Email marketing isn't for only the most savvy or the mega churches. Any church of any size can capitalize on email and transform it into their strongest tool for communication. Most churches find themselves completely absent from sending any type of email or completely over-saturating their subscribers with too many emails. In this episode of the Church Marketing Podcast we debunk email marketing myths, we address email marketing mistakes, we pick low hanging email marketing fruit and we build a checklist of tips you can implement right now to get your email working for you and generating response for every ministry in your church.

The Email Marketing for Churches Episode

Every week you produce that same bulletin. It's like wrangling livestock trying to round up everything that needs to go in this titanic printed mess. You know it's not dying anytime soon so you've gone out and tried to find examples of other church bulletins. You've posted in Facebook Groups asking to see examples, you've searched Google for "church printed bulletins" hoping to find something that will help you spice up that black and white classifieds you've been producing. In The Sunday Bulletin Episode of the Church Marketing Podcast you will be challenged to answer very specific questions for your church and the answers you provide will fuel the discussion you have with leadership about how you are going to improve the weekly print piece and drive more engagement through this destined-for-the-garbage communication outlet.

The Sunday Bulletin Episode

There are two types of social media mistakes: those that can't be avoided and those that can. It's as simple as that. No matter how much training, education and experience you have working with social media the ever changing technology and social landscape means that we are constantly having to adapt - a mistakes will be made along the way. Those mistakes are the ones you cannot avoid.On the flip side there are may mistakes that can easily be avoided and sometimes all you need is someone pointing out to you the low hanging fruit right in front of your eyes.In The Social Media Mistakes Episode we take a look at an article from ChurchTechToday.com identifying 3 mistakes that continue to plague churches on social media as well as additional social media mistakes that are easily correctable.Are you a church social media expert thinking that maybe this episode doesn't apply to you? Think again. Everyone has room to grow, including the host and you will leave this conversation with at least one investigative assignment and most likely one corrective course of action to take.

There are two types of social media mistakes: those that can't be avoided and those that can. It's as simple as that. No matter how much training, education and experience you have working with social media the ever changing technology and social landscape means that we are constantly having to adapt - a mistakes will be made along the way. Those mistakes are the ones you cannot avoid.On the flip side there are may mistakes that can easily be avoided and sometimes all you need is someone pointing out to you the low hanging fruit right in front of your <a href="http://eyes.In" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">eyes.In</a> The Social Media Mistakes Episode we take a look at an article from <a href="http://ChurchTechToday.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">ChurchTechToday.com</a> identifying 3 mistakes that continue to plague churches on social media as well as additional social media mistakes that are easily correctable.Are you a church social media expert thinking that maybe this episode doesn't apply to you? Think again. Everyone has room to grow, including the host and you will leave this conversation with at least one investigative assignment and most likely one corrective course of action to take.

The Social Media Mistakes Episode

You know how you operate week in and week out. What you don't know is how the church across town (or across the country) operates. Often we learn the most by observing the practices of others and in this episode of the Church Marketing Podcast you are invited to peek at how National Community Church in Washington D.C. operates their communication and social media. From why, to what and how, discover a new spin on what you may already be doing and be inspired to grow your practices.

The How We Do It Episode

Are you keeping the three c’s of communication in mind when creating content for your church?  In this podcast Dave Shrein talks with Ryan Holck about how utilizing these three c’s will help communicate the mission of your church more effectively.Convey details.Connect heart.Creatively deliver.

The Communication Episode

You've been asking the question since April: How can we use Periscope at our church. You've probably launched a broadcast showing your band playing, or maybe a baptist but the question remains - why and how should I use Periscope for my church. In this episode of the Church Marketing Podcast Ryan Bilello joins Dave Shrein to talk about the power of using social media to network within the church and how an app like Periscope and a technology such as live streaming will allow your church meet the networking needs of others in a way you have yet to experience.

The Periscope Episode

Consistency, niche and unique voice... these are the three traits necessary to maintain a successful website blog. As you pursue your communication strategy, it is as important as ever to make sure that you maintain a consistent publishing rate with content relevant to your mission presented in a voice consistent with your church's personality. In The Communication Schedule Episode, Kevin Hendricks walks us through the process of creating, curating and keeping a healthy communication schedule - otherwise known as an editorial calendar.

The Communication Schedule Episode

WIIFM? These five letters represent the most powerful filter that every piece of copy for your organization must be passed through. When you have this concept of WIIFM at the forefront of your mind your writing becomes more compelling and your call to action becomes more effective.So what does WIIFM stand for? "What’s In It For Me?” And that is the question your readers, viewers, congregation members, visitors are asking themselves when they interact with your church.In The Website Content Episode, Mike Kim takes us through the mental shift that we all must make. We must move from writing for ourselves to writing for others.

