{"id":765366,"date":"2021-12-17T05:00:09","date_gmt":"2021-12-17T11:00:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/?p=765366"},"modified":"2021-12-15T06:33:41","modified_gmt":"2021-12-15T12:33:41","slug":"what-im-planning-for-2022","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/blog\/what-im-planning-for-2022\/","title":{"rendered":"What I\u2019m Planning for 2022"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Let me take you behind the scenes of our church\u2019s communication strategy. I set aside a day every year in December to think through our church\u2019s communication goals. I spend time thinking about what worked and didn\u2019t work this year, and what the challenges will be for our church in the coming year.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">During this year\u2019s planning, <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I kept coming back to the idea that while the pandemic did help us get rid of some communication channels that were ineffective (i.e. the bulletin), we didn\u2019t go far enough.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> I still had a lingering suspicion that would go even further into getting rid of what was ineffective so we could focus more on what works.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">So I decided to take a look at our analytics to determine what was really happening with our communication channels and what was really working. Here\u2019s what I found:<\/span><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\" aria-level=\"1\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Almost 7 out of 10 people view our content on mobile devices.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\" aria-level=\"1\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The majority of our engagement comes from content that gives them quick access to information (church calendar)<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\" aria-level=\"1\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Our storytelling is good, but it\u2019s not great. We\u2019re creating content that plays well in a worship service but does not fare nearly as well on social media.\u00a0<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\" aria-level=\"1\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">While we switched to mostly digital pieces versus print, we\u2019re still creating PDFs that look nice but don\u2019t drive engagement.\u00a0<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">From this information I was able to put together our two goals for 2022.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Goal #1 Mobile First<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Everything we create must be created with the idea that it will primarily be consumed on a mobile device.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> This means that we\u2019ll need to trim the length of text, increase the font size, and make sure the most important information can fit on a single phone-sized screen.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">This will not be easy since it will require brevity, eliminating unnecessary calls to action, and coaching our staff on why this matters.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Goal #2 Engagement First<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The metric we will measure success by is whether or not someone engaged with content in the way that it was intended to be engaged. It\u2019s not enough that someone watched a video, we want the video to compel them to the next step.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">This is going to be difficult because we will be judged not on whether we had the most creative ideas or if the content looked great, but by whether or not the content worked. This takes the emotion out of the equation and lets the numbers do the talking.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">So I\u2019m putting those two goals together to create a theme for our church\u2019s communication: Mobile First, Engagement First. This theme will be what helps drive and shape our church\u2019s communications in 2022.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Let me take you behind the scenes of our church\u2019s communication strategy. I set aside a day every year in December to think through our church\u2019s communication goals. I spend time thinking about what worked and didn\u2019t work this year, and what the challenges will be for our church in the coming year.\u00a0 During this&#8230;","protected":false},"author":8044,"featured_media":765369,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"publish_to_discourse":"0","publish_post_category":"1","wpdc_auto_publish_overridden":"","wpdc_topic_tags":"","wpdc_pin_topic":"","wpdc_pin_until":"","discourse_post_id":"","discourse_permalink":"","wpdc_publishing_response":"","wpdc_publishing_error":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1,183,175,186,192,176,196],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-765366","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-church-answers","category-communications","category-grow","category-health-and-metrics","category-how-to","category-revitalize","category-staff-and-organizational-issues"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v26.7 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>What I\u2019m Planning for 2022 | Church Answers<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Let me take you behind the scenes of our church\u2019s communication strategy. 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