Back To The Weekly Bulletin

We (Calvary Church) are going back to a weekly bulletin. In spite of the recent trend in some churches toward producing a monthly bulletin, we have come back full circle to producing a weekly publication.

Background
Perhaps some quick background information might help. About a year ago, we were producing a weekly bulletin. It was bloated and full of information that was irrelevant to the majority of our target audience. Our metrics were showing that few people were reading the information in it and it was pretty ineffective. On top of that, it wasn’t providing us with the opportunity to tell the Calvary story, one of our stated goals for the publication.

Our Monthly Bulletin Journey
So, about 6 months ago, after some inspiration from Tim Schraeder and Park Church, we decided to move to a monthly format where we would produce the bulletin once-per-month but hand it out to every attender every week. It still had an over-dose of information in it, but the layout was much more aesthetically pleasing and provided us an opportunity for storytelling. Perhaps the biggest up-side to the monthly format is that it allowed the Communications Team to work together with the Leadership Team to create a communication plan for the upcoming month (determining which ministries and events  would be promoted at what time and in what venues – bulletin, service promotional videos, platform announcements, website, etc.).

There were some significant growing pains. At first, our staff was not very fond of the advanced deadlines to the monthly format. We also had to print a weekly “insert” to cover all the information that came in after the print deadline or that pertained to a specific campus. In spite of all its down-sides, it was a significant improvement over our previous weekly format. That is, until a few weeks ago…

Full Circle
A few weeks ago we realized that we were losing a significant amount of readership (and, thus, event registrations, information dissemination, etc) in the later weeks of the month and it was causing a strain on our ministries’ ability to function. So, the Communications Team entered once again into a dialogue with our Leadership Team and came to an agreement that we would return to the weekly bulletin format with some stipulations. The main stipulation is that we would still determine what would be in the bulletin for the given weeks of a month in advance as part of an overarching communications plan. This would allow us to remove information about events that had passed (less noise and clutter) earlier in the month, but still have a plan to coordinate the items remaining in the bulletin as part of the larger communications plan.

So far, after one month of implementation, the new production plan and schedule seems to be working very well. As always, time will tell how truly effective this strategy will work, but I’m very excited about the dialogue that has opened between our leadership staff and communications team as we’ve taken this journey together.