WIIFM? These five letters represent the most powerful filter that every piece of copy for your organization must be passed through. When you have this concept of WIIFM at the forefront of your mind your writing becomes more compelling and your call to action becomes more effective. So what does WIIFM stand for? "What’s In It For Me?” And that is the question your readers, viewers, congregation members, visitors are asking themselves when they interact with your church. In The Website Content Episode, Mike Kim takes us through the mental shift that we all must make. We must move from writing for ourselves to writing for others.

The Website Content Episode

You’ve witnessed the transition - gone are the days of members attending Sunday services 4-5 times a month. As a matter of fact, churches are fortunate if a regular attender will walk into the worship center twice in one month. The modern church must begin to reassess it’s model in order to keep up with an on-demand culture and if the conversation doesn’t begin now the risk of being irrelevant as individual organizations heightens dramatically. You may not have thought of it this way but through our mobile devices areas of our lives that might have once be separated into scheduled segments (church, work, school, personal, etc.) collide into one device. This means that we have more regular access to various parts of our lives and the church must compete with all the other areas. Where there is a challenge there is an opportunity.In The Live and Online Episode you will be challenged to engage mentally into scenarios that are playing out in front of us right now in the church. If you’re looking for steps 1, 2 and 3 on how to balance this shift, keep looking. By the end of this episode you will find yourself equipped with facts, figures, thoughts and realities that will serve to influence your church communication decisions now and in the future.

You’ve witnessed the transition - gone are the days of members attending Sunday services 4-5 times a month. As a matter of fact, churches are fortunate if a regular attender will walk into the worship center twice in one month. The modern church must begin to reassess it’s model in order to keep up with an on-demand culture and if the conversation doesn’t begin now the risk of being irrelevant as individual organizations heightens dramatically. You may not have thought of it this way but through our mobile devices areas of our lives that might have once be separated into scheduled segments (church, work, school, personal, etc.) collide into one device. This means that we have more regular access to various parts of our lives and the church must compete with all the other areas. Where there is a challenge there is an opportunity. In The Live and Online Episode you will be challenged to engage mentally into scenarios that are playing out in front of us right now in the church. If you’re looking for steps 1, 2 and 3 on how to balance this shift, keep looking. By the end of this episode you will find yourself equipped with facts, figures, thoughts and realities that will serve to influence your church communication decisions now and in the future.

The Live and Online Episode

You know that communications span way beyond the pixels on a computer screen or the ink that's used on a print piece. The effectiveness of your communication is a sum of church mission, leadership vision, ministry events and details. In The Leadership &amp; Volunteer Episode Deborah Ike takes us throughout the entire scope of church communications into the world of volunteers and utilizing volunteers within our communication departments.

The Leadership & Volunteer Episode

Finally, a podcast all about church communication for church communicators. There's a lot of great content being created for church communicators, but not a whole lot of podcasts... so we started one. Uncover scalable solutions when it comes to marketing your church's mission and vision to the context you've been called to serve.The Church Marketing Podcast is the official podcast of Church Marketing Sucks.

I spent a few years working in a church setting, but now I work in the online content-creation space. Many of my bad marketing habits were picked up from church. Thankfully this podcast is helping me change that!
Church people are not inherently more boring than others, or more susceptible to lazy communication - so we, as Christians leading in a ministry or non-ministry setting, have to do better.
This podcast is full of useful ideas, real examples, and strategy that makes sense. The host and guests have an excellent grasp on this subject, especially with how it relates to the modern church and the issues it faces.
I love this podcast and can&#39;t recommend it enough!

Excellent resource for every Christian leader

This is content I’ve been searching for a while!  Very practical information and good information for church leaders.  Thanks for putting in the effort Dave.

Much needed information for today’s church!

Church Marketing Podcast

Who's visiting your website and what are they doing while they're there? If you don't know the answer to that question you're missing out on key criteria that can help you make decisions about every other area of your online communications (and offline for that matter). When you establish firm goals for what you want a webpage to accomplish and can measure those goals against analytic data, you have the information necessary to determine what you need to change about your website strategy. Also, discover the missing element that connects your church to Instagram.

The Church Website Episode

There is no better way to learn than to live as a fly on the wall as others talk about their successes and failures. While there are certain names we all know in church marketing and communication, there is one set of individuals that you have yet to hear from… our listeners. The Awesome Communicator Episode is all about highlighting the successes of our community for the benefit of our community. This is the first of two episodes where we talk with Church Marketing Podcast listeners about their 2014 experiences.

