How to Effectively Communicate with Families

How can we effectively communicate to families in today's world? That's what we're talking about today.

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Because it's time.

You're listening to the Church Digital Sidekick Podcast, part of the TCD Podcast Network.

Hey heroes, my name is Tom Pounder and this is the Church Digital Sidekick Podcast. This is the podcast where I bring on ministry leaders and we talk about how you can do ministry more effectively in this very digital and online world. And today I'm bringing back a friend who's been on the podcast a number of times, Dan Isvinik, and he is going to be sharing about how you can effectively communicate to families in today's world. In fact, he has three C's of effective communication. I'm not going to share with them right now what they are, but then he's also got a website that we talk about as well that really helps train and prepare ministry leaders. And this is specific to family ministry leaders, but I bet you if you're any kind of ministry leader, this will be helpful for you as well. So, I'm really excited about having Dan on the podcast. But before we begin, I do want to highlight The Church Digital. At thechurch.digital, the website, we have a ton of blogs, podcasts, coaching, and cohorts that are going on right now that we would love for you to be a part of because online ministry is really integrated into everyday ministry today. There is no separation. between online and in person it's all together in some capacity and at the church digital we've got great resources in training for you today so if you've never checked it out or even if you have checked out we've got new postings almost daily and we've again we've got coaching and cohorts that love for you to be a part of go to the church.digital today all right so without any further ado let's get in the conversation with dan and talk about effective All right, with me right now is Dan Isfinek. Dan, how are you doing, man?

I am doing great, enjoying some snowy weather about to hit us here in Chicago area.

Wait, you actually have snow this winter?

We are, well, about to get hit. We haven't had much, but it's coming. It's coming right now.

dang okay well and we're recording this early march uh and so um we have actually in the washington dc area where i'm at we have actually had they said 0.4 inches of snow this winter point oh that's crazy i mean yeah i remember a couple years ago living in in dc when it hit we got that big snow yeah and no one had snow blowers and it was it was crazy yeah usually we'll get a little bit of snow at least an inch but 0.4 that's just crazy so wow so you're bracing for some snow you've lived up in Chicago for a few years has the snow been everything that you thought it would be

It has not been. No, we were very disappointed. We lived in Kenosha, Wisconsin years and years ago. We got hit all the time. We got here, we're expecting the worst. And it's actually been pretty mild the first three years.

Wow. That's crazy. So, well, Dan, I know who you are and you've been on the podcast a number of times. And again, you, like you said, you, you and I have some mutual friends together because you lived in the DC area. But why don't you tell everyone who you are and what you do?

Sure. Currently, I'm a family pastor at Avenue Christian Church in the western suburbs of Chicago. Been here about three years. Moved here during the pandemic, of all things. But I've been doing student ministry and family ministry for about 28 years. Just love what I do and just been enjoying a lot of time in ministry.

That's awesome. And you actually, we'll talk about this a little bit more, but you actually run a website as well. Tell me a little bit about that.

I do. A few years ago, we launched a youth ministry resource website called youthministryhub.com. And that has family ministry resources, as well as student ministry resources, games, lessons, and helpful hints. Every single day of the week, we try to post something a little bit extra just to help people do ministry better.

Yeah, it's actually awesome. We are going to talk about it a little bit more. Your website is on my Feedly account. And so every day you're posting something new, whether it's a game or resource or blog. So I really keep in touch with what you're doing. Even though I'm kind of moving out of student ministry, I love all the stuff that you're doing with family ministry and parenting, which yields us to our conversation today. Today, we want to talk about a little bit about effective communication to families. You've been working with families for a really long time. So why don't you start us off with that? What's the importance of communicating effectively for parents? Why should we be doing that?

Absolutely.

That's like a softball.

