication options of every kind. In practical terms this means you need to learn and grow in all areas of communication.
That is what this site is about and to help you do that, here are some more resources that discuss multi-channel communication:
In your excitement over new communication channels please read: Never forget the people who don’t have access to the easily created channels
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Effective Church Communicators Toolkits, an Introduction & Overview
To make it easier for you to access the information on this website for your own training and for training others, with or without the computer, I'm organizing the content into ECC TOOLKITS. The TOOLKITS contain instructional webinar/videos, corresponding PowerPoint presentations, PDF notes that go with them, associated e-books, and editable MS Publisher Templates, all focusing on one particular topic in church communications such as: church invitation cards, church visitor or connection cards, church bulletins, church websites, strategy for church communicators, and numerous holiday connected materials.
To access them you have two options:
Option #1: FREE Website TOOLKIT access for ECC MEMBERS
ECC Members have immediate, 24/7 access to all TOOLKIT materials as soon as they are released.
For each topic, all the material we have gathered for that topic will be accessible under the area of TOOLKITS, a tab on the Home Page of www.effectivechurchcom.com. Each topic will be in a separate TOOLKIT.
PLEASE look at the OVERVIEW file for each TOOLKIT as the contents vary and for suggestions on how to make the most of each TOOLKIT. If you are using the videos for training a group directly from the website, any of videos can be enlarged to full screen size and projected. The quality of the videos projected from an internet connection is not as good or reliable as the ones from the CD, but it is possible to view them with a group in this way.
You also have permission to make copies of the e-books PowerPoint handouts, and other print materials, and the templates for your church communications team without purchasing additional memberships.
The TOOLKITS offer some similar materials, but differ in organization from the Free Member's Download section in that the Download section has separate files (templates, jpgs, e-books, PDFs) that you can download and use individually if you want a specific type of resource. The TOOLKITS are organized around a particular topic, holiday, or communication tool and have everything you need in a variety of formats, in one place, on that particular topic.
Option #2: Toolkit CDs from www.lulu.com/yvonprehn, all $19.95
This option is available for anyone, members or not, who would like the material accessible on a CD. This works especially well for the churches or church support organizations that do not have high speed internet access for the videos and some of the larger downloads.
The CDs will contain one TOOLKIT per CD and are very reasonably priced ($19.95 each) to enable individuals, churches, church support and training organizations to collect a library of TOOLKITS useful for all their members. The www.LULU.com company that I use for production and shipping produces excellent quality CDs in hard plastic cases with spine labels—enough packaging to be useful for shelf storage and protection, but not too much with wasted software boxes.
The reproduction rights we give you with the TOOLKITS
Because we retain copyright to all the materials in our TOOLKITS, we can be generous with giving these rights to you. We do this because we want you to use the materials not only for your own learning, but to train others.
If we are to do all the communication for sharing the gospel and growing the Kingdom of God that needs to be done, we need many Great Commission-committed church communicators. We encourage you to not only look at these materials yourself, but use them to train others.
That is why we allow you to make copies of the e-books for staff and volunteers at your church if you either are a member or purchase CDs. That is why we grant you permission not only to use our materials to train volunteers if you are a member (you do need larger church or organizational membership for this) or purchase CDs, but you can charge a reasonable amount for that training and keep it.
You have permission to keep the CDs in your library and allow people who are members of your church or organization check them out, put them on their computer, print off e-books and not feel guilty that you are violating a rule about the CD only being able to be used on one computer.
We’d rather you didn’t reproduce the CDs. However, we can grant you a special license or provide group pricing if you want to give CDs to folks at a conference or training event. We can also provide wholesale pricing if you would like to sell the CDs and make a profit.
Questions, suggestions, ideas
If you have any questions about ECC TOOLKITS, suggestions for topics you would like to see in a TOOLKIT, or any other ideas on how we might help you become a more effective church communicator, please email: yvon@effectivechurchcom.com.
My inspiration for creating the TOOLKITS
Inspiration for this organization method came from an unlikely source. Stephen King who, as a little boy, won his first Bible by memorizing verses for Methodist Sunday School and who now makes lots of money writing scary stories, provided a near perfect description of the situation confronting many church communicators today and an inspiration for how to help in his book, On Writing.
In the book King tells a story of when he was eight or nine, he helped his uncle replace a window screen. Though a fairly simple job, requiring only a screwdriver, his uncle carried a huge toolbox to and from the work site. When King asked his uncle why he went to all the work of lugging around the huge toolbox, when it seemed like a simple screwdriver, carried in his uncle’s back pocket, would have been sufficient, his uncle answered:
“Yeah, but Stevie,” he said, bending to grasp the handles. “I didn’t know what else I might find to do once I got out here, did I? It’s best to have your tools with you. If you don’t, you’re apt to find something you didn’t expect and get discouraged.”
King goes on to say:
“I want to suggest that to write to your best abilities [or to create the best church communications, my note] it behooves you to construct your own toolbox and then build up enough muscle so you can carry it with you. Then, instead of looking at a hard job and getting discouraged, you will perhaps seize the right tool and get immediately to work.”
That’s my purpose in creating these TOOLKITS, so church communicators will have a selection of resources so they can “seize the right tool and get immediately to work” to help their churches create communications that will enable us to fully fulfill the Great Commission.
