Bruce's Blog

Thoughts from Rev. Bruce Russell-Jayne
Minister of Northern Hills Fellowship

June 20, 2010

Church Communications

Last Harbinger, I wrote about someadministrative things,which I don’t normallydo, and this time I will do it again. I guess Bruce Beisner’s leaving leaves me thinking about how we will do things differently now. Before he left, he made a (long) list of all the things he did for us. He and I went over the list several times, and he lined up volunteers to carry on most of the tasks we can’t do without. We are now beginning the third week of the summer, running our office with volunteers, and it is going well. I will be hiring an office administrator later this summer. I’ll keep everyone posted as to progress, but it now looks as if we will remain on the volunteer plan at least for awhile.

As Bruce and I went over his duties list, a large number of them involved communications; so, I grouped all of them into one list. As we talked about how each of them was used, it became apparent to me that Bruce’s main job was communications, and the main benefit of having him as the central point of contact for all church activities was his ability to schedule, coordinate, and publicize all of them. With volunteers standing in (bless them!) it will be hard to maintain the level of coordination which we have been used to. Will you please bear with us during the summer months if a few things get out slowly or drop thru the proverbial cracks?

Reviewing the list of communications tasks Bruce performed, I created a spreadsheet to help analyze why we are doing what we are doing. (The engineer in me just loves spreadsheets.) Most of the “analysis” you see on it are my SWAGs, and I invite your input on it. With only a SWAG analysis it nevertheless became apparent we couldn’t keep up with all of these different ways of making announcements, etc. So, I recommended to the Board a couple of quick changes to help us this summer. We will make others over time in order to make our communications more effective and more efficient. Harbinger editor Sue Woodruff and her team asked me to tell you why we will go to one newsletter a month – at least temporarily. Our analysis told us what types of things the Harbinger does, and what it does best is to provide columns, articles and more detailed descriptions of opportunities. These things don’t come in most of our other communications vehicles. We need the Harbinger to continue doing that. What the Harbinger is less effective at is event scheduling - because our schedule changes daily.  Therefore the Harbinger calendar is always behind reality. Therefore, we will go to monthly publication of the Harbinger, which seems to be often enough for newsletter columns and articles.

We will still use email and phone for anything which needs to be communicated quickly. The most efficient scheduling tool we have is The NHF Calendar on our website. Especially while we are without an Administrator we will use it as the main central control point. It is a great tool for coordinating all events and announcements. We will be providing even more program content and details in The NHF Calendar in future. I encourage everyone to bookmark it onto your computer desktop and use it frequently.

I know this is a little technical for many people’s interests, and I promise to go back to normal, soon. In any case, if you have a comment, question or complaint about the Harbinger change or any other communications
issue, will you please let me know?

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