The Chasm of Effective Communication

I spent six years on staff at a 1,500-member church in Central Texas as their Director of Media and Communications. In that time, I learned about the chasm. Not the chasm that can exist between the lead guitarist (Johnny Solo) and the Worship Pastor. Not the chasm that can exist between the Youth Pastor and the Senior Adult Pastor. The chasm I nearly fell into was the sometimes seemingly infinite space between delivery and reception.

Like most of the jobs I’ve had, I learned the ropes of a Communications Director while on-the-job. Don’t tell my former church, but I didn’t have a clue as to what I was doing when I started. I knew enough Photoshop to make graphics look like they hadn’t been created in MS Paint. I knew enough HTML to create a link. I had enough technical ability to get the job done. What I lacked, though, was the knowledge of how to bridge the chasm. Simply put, I didn’t know if what I was doing was effective.

This is a subtle issue that every person on a church staff must deal with in the course of their work. The Senior Pastor has to relay their message in such a way that it might engage the hearts and minds of every attendee. The Youth Pastor has to overcome easily distracted teenagers, prone to twittering and texting. The Bible study leader has to speak words of wisdom over coffee consumption and donut digestion.

Tracking Effective Church Communications

One way to know if effective communication has occurred is to devise trackable methods. This task may be just as challenging as creating effective communications in the first place, but both are necessary in order to fully engage your audience, regardless of the size or identity of that audience.

Certain communication pieces may be easily trackable. For example, tracking attendance after sending out an Easter direct mail piece is easily done. So is keeping close tabs on your web traffic after posting a particularly funny yet touching video that all of your members have shared online. However, other factors may have also played a role in your results, i.e. Easter often results in increased attendance anyway. When coming up with ways to track the effectiveness of your communications, be sure to cover your bases in regards to all of the variables that may have contributed to your results.

However, many issues related to communicating in the church are not as easily tracked. How does a Teaching Pastor know if what they’re saying is hitting home? Count the number of watering eyes or uncomfortable seat shifts? Is a Youth Minster supposed to see how many students make actual eye contact with a speaker for more than two minutes? Should a Bible Study leader count the number of donuts left in the box as a sure sign of their students’ eagerness to get into the Bible? All joking aside, how do you track your effectiveness in such situations? Is it possible to do so when the results sought are changed lives, or some type of intangible effect?

As for the chasm, I seldom felt as if the items I produced were having any effect at all. I knew they were, but only in some vague sense. I never set in place any methods to track their usefulness, so I was never sure if certain items needed to be abandoned while others needed to be adapted. My toes dangled on the chasm, so to speak.

To span the chasm, consider putting in as much effort in your tracking as you have in your creating. After all, it takes a lot of effort to build a bridge.

Practical Tracking Methods You Can Employ Today

For instance, consider any of the following:

• Conduct a churchwide survey regarding the content of last Sunday’s sermon.
• Track your website statistics via Google Analytics or a similar program.
• Ask your social media followers for instant feedback.
• Offer an easy feedback form on your website.
• Establish a quarterly focus group of diverse members in the church who will share their honest opinions about the sermon, church life, communications, etc.

By taking simple steps to begin incorporating practical tracking of your communications, you can develop a more refined understanding of the issues that may be preventing you from bridging the chasm. Eventually, you’ll know the precise questions to ask that can help you ascertain what needs to die or what needs to change.

Whether a Pastor, Bible study leader, Communications Director, or church staff member, what methods do you use to track how well your communications are received?

Originally posted on July 26, 2011.