First Church Communications Team

Meeting Minutes

Tuesday, Dec 12, 2006

 

Members Present: Bill Bartscher, Bennett Griffin (Chair), Harold Jones, Jerry Niebaum, Michelle Parmley, Candice Ranney.

2007 Communications Team con’t: Jerry Niebaum has been given the task of putting together the communications team for next year. He has a list of people to contact and is hopeful that a team will be formed soon.

BLOGS and Lay Leadership: Jerry is the chair of the Administrative Board for 2007, and he presented the new lay leadership structure of the church. He has created for each leadership team blog space for committee minutes. As we discussed at the Dec 5th meeting, we are going to recommend that each committee upload their meeting minutes as a blog with the Communications Team leading the way. Google provides free space for blogs and the address http://fumclawrence.blogspot.com was registered last spring. Jerry has offered to educate the members of next year’s team on blogs. In addition, on Jan 13 there is a training session on blogs for all the committee chairs.

The Handoff: We came up with a list of documents to hand off to next year’s team. Here are the items we think will be useful:

1) Communications Strategic Plan

2) West Campus Grand Opening Events Documentation

3) Logo/Slogan

4) Church Identity Guidelines

5) Reference to Communications Team Website for archived minutes

Goals/Unfinished Business:

1) Follow up survey

2) Message board with note cards on events at both campuses. These cards could be a postcard or a business card that would include the who, what, where, etc on events going on in the church. They could be taken home and even mailed

3) Explore other avenues for advertising (community publications that are distributed for free around town)

4) Outdoor signage—on the sidewalk or at the doors listing events/activities

5) Worship marketing/branding

6) Small groups branding

7) Menu/Plan of “how to market a church event”

8) Statement of purpose—this last item received quite a bit of comment. We feel that it is very important that there be considerable discussion by next year’s team to define who they are and what’s their purpose. The discussion should include Tom Brady

Lessons Learned:

1) Consistent messages at both campuses
2) Empower individual groups to communicate
3) Don't meet every week throughout the year, even though there is enough work for that

4) Allow enough time for newspaper ad proofing