A recent article from Harvard Business School shows the balances between using internal vs. external creative forces. This brought to my attention a long debate I have seen in creative ministry.

While many media driven churches have hired internally for creative staff, there are a few that outsource different elements of their ministries. Some of the more common outsourcing includes:

• Church Website
• Television Commercials
• Television Broadcast
• A/V Setup

Week to week tasks are commonly handled in house while long term goals are outsourced to other industry experts. While many of the common problems with hiring internally are addressed in this article by far the most significant is the lack of creative auditing.

Creative auditing insures that church communication stays brand consistent while continually evolving for today’s consumers. External industry experts have the knowledge and experience of common industry practices. This especially lends them the upper hand in creative technological fields. Is it any surprise that churches most commonly outsource tech heavy creative communications?

A few short bullets on how to make a successful email marketing campaign that works for churches

• Always include text that will be rendered as HTML somewhere in the design. Some email programs block emails with only images
   
• Provide something of value. People who signup for church email newsletters want something more than the average church goer.  Experiment by introducing new event information by email campaign before releasing it to the general church via Sunday morning announcements.  Who knows you might create some buzz…
   
• Insider secret: Use the slice tool in Photoshop combined with File > Save for Web to export your newsletter design into HTML code and images
   
• Take advantage of an email marketing program’s statistics. Look at open rates and bounces to gauge how successful your subject line was
   
• Every email that you send must have a purpose.  In the industry we like to call this the Call to Action..
   
• I would suggest sending out a newsletter once a week. Any more than twice in a week and it could end up being considered spam
   
• A good time to send a weekly newsletter (if you run a Sunday service) would be Thursday morning about 10 A.M.