Posted by Matt Harrell on May 14th, 2009 
At your church, non-profit or association, how many tools do you use to communicate with your members? We’ve learned that in some cases people are using 3 different tools. For example, a Director of Youth Ministries at church here in Raleigh, is currently using Facebook to connect with the kids, an email marketing program to reach the adults and he combines this with the occasional personal email and phone call. Throw in Twitter and text messaging capabilities and you can find yourself spending half the day trying reach everyone, just to remind them to return their (enter random weekly form name here) form.
Does this sound like you? Sure, effective communication needs multiple mediums to make sure everyone is reached, but how many tools do you have to use to accomplish this? How much time and effort are you spending on simply “organizing the procedures in which your communicate”?
Please share with us how you deal with this challenge. What’s working for you? What’s not working?
I think the multiplicity of communication methods should be used based the needs and habits of your target or current audience or community.
If your people are mostly on Facebook, use facebook.
If your product can empirically benefit from Twitter, leverage tweets.
Spreading your message too thinly will or across mediums that do not contain a valid target audience or effectively communicate your product or needs will waste time.
A careful research of the most appropriate tools and then a continued measuring of the effects of each tool will enable a focus on the tools most effective to your needs.
Flexibility and greater network awareness is important though. With the speed with which new communication mediums emerge, coming into a newly effective medium too late could cost substantially.
Thanks. So you're saying "do your homework" first and figure out which tools will do the best job of reaching people. There is still the challenge of reaching each person where they are. For example, some people don't check email as much, but check their Twitter account every 3 minutes. And of course teenagers can't be reached these days unless it's a text message or phone call directly to the their phone! Still though, you do need to take inventory of where your members and constituents are.
This a very good question and one that won't be easily answered or solved. Just think – for 90% of us, Facebook was not even a consideration 3 years ago! The speed at which the mediums are changing is almost mind-numbing. Add to that the fact that most churches do not hire full time Communication Directors and of those that do, most are probably not well trained in today's tools.
Unfortunately that doesn't give us the right to just throw up our hands and surrender. The cause of Christ is to important for that. But it does mean we need to educate ourselves and where possible, let the members themselves choose (tell us) how they prefer to be reached.
I believe we will continue to see evolution in methods and process, but my vision of communication nirvana might be a system where you can publish your content once and simply select which communication channels you want to target (ie. Facebook, Twitter, email, SMS Text, etc). Now there would have to be some consideration given as not all are equal (Twitter for example is only 140 characters), but I think you get the idea. The other half of this utopia however would be a system that allows the recipients to "subscribe", "follow", "receive", or whatever you want to call it via the channels they choose.
For example, a Youth Pastor might have an announcement about a summer missions trip. Ideally, he would have a single place where he could enter that information (perhaps both short and longer versions) and since he needed to reach both students and parents he would want to publish this via several channels (E-mail, Twitter, Facebook, and SMS). He would not have to worry about who prefers what as the distribution side would be in the hands of the recipient. Parents in this example may subscribe to only the "email" method of the Student Ministry Channel, while their son may choose the Facebook and their daughter may choose SMS. A third child may choose a combination, twitter and email.
I think of this much like the Feedburner service for blogs. You can write your blog and let readers choose how they want to receive it (by visiting your site directly, via the RSS option, or via email). I didn't have this vision until I just wrote this comment, but I really like it! Think of it as Feedburner on steroids! Maybe there is a new business opportunity here! ;-)
It's pure genius Greg! That's what keeps drawing me back to TweetDeck at this point. Because I can make a tweet and then decide for each one whether or not to update my Facebook status too. Cool. Hopefully sooner that later, you'll be able to create an announcement in a hub in MemberHub and have it update a Twitter account too. WE already limit the text there because they can be sent out via text messaging.