Faith and Web

Our church has done a weekly email for almost eight years now. In the main, it’s been a great success. However, the last few years we’ve been haunted by formatting issues.

The crux of the problem is that most church members and staff don’t understand how their email clients work. Thus what looks fine on their machines can be a mess on someone else’s. This is particularly true for something like our weekly email, which is initially built in Microsoft Word. Plop the document into Outlook with HTML email turned on, and the results are a disaster. While we know how to stop this problem (turn HTML off and plain text on), we’re at risk every time staff or computers change.

Enter Constant Contact, one of the best-know email marketing services. One of our Communication Committee members happened across it some months ago and signed up for a free trial. Committee members experimented with it and we were impressed. However, we were busy and forgot about it, until the end of the fiscal year came round. When we had a little extra money, one of the co-chairs shrewdly suggested that we dive in.

We did, and the results have been even better than we had hoped. Church members love it, and (surprisingly enough) in many ways it’s easier to produce than a text email. Moreover, on Websters, the listserv for UU webmasters, a couple of people who have been using it for much longer than us (including Dean Goddette — thoughts, Dean?), recently wrote that they too have been very happy with Constant Contact.

If you, like us, have been hovering on the edge of using an HTML email service, I’d recommend giving it a try.

Why Do I Recommend It?

• Both church members and committee members really like it.
• Many think it’s attractive. I’m actually not crazy about the way it looks, but that’s probably just because I’m an HTML snoot. More to the point, I’m clearly in a minority. And really, I don’t think it’s bad. In fact, it’s easier to read than the old text version. My aging eyes appreciate the larger font.
• Managing subscribers is amazingly simple. It only took me about 15 minutes to import our list, and adding new subscribers is a breeze. In fact, they can easily do it themselves…
• I followed Constant Contact’s simple directions, and we now have a nifty newsletter sign-up box on our home page. Not only that, it turns out to be rather clever. I tested it and it knew I was already a subscriber; it refused to let me sign up twice and spam myself.
• Unsubscribing is equally easy for the end user.
• While designing a template for the look-and-feel isn’t the easiest, comparatively speaking it is. In my professional life, I use a comparable service, and Constant Contact’s interface is considerably more intuitive.
• Once the template is set up, it’s easier to produce than plain text emails.
• The company is geared to small businesses, and nonprofits.
• It’s relatively inexpensive. One year’s service is under $300 for us.
• A user can receive it in plain text if they’d prefer or if they have a firewall that prevents HTML email.

The Drawbacks?

• It’s an ongoing cost. But compare it to other ongoing costs, such as the Yellow Pages, and the value becomes more obvious.
• The WYSIWYG interface can be temperamental. We had one link that absolutely refused to match others. I finally had to go in and force its hand using raw HTML.
• I’m told that when producing it, response time can be incredibly slow on some machines.

The Bottom Line

If you’re interested in it and think it might meet your congregation’s needs, give it a whirl. They have a free 60 day trial. So far, we’re delighted with it.

8 Comments »

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)

5 Comments »

As a church webmaster, I’m often asked to help with congregational email issues. We’ve had our share of sticky wickets to deal with, so when our Director of Religious Education recently sent me an article on the subject, it struck a chord with me. I think there’s a good deal of wisdom and some great advice in it, and commend it to those of you responsible for church-related email: Email Caution Helps Avoid Damaging Situations, InterConnections (a quarterly publication of the Unitarian Universalist Association).

Using this article as a starting point, I’ve distilled a list of tips and added a couple of my own.

An Ounce of Prevention: General Rules for One and All

1. Never say anything about someone in an email that you wouldn’t want that person to see.
2. If someone wants to have an email conversation about either another person or a complicated issue, suggest meeting in person.

For Potentially Emotional Situations:

3. Let your email sit overnight before sending it.
4. Adopt a measured tone.
5. Don’t forward emails of others without their permission.
6. Remember that once you send an email you lose control of it; it can be copied, sent to others, and quoted out of context, even years later.

When Conflict Arises

7. Stop the email.

For Official Congregational Email

8. Establish congregational policies about email.
9. For the congregation-wide list, limit access to certain leaders, and designate an editor.
10. Don’t overuse it. Our church does a weekly email blast, and maybe once a month (for a major occasion), will send out a second short email.

Do you have other tips? I’d love to hear them.

2 Comments »