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Church Communications

Stop Winging It: How to Create a Church Communications Strategy That Actually Works

· by · 3 min read

A team planning with sticky notes on a whiteboard

Most churches don’t have a communications strategy. They have a communications habit — usually a reactive, exhausting cycle of last-minute announcements, forgotten events, and staff members who all think someone else is handling the social media.

Strategy sounds intimidating. It sounds like something big corporations do in boardrooms. But a communications strategy for a church doesn’t have to be complicated. At its core, it’s just a clear answer to four questions: Who are we talking to? What do we want to say? Where do we say it? And how will we know if it’s working?

Question 1: Who are you talking to?

This is the question most churches skip, and it’s the most important one. “Everyone” is not an audience. When you try to communicate to everyone, you end up connecting with no one.

Get specific. Your primary audience might be young families in your city who are spiritually curious but church-skeptical. Or it might be empty-nesters who are looking for community after their kids left home. Or it might be your existing congregation, because your biggest communication challenge is keeping members informed and engaged.

You can have more than one audience, but you need to be intentional about which one you’re speaking to with any given piece of communication. A post designed to help a skeptical 30-something consider attending for the first time looks very different from an announcement about the women’s Bible study.

Question 2: What are the messages that matter most?

Your church probably has a mission statement. If you do, it should be driving your communications — but most of the time, it’s hanging on a wall in the lobby and showing up in virtually none of your actual content.

Define two or three core messages that you want your audience to walk away with after any interaction with your communications. These should flow directly from your mission and values. Then ask yourself: if someone only read your last 10 social media posts or your last three emails, would they receive these messages?

If the answer is no, your communications aren’t strategic — they’re just informational. There’s nothing wrong with information, but information alone doesn’t build culture, grow faith, or compel people to get more involved.

Question 3: Where does your audience actually live?

You don’t have to be everywhere. You have to be where your specific audience is, and you have to show up there consistently and well.

For most churches, the highest-leverage channels are your website, email, and one or two social media platforms. Pick the platforms your target audience actually uses. If you’re trying to reach families with young kids, Instagram and Facebook are still your best bets. If you’re trying to reach college students, you need to think about TikTok and YouTube.

Here’s the hard truth: it’s better to be excellent on two platforms than mediocre on six. If you’re spreading yourself thin trying to maintain a presence everywhere, you’d be better served by doing fewer things with more intentionality.

Question 4: How will you know if it’s working?

This is where most church communicators check out, because metrics feel unspiritual. But measuring your communications isn’t about chasing numbers — it’s about stewarding your time and resources well.

You don’t need a sophisticated analytics dashboard. You need a few simple indicators that tell you whether your communications are actually reaching and engaging people. Track things like email open rates, website visits from new users, and whether first-time guests can tell you how they heard about your church.

Review these numbers quarterly. What’s working? What’s not? What do you need to stop doing, and what do you need to do more of?

The one-page communications strategy

Here’s how to pull this all together. Open a blank document and fill in the following:

  • Our primary audience: [describe the person you’re trying to reach in one sentence]
  • Our core messages: [the two or three things we want every communication to reinforce]
  • Our channels: [list your website, email, and the social platforms you’ll invest in]
  • Our metrics: [three numbers you’ll track quarterly]
  • Our team: [who owns each channel]

That’s your strategy. One page. It doesn’t have to be more complicated than that.

Print it out. Share it with your team. Come back to it every quarter. Let it be the filter through which you make every communications decision — what to post, what to skip, where to invest your limited time and energy.

You have a message worth sharing. A strategy just makes sure it actually gets to the people who need to hear it.