How to Develop a Weekly Communications Rhythm

Developing routines and habits will help you save time and build momentum for your organization.

This is a no-brainer for some things.

For example, imagine the nightmare it would be if every week your church asked everyone if they could gather for worship next Sunday and if so what time works best for them. Then based on the responses, the leaders decided when they would gather that Sunday, and then notified everyone. That would be a ton of extra work every week and the uncertainty would lead to inconsistent participation.

Instead of deciding every week when to gather for worship, churches make that decision once and stick to the routine of gathering at the same time(s) every week until further notice. As a result, people can incorporate the weekly gathering into the rhythm of their lives.

This same principle can be applied to almost all church communications.

Decide once what your weekly communications routine will look like so that you don’t have to decide every week. This includes what you’re going to put on the website, what you’re going to post to social media, and what you’re going to email.

The best time to decide this is before you do your church website design, because you want to structure your website to feature your weekly content (sermons, newsletters, blog posts, etc), and make it easy for people to subscribe to receive it. The second best time to decide this is now, and then adjust the design of your website.

Developing a weekly communications routine will also help your church SEO, improving search rankings and bringing more visitors to your website, because a) search engines love fresh content, and b) the more consistent you are in producing and sharing fresh content the more people will see it, like it, and share it.

5 Things to Include in Your Weekly Communications Rhythm

Every church is different. The resources, staff, volunteers and types of communication that work best for each church will vary. It would be impossible to create a weekly communications rhythm that would work for every church. Instead, I’m going to propose some options to consider.

1) Sermon

Post audio, video, notes, resources, and/or action steps from the weekend message. The sooner after the weekend gathering you can do this the better. If you can do this Sunday afternoon, that’s great, Monday morning is a good option too. I recommend posting each week’s message as a separate post/article (rather than adding each week to an existing page).  Then share that post/article on your social channels.

2) eNewsletter

Keep people informed about the things that are going on in the life of your church this week. It’s good to post news and announcements to your website and also email it to your congregation. I recommend doing this the day after you post your sermon to the website so you can mention and link to the sermon materials in the eNewsletter.

3) Daily devotional

Some churches write their own daily devotions to help people focus on Jesus and the theme for that week throughout the week. Some do this just for a short season. Some use devotionals written by others. Devotionals can be posted to the website, emailed and shared on social channels.

4) Mid-week nugget

If your church is not publishing daily devotions, another option would be to post something in the middle of the week to encourage, inspire or challenge your congregation. This could be:

• A blog post by the pastor
• A short, 1-2 minute audio or video clip from the weekend message
• A testimonial from a member of the congregation
• Pictures, video or story of the people of your congregation living out their faith

5) Weekend teaser

A great way to stoke interest in the next weekend service(s) is to post a question related to the message on your social channels. Friday afternoon is a good time for this. Try to make it something easy to respond to. (If it’s too personal or to theological you won’t get any engagement)

Bottom line…

Developing a weekly communications rhythm will save time and build momentum for your church.

Comment and Discuss:

• What does your weekly communications look like?
• What’s one thing that you’re either not doing or not doing consistently that you would like to make a lock in your weekly communications schedule?

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Read more articles in our Summer Rhythms series.