Tuesday,
Feb 6, 2007
Members Present: Megan
Chichester, Carol Cline, Janet Mody, Jerry Niebaum (chair), Michelle Parmley,
Candice Ranney, Andy Smith, Bill Uhler, Patti Winn. We were joined by Bennett
Griffin.
Introductions: Brief introductions were made by the team members.
Michelle Parmley was selected to be the secretary.
Guide Book & Directory Changes: It was suggested that the church directory of names, addresses, and
phone numbers include email addresses with the 2007 version. The discussion
brought up several concerns regarding the addition of the email addresses.
Would the guidebook be too big? Would members get unwanted SPAM? Does the
church have a reliable list of correct email addresses? Do we have members opt
in or opt out of having their email addresses published? What is the best
method of contacting members to have them either opt in or opt out? More
discussion is needed to answer these questions and to come up with a proposal.
2006 Communications
Team: Bennett Griffin, the team chair
from 2006, met with the group to talk about why the team was brought together
and to highlight the accomplishments of last year’s team. He presented the team
with the Communications Guidebook, a notebook consisting of 4 sections to help
the team in its work. The 4 sections include: 1) Marketing and Strategic Plan;
2) Visual Branding Work (Logo); 3) Grand Opening Information; and 4) Letterhead
& Business Cards samples. In addition, Bennett, offered some advice on the direction
we should take as a team in 2007. First, there is a need to enlighten the
church about what the role is of the Communications Team. We are not the
marketing group as has been thought in the past. He urged us to work toward
empowering the various small groups within the church to do their own marketing
by creating a menu on how to market an event. Second, there is a lot of work to
do to promote who we are as a church to the community and to our own church
members. More specifically, Bennett suggested that work be done on branding the
individual worship services. First Church has 4 distinctive worship services
that need defining so that we can market them to the congregation and to the
community.
Small Businesses within
the Congregation: In the spirit of
shopping locally, we think that the congregation would like to know about
businesses that are owned by First Church members so that they could select the
goods and/or services of those businesses when they are in the market for just
such a service. It was decided that a “fish bowl” be set up at each campus to
collect business cards. All cards collected will be scanned and put on the
website to create a church yellow pages. To encourage business owners to put
their cards in the fish bowl, there will be a drawing for a lunch with Tom
Brady from the collected cards. Jerry Niebaum has offered to scan the cards and
put them on the website.
Communicating within
the Church: Jerry has asked us to
think about the various ways that we communicate within the church. Some of the
most common: email, Sunday Morning News (bulletin), the website, First Edition
(newsletter), personal stories. Be thinking of creative ways to market the
church, for example, the HyVee shopping bag with Advent services listed for the
church in Iowa. Take a look at the First Church website, www.fumclawrence.org, Kansas East
Conference site, www.kansaseast.org,
and the National United Methodist Church site, www.umc.org.
Next Meeting: Tuesday, March 6th, 7:30pm, Downtown.