Getting Started with eNews for Churches

Written By Deidre Jones

From youth pancake breakfasts to the next inspiring sermon series, your church is bustling with activity. If created with intentionality and the reader in mind, your eNews can be an efficient and informative tool. Research shows that shorter newsletters with limited photos tend to have better readership. So how should you choose what to include?

The anatomy of a Church eNewsletter

  • Avoid Outdated Habits

  • Timeline and Order of Soonest First

  • Learn to Use a Great a Powerful Word

  • Employ Good Design Principles

Avoid Old Habits

NO Clipart (most of the time)

Back in the ’90s using clipart was cute, but now it can make your design feel dated and unprofessional if not used carefully. If you aren’t sure when it is appropriate to use clipart, then the best course of action is to not use it at all. Photos are your best friend to elevate your eNews to a modern and professional look. Use stock photos if necessary, just be sure you have the rights to use them. It would always be preferable to have photos you or other church members have taken.

NO Devotionals or Prayers

It is tempting to include devotional pieces or prayers in a church eNews. However, this is not the purpose of an eNews and you will lose readership when people are misled as to the content they should expect to receive. These items should be reserved for emails specifically for that purpose.

NO Recurring Announcements

There are activities that take place every week at church. Perhaps your church has potluck every week or a youth activity. These items should not receive center stage. If you have a church calendar, that is kept up to date, these would be good items to include there and a link to the calendar could be included in your eNews. All other announcements should run, at most, for 3 weeks if there is room. If there are too many announcements, you may need to only run them for 2 weeks.

NO Wordy Announcements

All announcements should be kept to the minimum number of words possible. As the eNews coordinator, you reserve the right to adjust and edit wording as needed and those submitting items to you should be aware of this. Try to keep each announcement to only the essential information. We don’t need to include fluffy descriptions. (Which could be reworded to say “Don’t include fluffy descriptions.” See how I removed 3 words from that sentence and it still made sense? That’s the goal!)

Timeline and Order of Soonest First

Now that you have a foundation for a good eNews, it is time to piece it together. I suggest you send out your eNews once a week on Thursday or Friday. With this timeline in mind, set your eNews up for success by listing items at the top that will be happening this weekend, then next week/weekend, and finally items that either don’t have a timeline or are further out. Make headings to help break up your articles and help people find what they are looking for:

  • Happening this Weekend

  • Happening Next Week/Weekend

  • Coming Soon

Learn to Use a Great and Powerful Word: NO

If you are like me, you tend to avoid controversy and try to please everyone as much as possible. However, if you don’t set eNews boundaries in place and follow them then your message and readership will suffer in addition to your sanity.

  • Set a deadline. A good place to start would be requiring all announcements 2 days before you plan to send out your eNews. So if you plan to send it out Thursday, require everything by end of day Tuesday so then you’ll have Wednesday and most of Thursday to prepare and send it out. If you don’t stick with your deadline, people will notice (they can smell a pushover) and continue to send you things way late after you’ve already put the rest of the eNews together. Asking others to respect your deadlines will prevent you from becoming stressed, resentful and burned out.

  • Create submission guidelines. Sit down with your pastor or a committee and decide what cannot be included such as personal sale items (John has a couch to sell), personal needs (Grandma needs a caregiver), or every single youth event ever (the youth group needs their own way to communicate with each other, only items where the whole church is invited to participate should be included in the eNews).

  • Not all submissions will be accepted. Even if all the items you receive are valid, most likely you cannot include them all. eNews should not be an endlessly scrolling list and Gmail will cut off showing messages that are too long. You shouldn’t even get near this point as people will not be willing to read the entire message. You will need to determine if something will be included or not.

Employ Good Design Principles

  • Use an eNews platform like MailChimp or Constant Contact to make creating eNews easier.

  • Canva can connect directly to MailChimp and Constant Contact to make using stock images WAY easier.

  • Not sure how to word an announcement? Ask AI! This is not “cheating.” Using AI to your benefit is the same as using a computer to type instead of a typewriter. Technology is changing. It is new, but it doesn’t have to be scary. Most of what an AI will give you will need to be rewritten but it gives you a starting point and sometimes getting started is the hardest part.

  • Make sure if you say something is available from a link that you include the link and it works.

  • Do not use colored text for body copy. Body copy is anything that is not a title or header. Please, PLEASE, do not do this. It makes your text hard to read and if something is hard to read people simply won’t read it.

  • Choose fonts (2 or 3 at most) that are easy to read.

  • Do not reduce font size in order to include more items. Again this will make the text harder to read and people will skip it.

By following these simple steps, your church members will look forward to receiving your eNews and stay informed with the latest updates and announcements. Don’t worry about having a perfect design to begin with, there is always room for improvement so just get started and have fun!

Deidre Jones