The Awesome Communicator Episode

The position of Communication Director (or Pastor) is fairly new. While many large churches (5,000+) have had someone in this role for a long time, the average church is just now discovering the need for someone to ask strategic questions about how their information is being communicated and received. The increase in noise (both online and in life overall) has revealed that the messages from the church are not making it onto calendars, into conversations and or translating into any type of measurable growth. In a scurry to keep up with the times churches are hiring individual to manage communications without a full understanding of what that even means.A communication director will begin to do their job and pastors realize their being told no more often or having to explain initiatives and decisions in greater detail than they have been accustomed to. No one is right or wrong in this scenario but the fact remains there is a giant gap between what pastors and communication directors see as furthering the communications of the church.In this episode Pastor Brian McCoy from Foothills Baptist Church in Phoenix, Arizona shares his experience working with a communications director for the past 4 months. Who is this director? It just so happens that I am the director (Dave Shrein). Throughout our time working together to improve the communication mechanisms at Foothills we've experienced significant wins, constant misunderstandings and a learning experience that has benefitted both of us.

The position of Communication Director (or Pastor) is fairly new. While many large churches (5,000+) have had someone in this role for a long time, the average church is just now discovering the need for someone to ask strategic questions about how their information is being communicated and received. The increase in noise (both online and in life overall) has revealed that the messages from the church are not making it onto calendars, into conversations and or translating into any type of measurable growth. In a scurry to keep up with the times churches are hiring individual to manage communications without a full understanding of what that even means. A communication director will begin to do their job and pastors realize their being told no more often or having to explain initiatives and decisions in greater detail than they have been accustomed to. No one is right or wrong in this scenario but the fact remains there is a giant gap between what pastors and communication directors see as furthering the communications of the church. In this episode Pastor Brian McCoy from Foothills Baptist Church in Phoenix, Arizona shares his experience working with a communications director for the past 4 months. Who is this director? It just so happens that I am the director (Dave Shrein). Throughout our time working together to improve the communication mechanisms at Foothills we've experienced significant wins, constant misunderstandings and a learning experience that has benefitted both of us.

The Communicating with Pastors Episode

School is back in session (though it seems earlier than when we were in school) and the fall is coming into focus. The You Episode is all about self-care. Entrepreneur Ahna Hendrix joins the Church Marketing Podcast from Vietnam to share how she practices self-care while living a lifestyle that demands nothing but complete and total focus. Also in the episode we look at the power of real photography on a website as well as an alternative way churches can approach using Pinterest.

The You Episode

In our final sneak peek episode we talk about how to cater a message to your audience, balancing service times for attendance, knowing your audience and an item of recommended reading.

Church Marketing Podcast: Sneak Peek with Gerry True, Part 2

If you’ve had questions about how to recruit and use communication volunteers in your church, this is the podcast episode for you! Phil Bowdle lends his voice and experiences from West Ridge Church in Georgia, sharing from what he has done well and not so well as it relates to volunteers. We also touch on the topic of maintaining healthy relationships between the communication department and the rest of the church staff.

The Communication Volunteer Episode

We know how we use social media for ourselves, but what should social media look like when a church uses it? While it’s typical for church culture to slowly adapt to new mediums and modes of communication, it is also typical that social media networks, protocols and trends change on a month to month basis.In this episode we take a look at how churches can overcome the challenges of their individual organization culture, budgetary restrictions and man hour limits in order to add meaningful contributions to social media. Dave even finds a way to work a mad men quote into the conversation

We know how we use social media for ourselves, but what should social media look like when a church uses it? While it’s typical for church culture to slowly adapt to new mediums and modes of communication, it is also typical that social media networks, protocols and trends change on a month to month basis. In this episode we take a look at how churches can overcome the challenges of their individual organization culture, budgetary restrictions and man hour limits in order to add meaningful contributions to social media. Dave even finds a way to work a mad men quote into the conversation

The Social Media Episode

Jonathan Malm

Does our communication drive visitors away? If you're looking to decipher how your communication is received by visitor, Jonathan Malm's new book, Unwelcome gives you a list of 50 ways your church may be driving away first-time visitors. Whether you've been working in the church since before you were born or if you're still in your first 12 months of vocational ministry, Unwelcome reveals simple ways churches can intentionally welcome more visitors with open arms.

Unwelcome with Jonathan Malm

The best podcast episodes on non-current politics. Covering topics such as universal basic income, democracy, poverty & justice and more. For anyone interested in learning more about politics that affect that world, not just now, but in the longer term. Add episodes you're interested into your queue below!

Best Non-Current Politics Podcasts

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