Real Lessons From Nine Years of Parish Communications

Jeannette Williams has run communications for St. Jude Church and Shrine in Chalfont, Pennsylvania, for nine years. She's responsible for the bulletin, the weekly e-newsletter, Facebook, and the website for a parish of more than 1,000 registered families.

Ask her what she's learned in nine years and she doesn't start with a tool or a template. She talks about relationships: with her subscribers, with the ministry leaders who send her their announcements, with the parishioners who tell her how they actually want to hear from her. 

Everything she does is built to protect those relationships, not just to fill a content calendar. In this article, we'll share some tips and best practices that Jeannette has learned in her nine years in parish communications.

The first lesson is one that most people get backward.

Don't Drive Your Subscribers Away

When people unsubscribe from a parish email newsletter, they don't think they're leaving. They think they're opting out of one thing (e.g., youth group updates once their kids are grown).

But what they're actually doing is walking away from everything: Christmas Mass times, the pastor's letter, next month's fish fry. Jeannette learned that the hard way, and built a system to keep it from happening. Here's what she's learned, in her own words.

Early on, Jeannette noticed something in her list data: when she sent emails randomly (one for CYO news, another for a special appeal, another for a schedule change...) unsubscribes climbed fast. The biggest source of unsubscribes was parents opting out of kids' ministry emails once their children aged out. 

The problem is that if you don't have a way people can unsubscribe from one category, they end up unsubscribing from the list. So you end up with a parent trying to unsubscribe from CYO updates who also stops hearing about Mass times and the parish gala.

One solution is to create different subscription groups so that people can leave a group when it's no longer relevant to them.

Jeannette's fix was to streamline communications. She sends one weekly newsletter that covers everything, with the occasional special send reserved for things that are genuinely urgent. Parishioners who know what to expect, and when, are less likely to leave. 

It's a small operational choice with an outsized effect on how many people a parish can reach.

Make the Website the Hub

Every channel Jeannette manages exists to point somewhere: the parish website. The bulletin includes a QR code linking to more detail. The e-newsletter is short and visual, built to be scanned, not read in full — with a click-through for anyone who wants more. Facebook posts are scheduled a week out and always lead back to a page on the site.

The reasoning is practical. Email has to be brief because people scroll. 

The bulletin allows more depth and more images, and it's where she builds in something uplifting each week so it doesn't read as pure logistics. 

But the website is the only channel with no length limit and no format constraint, which makes it the only place a parish can tell its full story.

Build the Calendar Before You Need It

Every quarter, Jeannette reviews the parish calendar and lists everything that will need advertising in the months ahead — not routine meetings, but events: a feast day, a novena, a fundraiser. She checks the list against her ministry leaders to catch anything she might have missed, then works backward from each event to figure out when promotion needs to start. A month out for something like the parish's 40 Hours devotion. Longer for anything bigger.

The result is a simple spreadsheet: event, date, owner, and which channels it needs — bulletin, newsletter, Facebook. She checks each one off as it's handled. It sounds like overkill until you consider the alternative, which is emailing a ministry leader in a panic three days before their event because nobody thought to ask sooner.

If you need some help getting started, check out our content calendar based on the liturgical year.

How to Maintain Good Relationships with Ministry Leaders

The hardest part of the job, in Jeannette says, isn't the writing or the design. It's getting the right information from people who have full lives and no obligation to think about her deadlines. 

Her approach is to lead with respect: these are people doing this out of love for the parish, not because it's their job, and treating a late submission as a crisis doesn't help anyone.

When she has to edit something someone sends her — tightening a too-long announcement, choosing a stronger headline — she shows the ministry leader the change before it goes out. It costs her a few extra minutes, but it buys is trust.

The ministry leader knows they're the owner of the message, and they're more likely to come back to her next time instead of working around her.

What She'd Tell Someone Starting This Job Tomorrow

Jeannette's advice for a new communications director starts with a warning against leading with your own ideas. Talk to the parish team first about what you're trying to communicate. 

Then find out, directly where your own parishioners already are and how they prefer to hear from you. (One way Jeannette has done this is to put surveys in the pews for parishioners to fill out.)

A parish full of retirees doesn't need TikTok. A parish with an active youth ministry might.

What ties all of this together is that Jeannette treats parish communication as a relationship to be maintained, not a broadcast to be sent.