10 Challenges When Using Email To Reach Parishioners (And Overcoming Them)

If you want an easy, affordable, efficient and familiar way to directly send out information and keep your parishioners up to date — your #1 best option is email. Hands down. Social media and texting are great, too. But far more people in your parish have access to email (and are comfortable using it) than anything else. That's where parishioners are at right now. And that's where we'll be at for years to come (with Text Messaging catching up, then social media - depending on your particular demographic).

Even with smartphones as popular as they are, most people still use the connection for checking email more than any other form of communication.

Now, most parish workers are at least comfortable using email personally. But, as a whole, we're not very good at using it organizationally yet. Here are 10 of the most common challenges parishes are facing when trying to use email as an organization:

1. Gathering addresses - They don't know the best ways to start gathering email addresses in the first place and how/where to store them efficiently.
2. Getting people subscribed to the right lists - Once a parish has gathered email addresses for people, they don't have a good way to get them onto the distribution lists that the susbcriber wants/needs to be on.
   
3. Managing lists (bad emails, unsubscribes, legal, etc.) - Once they do manage to get people onto the many distribution lists a parish may need (i.e. one or more for each ministry, dept. etc.), they don't have a way to easily and effectively manage those lists. If emails go invalid or "bounce," they aren't tracking those properly. They aren't giving parishioners a way to easily opt in and out of those lists - which is (among other things) a legal requirement for organizations sending out a lot of email.
   
4. Bulk email on your email server? - If a parish hasn't run in to this challenge yet, they probably will soon...they'll get their web server blacklisted. If you are regularly sending out bulk email to 20, 50, 100 or more people at a time (and many parishes are sending out much more than that) then you really should be using a proper bulk emailing service (FYI - I don't mean for your personal/work/internal email you use now - just for when you're sending out email to large groups of people). If you don't, many ISP's can easily start to view your web server as a spammer or other undesirable and will downgrade or blacklist your server. That means that all of a sudden a lot of the email you send out is much more likely to go straight into parishioner spam folders or not even reach them at all. It can cause a lot of other problems for your web presence, too. Most parish web servers were simply not set up to send out that much email.
   
5. Sharing lists, building upon them and "turnover" - When you have employee turnover at the parish, what happens to the distribution lists that the out-going person built? It's very common that whatever they were using to communicate or send out info goes with them and the new person starts all over again from scratch. Additionally, are you able to easily share and build upon your various email lists among your parish leadership? Or do you have to send information to one person and then trust that they'll forward it along their own channels? What if the pastor wants to send something out to everyone in the parish? Does he have direct access to easily reach everyone? Most parishes don't have a way to piggy back and easily build new, wider distribution lists from the few smaller ones that each ministry may have.
   
6. Team use - Parishes seldom have a communication tool that can be easily used by a team of minstry/department leaders. There is usually a bottle-neck of only one person who has access or knows how to send out information. Instead, parishes need a system that gives each ministry leader appropriate access to the distribution lists that they need to run their minsitry — whether it's for long formal newsletters or just quick reminders/announcements. And each ministry leader needs an easy way to let other co-leaders utilize those distribution lists when necessary along side them.
   
7. Accessing them when you need them - Parishes commonly can only send out information from their own computer at the office. But what about when they are on a trip? Or traveling? Or at home? They usually don't have a way to easily send out information to people from any where at any time.
   
8. Sending professional looking email - Parish email is often very unprofessional looking and not reflective of the vibrant, important, joyful mission of our Church.
   
9. Tracking success and results - Once parishes send email out, that's usually it. They have no way to practically check how many people it reached, who read it, when they opened it, whose email bounced, etc. They have no way to track the results of their email communication.
   
10. Oversight and documentation - Finally, most parishes have no way for administrators or pastors to oversee all of the information being emailed out. There is no formal archive of it all if it ever needs to be referenced. And there is no easy way for them to monitor and keep tabs of what each ministry is individually sending out to their parishioners.

flockNote solves every one of these problems. And it's the main reason why so many parishes have now found it to be so helpful and powerful for their community.

If you are a current user (or interested in becoming a user) of flockNote and would like some help overcoming any or all of these challenges, please contact support and let us know. We'd love to help.