Faithful Presence
This is an email newsletter for Christ Church Santa Fe's Faithful Presence Ministry, one of several ministries who needed their own, ministry-specific communications.
This is an email newsletter for Christ Church Santa Fe's Faithful Presence Ministry, one of several ministries who needed their own, ministry-specific communications.
When I first came on board, CCSF struggled with email communications not only in design, but frequency. A church secretary would send out "email blasts" per request. With a busy congregation served by 14 ministries, someone would have a reason to get word out to the mailing list almost daily. Obviously, this demand desperately needed to be tempered with scheduling and organization. I re-oranized the lists and switched email marketing over to MailChimp from ConstantContact. Simultaneously, I worked with various ministry leaders to improve their content, usually via professional copywriting and photography, which elevated and put a face on their activities.
My audit of the state of communications allowed Pastoral staff to better determine communication goals. Changing from former Inbox clutter, The Main Thing would now cover general activities on a quarterly basis, so as not to overwhelm recipients, while allowing the ministries to better organize their calendars so they too could have regular, ministry-specific email communications. With better communication came positive change: Fewer people unsubscribed from church emails, church attendance doubled, while tithing steadily increased. (In fact, during my second year, six million dollars was raised for a building expansion.)
The three years I spent as Director of Communication Arts at this church resulted in much more usable, organized, and better-designed communications.
This ministry was always incredibly active, as it was home for the outreach program from the church to the city and region. Above is what this newsletter matured into under my use of MailChimp; below is an earlier version I created when I first came on board while the church was still using Constant Contact. Prior to the design below, there was no design - they were barely even using hotlinks or imagery, as there was no one on staff with HTML knowledge.
