I didn’t forget about stage three for my communication process. I’m including it last because I’m not done developing it here at Gateway.

The weekly email and blog posts are separate forms of communication I have to write every week. However, there is a substantial amount of communication that does (and needs) to happen every week that I really don’t need to be involved with. Every week we get questions about infant baptism, questions about our programs and opportunities to serve. In addition, we get many visitors who may come back if we follow-up with them. A lot of times, these are the communication pieces that fall through the cracks. If done well, our parents will feel valued and informed.

We have several pre-written emails to respond to our most popular questions. My admin can field these questions by cutting and pasting the pre-written response. If they have further questions, I or my staff can follow up. Otherwise I’ll be explaining why we don’t baptized infants three times a week. In addition you can automate follow-up communication to visitors. We can run reports on Monday that will track first, second and third time attendance on that weekend and print out labels for us to attach to postcards. The more simple things you can automate like this, the better your scope for communication.

Well, that’s it for my series on communication. Again, I’m not expert, but this really worked for me. Hopefully there will be a few people other there that might find this information helpful.