Charleston Atlantic Presbytery

Charleston Atlantic Presbytery Disaster Preparedness

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A disaster preparedness plan is an important part of every church facility, but even more so for us located close to the coast.

The attached PDF was created by Col. Jon Rockstad of Summerville church. Jon has delivered this presentation to some members of the presbytery and will speak at the October 4th Presbytery meeting about the importance of disaster preparedness.

In the coming weeks, Rev. Mike Fitze will reach out to every church in the presbytery to identify the disaster preparedness contact in your congregation. Please assist us with this process so we can work together to prepare for potential disasters in our area.

Charleston Atlantic Presbytery Disaster Preparedness Presentation

Using MailChimp for Church Newsletters

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The Charleston Atlantic Presbytery recently switched our e-newsletter service from ConstantContact to MailChimp. We sent our first newsletter with ConstantContact on May 6th, 2009, which included a few articles, almost no images, and a list of dozens of events going on in our presbytery. Since then, our newsletter has not changed much. We’ve added new logos, tried to include more images, and made numerous changes to the newsletter through the years.

However, ConstantContact does not offer a number of important features that are expected in 2014. For me, the largest reason to change is a lack of good templates for our newsletter. Specifically, ConstantContact has very few templates that are mobile-friendly or responsive. A mobile friendly or responsive newsletter changes the display of the newsletter to adapt to the device being used. This may seem like a small issue, but more and more of our members are using their phones and tablets to consume information. I have seen some sites that enjoy higher than 50% of visitors coming from mobile sites. If we ignore these increasing numbers of people using mobile devices, we’re going to forfeit a great opportunity to connect with people. MailChimp supports numerous responsive designs and you can easily purchase a template from a third party and use it easily with MailChimp.

The second influence in our decision was the price. MailChimp offers a free tier for everyone. You can have up to 2,000 email addresses and send up to 12,000 emails per month for free. That’s not a trial or a promotion. In fact, since I started using MailChimp, they have increased the number of subscribers and emails allowed at that price. If you need to upgrade your account because you send more email or have more addresses, the prices are as reasonable as any other service. And you get a 15% discount as a nonprofit.

If you’d like to check out MailChimp and see how it might improve your communications efforts and reduce your costs, please visit their site.

Churches and Social Media

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This survey is a little dated, especially in the social media and communications world. What you can be sure of is that more churches are using social media than when this survey was completed and more people expect some sort of interaction from their religious institutions in the social media world.

Hat tip to BuzzPlant for the useful infographic.

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Texting Service for Churches

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Maybe you’ve noticed that email is becoming less important to people’s daily lives, replaced by SMS and other texting services. Adam Cleaveland, a Presbyterian pastor in Illinois, noticed that it’s almost impossible to get youth to check their email and found a great solution called TextMarks. TextMarks is a group SMS service that is much easier than creating lists of people from your phone.

To get the full rundown, check out Adam’s post here.