Well, I'm a family pastor, so I still actively work with students, but I oversee children's ministry, youth ministry, college, and even some into our men's ministry, women's ministry areas of our church. So communication, especially digital, virtual communication is so essential and key. And so as I bring staff onto our student ministry team and our children's ministry team, we've been talking a lot about this. and one of the things that kind of gave them three c's and that which has been kind of my flow of things is to be consistent concise and confident in what we do and how we communicate so kiss consistency is huge we want to make sure that people are getting our communication on a consistent regular basis and it's been funny we actually have that rhythm so well down and well pat in our ministry now that when we don't send out that communication people call us or email us or text us and say hey are we having ministry tonight or what happened because they're so used to our consistent communication every single week whether it be a text message whether it be our email whether it be our posts on social media that especially in the chicago later we just joked about but snow but people will say oh is there something going on do we cancel tonight because they've know that we're consistently communicating posting and putting out our information on a regular

That's awesome. Actually, that's really cool. And what I liked what you did, you highlighted multiple ways that you're consistently communicating. So again, texting is really valuable. Email is very valuable. Social media. What have you found to be, is there one that's maybe more effective than others? Or what have you learned in the different styles of communicating?

For parents, really email and text is still the most read and consistent. For students, it's social media. And we are on Snapchat. We are doing texting. Even still, Instagram is a huge way to communicate. We kind of laughed about this a little bit last night with my son. I text my son, and he doesn't respond. So what I've found is I message my son on Instagram, and he responds to me immediately at school. so even with my son it's a great example of how we need to be very differentiating how we communicate but doing it across the board so we know in our world that we are going to for students we're going to put a reel up every monday and every thursday with pictures on tuesday announcements on wednesday something funny on friday and then something more kind of just interesting on saturday and then sunday is a rewind of whatever happened that week or highlighting what happened in our student ministry and we try to do the same thing in children's ministry a little bit less on instagram more on facebook and other places but constant everybody knows hey monday morning i'm going to see tuesday morning i'm going to see and then with our texting service we use remind because that's what the schools in our area use. So students are used to getting remind notifications. Parents are used to getting those remind notifications. So our parents know that Wednesday morning, you will get a middle school text. Friday night, you'll get a high school text. And we do that so consistently. We set it up on our scheduling so that people know. And when they don't get that text, they're like, wait, what's going on? And so we're very, very consistent. And the same thing with our posts. We want to make sure that we're constantly posting so people are seeing what's going on. And it kind of pushes us up in our algorithm or feed as well. And that's kind of the little new trick of our world is that consistently actually does push you up to the top of people's feeds.

Yeah. Okay, I'm going to date myself a little bit here, but you'll laugh at this because you know this pain and struggle. But, you know, when I first started off in ministry, we were handing out paper flyers and then we would mail, physically mail things to families about, you know, what's ahead, what's going on. We would mail our calendar. and what i like about what you're doing here from a digital perspective is that you're hitting on the different avenues of where you're going to most reach your family members parents aren't going to be on social media and doing that as much as they would respond to a text message or respond to an email and what i like about remind is we use remind for our student ministry as well it's free it is free and it's something that you can use so again i know cost is not always there for everyone you can work at a smaller church using remind is such a free service and again our school district uses remind it looks like your school district does it's a very popular one that a lot of students are familiar with so i i love the the idea that you are consistently posting you have that schedule down and you're hitting the different different digital communications so that's really cool

And we sit down with it as a team. I mean, we go through this every single Monday morning. We sit down with the family issue team and say, all right, what is Monday? What are you posting? What is Tuesday? What are you posting? And we go through it day by day and review and, hey, there's some changes and tweaks. But we actually talk about this intentionally and saying, what are we posting? What are we emailing? What are we texting? We walk through that every single Monday morning in our meetings. And it helps us a ton. I think it leads us to the second thing, which is concise. We really want to make sure that we are concise with what we're communicating.

Yeah, well, talk to me about that. What do you mean by concise? Like you're not sending out massive long emails?

