Sometimes church communication ministries don't realize the extraordinary responsibilities they have to communicate the message of salvation and the challenges of discipleship to their communities and congregations, but more often church communicators feel a tremendous weight of responsibility.

If an important event or training program doesn't get the response you anticipated, it is easy to blame yourself. You might feel your communications weren't catchy enough or your graphics not gripping or your text not as enticing as it should be.

Maybe those reasons had something to do with it, but probably not. Sometimes the reason people don't show up has little to do with what you communicated. Following are some true examples of times this happened, of course with some details changed so as not to embarrass any member of the Body of Christ.

Unknown scheduling conflict

You may find out the real reason no one comes to an event you advertised is the same as it was when one church launched a Sunday morning class for young parents. They wanted to target this group (what church doesn't), but on the day it launched 2 grandparents and no young parents came to the class. When a few informal calls were made to the target audience of young parents in the church and they were asked why they didn’t come to the class, the answer was that because the new class was at the time of the main service and the children didn’t leave for the children’s program until after the children’s sermon, which was 10-15 minutes into the time the class started. The parents weren’t going to leave their kids in the service alone to go to the class—no matter how well it was advertised and promoted. [Read more...]