Print bulletins vs Digital
Whenever we approach a bulletin design for a church, we start with a few questions about their bulletin process in general.
- What do your bulletins communicate about your ministry?
- Are they relevant to the branding and overall direction of your ministry?
- Do they relate to the specific message of the service they are used for?
- Are they just another way of spreading the news of upcoming events?
Recently we have found ourselves asking another question. Are printed bulletins actually the best method to get this information to your congregation? This question arose during a strategy meeting with a ministry we partner with. We were discussing the print and marketing budget for the ministry and putting a plan into action to see what was most effective. Several ideas were proposed involving weekly email blasts with the bulletin information and using the great service from YouVersion to make sermon notes available. After two months of planning, surveys and testing methods, this ministry has now killed off their old approach to bulletins. Their volunteer bulletin assembly team is thrilled, something was mentioned about the bandaid budget and fewer paper cuts.
We love new technology and creative ways to use it here at Church Visuals. How technology will be effective for your ministry however, will be different from other ministries. That is why it is so very important to get feedback from your congregation about what they would like to see made available to them. When we were ready to get info from this ministry’s congregation, we created a simple survey card to be passed out and deposited in with the offering. We will make a version available to you soon in our freebie section. It had questions about what social networking tools they use, what kind of mobile devices they use and if they thought electronic bulletins would be a good idea. On the back we created an infographic showing the current costs for printing the bulletins(about $0.10 per person), and estimated cost’s for the new method(about $0.01 per person).
As we researched what is available to make bulletins go digital and what other ministries have switched, we came across a couple good blog posts. Dry Pixel walks through their process in this blog post. They do a great job explaining the method that worked for them. Kem Meyer also wrote a great article years ago found here. She explains the pro’s and con’s and discusses the solution Park Community Church settled on. If you are thinking about getting rid of your print bulletins, make sure to do the research, planning and discovery stages before surprising your congregation with the big change. We would love to help you out with the process, contact us if you want to brainstorm ideas.
Are print bulletins or a digital approach the best solution for your ministry?
I just started as the Interim Comm Director at my church. We offer YouVersion notes and also a printed version. I just started spending Sunday mornings (after attending Saturday with my family) researching and observing the congregation’s interactions with our program (our previous Comm Dir. killed the term “bulletin”).
Findings: We can’t kill the paper version. Why?
1. People are actively engaging in the service with the paper notes. You can audibly hear people turn the page on the notes when we get to that point in the message. You can watch heads go down when the fill-in pops up on the screens. And you can hear the audience laugh, clap, etc. at appropriate times. This is an effective engagement tool for us at this time.
2. I’m in northern Nevada, where we get 3G coverage if we’re lucky (my phone usually says 1G), and we can’t seem to get enough bandwidth to effectively offer WiFi for everyone. (A lot of our people still aren’t on Facebook.) Some congregants still don’t have internet service at home, or are on dial-up. So, the technology offerings are there, but secondary for us.
I would love to kill the programs. I’m a tech guy. I love the newest and coolest things like this. I was a youth pastor in Huntington Beach, CA (ending last year), and only offered YouVersion notes for our youth sermons (About half of our students used them. The other half would probably draw on them or make airplanes if given paper.) But we supplemented everything with YouVersion, Facebook, and a website. That worked great for that culture and that group of students.
I hate wasting paper. (Though I much prefer print design to web…). But that is not an option right now.
What I am doing:
Looking at redesigning our program to be one design for the entire series. Currently we put the series graphic on the cover, and have different announcements on the inside each week. The notes are an insert anyway, so why not just make a series cover that has some info about the church and print it once for the series?
Also looking at ways to further engage our church online. Honestly we are pretty weak on social media right now. And we don’t have much of a system to point people to YouVersion for the digital notes. (It took me including verbal instructions for getting the app at the beginning of every youth service to really see it become widely used.)
Sorry for the long post. Thanks for the article, though!
Thanks for sharing Brian!
My home church wouldn’t adapt well or at all to digital bulletins for reasons similar to your thoughts. Finding what is effective for your specific ministry is the key thing to focus on (not being cool and tech savvy). I have been working with a couple churches lately in creating one program for a longer series and just including one unique page or card each week. I think you have a great approach. The idea of keeping a bulletins content in check is another great way to improve its effectiveness and possibly save some trees. With every submitted entry I ask; does this need to be in the bulletin? Is this inline with the ministries vision & goals? Is this item more important to showcase than another? And is the bulletin the most effective place to share this info?
Thanks for your thoughts. I would love to hear how your plans work out and what changes you find useful down the road!
Brian, do you use http://tableproject.org/ at your church? I highly recommend it for building up your church online and getting people engaged outside of Sunday mornings!
Hey Chris. We don’t use Table. I’m looking into it, and finding out what our take has been on it (since I’m only a month in this position).
I see that a lot of people are using this, but it seems to duplicate a lot of what is already happening on Facebook.
I wonder: Does this detract from FB interaction with the church? Does it create a “church bubble”? Is it one more thing to log into that people have to remember to visit (and remember passwords)?
Love that it integrates the groups from F1. I also wonder about getting it plugged into our website or working in conjunction with that…
I’d love your thoughts/experiences.
It does duplicate several things that Facebook may already deliver for you church but it delivers many things that Facebook doesn’t provide. The share app and prayer app are both great examples of filling a need for the church that other social media outlets don’t provide.
I would suggest any church to look into it even if they already have a great Facebook presence. From experience, I don’t see it detracting from other social media. There is a defined difference in the target audience. The table is a great resource for your church body and other social platforms are a great resource for outreach. Once you start using the table, I think it becomes clear in very little time how useful it can be.
Plan on seeing a more in depth review of the table project on churchflair.com soon.