Right. I mean, for sure. I mean, some of us, we are communicators and we love to communicate and over communicating in how much we communicate, how often we communicate is important. Over communicating with the amount of information is a big no-no in our world we live in, especially with social media. I mean, social media limits us. but even that sometimes we put too much in there and people what people know is they want to know just the basic information and then a click here to find out more is is beautiful it's our it's our golden spot of like hey i want you to be interested and then i want you to get involved before we intertwine you in your life and your schedule and that's one other thing that we talk about in our ministry is how to to to inform interest uh involve and intertwine when it comes to our communication

So when you're linking somebody to something, you're linking them back to a website. Is that correct?

back to our website we still use our church uses ccb which is a church community builder some people use um other other planning center but we want to make sure that we kind of get hey we just have to kind of whet your appetite we want you to be informed we want you to be interested and then click here to get involved and then we want to kind of intertwine and that's where we kind of link up our calendars as well so hey here's a link to the calendar so that immediately just pops in and then you sign up for something or it puts you right into your google calendar you have options that way so being concise people get lost in all the all the text of the not texting but the all the the text of what you're sending and especially with emails we try to keep those emails quick and sweet we use mailchimp you know box here's the basic information click here to read more um and it keeps me watch coming coming back so they're not getting lost in a whole long long email of something going on

Yeah, that's great. Again, I can be extremely wordy. You and I, we both blog a lot. And so sometimes you want to be wordy on your blog post, but on an email or especially on a text or social media post, you don't want to be wordy. You want to help them get to the next thing, get to that information. You don't need to share every bit of detail of what you're doing. And if parents want more information, they can email you back or they can check out the website. So I think that's really good.

And once again, MailChimp or one of those other services where you can set that calendar, set that schedule to go at a certain time. MailChimp optimizes your time when they send out. So you can figure out when your last email, your last thing was open and how many people opened at what time. And so we try to be really good about that. A lot of times we set it to be right at the end of school day, right at the work day. So people are looking at it, but they don't have time to read a whole long email or read your whole dissertation of how creative you are at this next event. said hey i just want to know when it what is it happening how much does it cost is it for me and do i want to do i want to click and find more information and that's kept people engaged in what we're doing because a lot of times like oh that long email and they just they kind of look at the heading and they're like oh it's from him i don't want to read anymore right it's from her i don't want to read anymore um because they're always too much yeah and we find that people really engage our content that way

Yeah, I think you're right on that. We use MailChimp as well. So there's a lot of commonality here. I see. I'm actually being affirmed by the fact that you guys are using it. I'm like, okay, good. We're using MailChimp. But what I like about MailChimp too is that MailChimp also gives you hints on like tips on like, hey, if you want your... email to be open keep your subject title to this amount of words and maybe include an emoji and they'll give you some tips on it to help you optimize it because even though open rates are you know people will look at emails they're not guaranteed to really open or even click on to what you're doing so mailchimp really gives you some direction there that is helpful

We use some SEO stuff for when it comes to our content as well to make sure that we're search engine optimized in what we're saying. That if we're going to put something out somewhere or we're going to put a blog post up on our website or whatever, that we limit the title to five. five you know five things uh we try to make sure that we're using keywords that are going to be pick up when people are looking for our church looking for our ministry looking within our area um there's a lot of stuff that even inside of youtube you can go down farther and optimize what your searchability when people don't realize that sometimes they just kind of post their thing and that's it or there's ways to do some little tricks behind the scenes to really optimize but also keep things you know concise in what we're doing

Yeah, that's awesome. Okay. So you're talking about consistency. You're talking about being concise. Let's go into the third one.

