One of my church’s most successful forms of communication is our weekly email. It started around 2000, when the minister and church administrator quickly and easily threw together an email that included a few upcoming events and a ministerial thought or poem sent to the church-wide distribution list. It was an instant hit.

Since those easy, carefree days, however, I think we’ve made every mistake in the book, so here are my top tips for a weekly email:

  • Commit to one time every week that it goes out and stick with it. Our designated time is Tuesday afternoon, since dinner and Adult Religious Education are on Wednesday – and we want to give people adequate time to plan.
  • Have an editor, who reviews content, spelling and grammar, and reformats into a consistent layout.
  • Minimize the number of cooks in the kitchen. We’ve discovered the hard way that when more than three people are involved, the points of potential failure increase. People miss deadlines, the format goes haywire, etc. Our three are the minister, who provides a weekly pastoral message, the editor, who reviews and pulls the content together, and the church administrator, who is in charge of distribution. If you can keep the number to two, combining editing and distribution, that will streamline things even more.
  • Double check to be sure people have received the email. Sometimes it looks to the administrator as if it’s gone out, but there’s a glitch in the system and no one receives it. You might have a fourth person designated to look for it every week who alerts the administrator once it’s received.
  • Don’t use the church-wide email distribution list for much else. If you want credibility and to keep members on the list, it’s very important to have a high signal-to-noise ratio. About once a month, something else worthy of the church-wide list comes up, but that’s it.
  • Use a stable platform. This has been our single biggest problem. Eventually we settled on UUism.net for maintaining the email address list and for distribution, and since then, our woes have decreased significantly.
  • Just like a good blog, be sure to have great content. Include things people want to read, and don’t go overboard. Every week we have links to an online version of our print newsletter and the calendar, menus for upcoming dinners, a list of current classes, a few featured announcements (e.g. who is doing pastoral coverage while the minister is away) and, my favorite, the Minister’s Message.

I’ll close with a quote from our most recent Minister’s Message, which began a reflection on our church’s involvement in the civil rights movement:

“And I’m gonna put white hands
And black hands and brown and yellow hands
And red clay earth hands in it
Touching everybody with kind fingers
And touching each other natural as dew”
(from “Daybreak in Alabama by Langston Hughes)