“What challenges currently face the church in the area of effective Communication – Solutions to Consider?”
The view from the USCCB and national perspective.
• Leading through a vision of mission. • Creating content and message that impact people. • Engaging people.
• Knowing what we want to achieve? • Our role as leaders is changing ? • Tendency to focus on outputs rather than outcomes. • Our own understanding of technology • Social media tools are just that – tools to do something. • Be disciplined and focused on long term.
• Messages and content need to connect people’s lives with Jesus Christ and the Church. Why Be Catholic? • Clear sense of what we want to say to people about Jesus and Church. • Messages tend to become unnecessarily complicated. • Competition for people’s attention requires unified, clear, and simple communications.
• Changing roles and responsibilities driven by technology and learning models . • Role change from gate-keeping to facilitating/mentoring. • Respectful dialogue - Two way: interactive and participative. • Competition for time and attention.
• Vision drives action – this is all about bringing people into a relationship with Jesus Christ! • Communicating as essential element in building community of believers. • Get the right people involved. • Training-formation. • Create a culture that includes assessment of outcomes. • Focus on need to develop right content expressed with right messages. • Be willing to take a risk – a measured risk.
• Identify what it is that you want to share with people – content? • Create messages that engage and impact people. • We are not just creating content and messages for ourselves - I am not the audience! • Focus on desired outcomes, not just outputs. • Value of “branding” as tool for evangelization. • Create strategies and communication vehicles to get messages to right people at the right time.
• Create strategies to move people from passive “receivers” to active “participants.” • Using social media – know what you want to achieve (desired outcome) and understand how social media works best. • Respectful dialogue. • Transparency. • People are choosing methods and formats that they are most comfortable. • A unified approach for parish as a whole.
1. Build a culture and organizational structure for effective communication within the parish. 2. Develop relationships and work collaboratively with key stakeholders, ministries and the community. 3. Create a unified strategy for Catholic Communications in the parish both internally and externally. 4. Create clear and consistent messages