The confidence is, is really is kind of a all encompassing word, but we want to be confident in what we're communicating, which means that we are, we have competence that people, oh, I want to hear more, but we're also confident in what we're doing. We're being positive and that's a big deal. So often we kind of like, well, only so many kids showed up last week. And no, this many kids showed up, celebrate whoever shows up, you know, find pictures. I mean, we kind of know the angles, but, you know, when you post a picture, make it look like it's positive and it's exciting and, you know, those things. And so often we kind of miss those things. And it's kind of a trick a little bit sometimes, you know, if only so many kids show up. know find a picture though that shows off the kids that did show up celebrate them not the oh well only so many kids showed up but i think also in the confident element is is also making sure that we are professional in what we're communicating how we communicate which means using grammarly or something else to make sure that our grammar is correct or center structure is correct inside the conciseness it still needs to be you know professional grammatically correct even for students we're communicating with students very privately maybe we're using you know some some quick algorithm you know quick things to make sure that you know emojis or whatever but we're communicating to the general public to parents to staff members when they're seeing this we need to make sure that we look like we're adults communicating to adults and that also is part of that confidence piece

Yeah, you hit the nail on the head on that. I think a lot of times, I think back when I was 22 years old and starting off in ministry, and I think I knew it all. And therefore, I just would send out stuff. And it didn't give parents a lot of confidence that I actually knew what I was doing. Exactly. I liked it. I like that you hit on the professionalism because youth ministers in particular get slapped around all the time saying, we're just goofy people. We're not really to be taken seriously. And if we send out content that isn't taken seriously, that's only going to continue to yield that stereotype. And so that's why you have to be professional in the communication, especially when you're sending it to parents. You have to exude confidence in what you're saying that you know all the details, you know what's going to happen. And again, your grammar is right. I mean, that is such a big deal because parents will pick up on it. Like that doesn't sound right. That doesn't look right. This guy's a joke.

And that came out of my time. You know, you probably know this as well in D.C. It kind of like my time in D.C. I mean, working with people that are in the government and high ranking officials, the Pentagon or places, you know, they walk in physically. They want to see that we're professionals. So we I came into a church that said, hey, we will make sure you're always the college shirt. You look professional. But there was an expectation that changed how I do communication. there and you are communicating to people who are in high ranking areas of the government, other places, and you sending out an email with a ton of grammatical errors, sending out stuff with just quick like things that don't look right, really does kind of shoot you the foot a lot of ways when you communicate with these people. And so even since I've moved from there. I've lived other places, they're not quite that level of, you know, maybe communication, you know, element of people, but it's really said, you know what, no matter what people deserve to be communicated with well, and with confidence, but with some basic professionalism, and it really does allow your ministry, but even yourself to be viewed differently. So I think there's an importance of raising that bar a little bit and how we are, who we are as professionals, because people will be more confident in us as well.

Right. No, you're 100% right. And so it's not an embarrassment for you to go to someone and say, hey, can you proofread this for me? It's actually you're taking better care. In fact, I still do that. I'm 48 years old. And I still, when I'm sending out a big email to somebody, I will have someone proofread it to make sure it sounds right, it looks right, there's proper grammar. And so that's very appropriate for you to do. So I love that point that you're making.

Yeah. And even on social media, it's even those concise, small statements that we make on social media. Just make sure that, you know, you have that confidence in there, but you're grammatically correct. It looks good for students. It's not going to hurt you at all. It always helps.

So this has been very helpful. I mean, this has been awesome. Three really simple points, three very practical points that people can take with them. How else would you encourage people kind of as we're getting close to wrapping up?

i think sometimes there's a conversational piece while we we're confident and we're professional there's elements that we allow ourselves to be conversational in allowing conversation back so we send something out we want a response um in some ways certain times we communicate we communicate things that are more conversational about ourselves so i know like we once a month we'll do a family newsletter it has lots of content in it but i try to start off with just hey here's my family here's a little something from me to you makes it feel a little more personal because people get a lot of like professional emails you know here's a newsletter read these things and so there's moments where i feel that we need to be conversational as well and simply saying hey we want you to know a little about who we are we want to invite you back what do you think please let's send us your feedback please interact with this content and that's always been a really helpful thing because parents want to know especially want to communicate with parents is they want to know that they have the option of writing something back an option of giving some opinions some helpful hints um so we try to do those things even our family newsletter at the end of it we try to have a conversation so my wife and i will shoot a video called an online pairing class about six to eight minutes where it's just like us literally have a conversation with parents about one key topic that's come up from the last month and out of that has come you know a parenting class a marriage class but it all started with just a conversation with parents that we pre-record but then we invite them to have conversations back with us via you know virtual ways of community kind of kind of responding back to us

