Are you still using the enewsletter?

We are. Although, it looks different than it once did. A few years ago, the enewsletter was the only alternative to snail mail for sending all church information out to everyone. Now there are a variety of vehicles to use. And, not everyone likes to get their information the same way.

There's one group of people who still want to get news from the church, but don't want it sent to their inbox. They're already on email overload. (ME) There's another group who doesn't want their information any other way. They love getting emails. (MY MOM) So what do you do?

We're giving people a choice. Here's a draft concept of where we're headed.

How do you want to get your news?

We're planning to live with this change, among others, later in the week. (Do you have any idea what I had to go through to get Daryl's permission to give you this preview? I love perfectionist qualities of that guy.)

• Behind the scenes, everything's centralized. The same team pulls together the information every week.
• We still keep it simple, but we don't assume we know the ONE way to reach people. Everybody's different; that's why they get to pick from a few popular vehicles.
• We have a secondary objective of helping bring the late adopters along to make their life easier. Some of these new vehicles really do help maximize time and compress volume. However, without context, they just look like another intimidating add-on. So we're incorporating little tutorials and descriptions of the tools for the folks "who don't know what they don't know".
• We recognize even for the people who still choose the enews as their preferred method, we've got to make some changes to keep it effective (because of decreased attention spans, increased information overload, spam filters, email provider restrictions, etc.) It's fun to look back and see how far we've come...

Want a closer look? 1. 2004-2006 2. 2006-2008 3. 2008-

Comments

[Russell Martin]

That's kind of scary but that is EXACTLY where we are right now.

[Kem Meyer]

Some of it is automated in our content management system and some of it is a manual process (twitter & text updates). The software isn’t all centralized, but the process is. We keep information to a minimum, consistent, and update everything at once at least on a weekly basis.

[Marcus Hackler]

Looks great - we're headed the same way.

What does the workflow look like on the backend, and what tools are you using to generate the rss/twitter/other feeds?

[Lori Bailey]

Wow, good, good, stuff! Totally helpful with where we are right now. Thanks for sharing.

[Kelly]

We just went to the same sort of system in August and it's working very well.

http://www.gogracefellowship.com/media.html

Interested in hearing your answers to the comment above, though, especially in reference to Twitter. Right now, it's essentially serving as an RSS feed for our blog and podcast, but we want to expand. Will you hit one or two headlines a week or will the communication there be totally different?

[Eric Granata]

Hey, yeah! I like the way everything will be centralized. Will different information be pushed depending on the vehicle used? Specificly, how will you decide what to twitter? Will it be updated more often? Will you post links to more info?

Good post.