That's really cool because I think a lot of times we think about when we're communicating to families and whatnot, we're communicating to them. But what you're doing is that it's not just a one-way conversation. I'm not just communicating. I'm asking you to communicate back to me. And I bet you that gives you tons of feedback. Well, it has. I mean, it's helped you shape some classes and some needs in your community.

it has and even with students and we try to find ways that even on social media we invite conversation back you know what do you think what was your favorite part of hey what are you doing this weekend and so even with students having that conversational piece um actually in the end actually push your algorithm as well is when students spend a little more time interacting with your social media whatever it is it actually pushes you back over the feed so once again it's it's an important spiritual element of connecting that communication piece but it also digitally wise it really does help us get boosted back into the places we want on the feed because students are stopping typing in a little response telling us something doing a quick survey some of those things that really are you know a part of how we communicate it really does ends up helping us

That's awesome. Well, dude, this has been very encouraging. It's been very, very concise in what we're trying to communicate. And I think it's really important because, again, like I said, back in the days, you had simple flyers, you had a simple letter that you would send out. But now there's so many different ways that you can communicate and different ways that parents and families are expecting communication. So giving these three C's have been very, very helpful, encouraging. Thanks for sharing this, but I want to transition into your website because you started this website a while ago. Tell us why you started the website.

Yeah, well, I mean, over about 15 years, I've been doing some writing for my own blog and for other websites and other organizations. And so about three years ago, we just said we really want to create something that is once again concise. It really brings all of our writing, all of our products, all of our resources, but also some of the things we've been doing over all these years of ministry into one website. So we launched this as a hub. of all of all the stuff that we've created but also a hub for other youth pastors to be a part of some things so we invite conversations we invite guest posts uh but what really we're trying to do is really create the best of some things that we've done so currently we have a product line called One Night, which really is just sums up and kind of packages everything for one complete night of youth ministry into one package. So it's your outline, your presentation, two games, small groups, everything you need for one night, all in one concise little package. You can download that. We have some family resources. So once again, it's putting everything together, Easy to use, all included. We have these Faith at Home family resources that parents can just grab that. So you download that. You have a sheet for you, a sheet for them, just to tell you how to do discipleship at home in a very simple way. And then what we're doing is we're about to release a product called the 7-Minute Sunday, which is a Sunday morning resource. It's a little different from a Wednesday night, a midweek program, which really goes along with this idea of how to teach in seven-minute segments to keep your kids' attention. it's partially what you actually wrote about a lot about is seven minutes the seven minute rule of teaching is how do you teach differentiate your instruction every seven minutes so really on sunday mornings i teach for about an hour to hour and 15 minutes But we do it in seven-minute segments that keeps the kids' attention, keeps them interacting with some ways. So we're writing a whole entire resource. It's kind of rewriting Sunday School in a way that really works today, you know, for the modern student that is currently attending our church. Not that old Sunday School curriculum you get that you blew your dust off of that the denomination has. So we're doing some neat things. I'm excited about it. So the big thing is just really resourcing the average everyday youth pastor with helpful resources.

Yeah, and see, what I like about your stuff, and I'm glad we're talking about this, is because this isn't just stuff that you tested in a focus group or something like that. These are field-tested things. These are things that you've accumulated over the years, and you've adapted, and you've changed them as the times have changed. So these are effective. They've been tested on students, and you're in the trenches. Again, these aren't people that are in think tanks or anything like that. Nope. These are ministry tested and really helpful for families, really helpful for pastors and ministers. So I would strongly encourage you to check out his website. I'm going to include the links in there. Absolutely. Anything else you'd like to share about your website?

No, I just want to invite everyone to come and interact with that. We love feedback. I want to make sure that everything we do, as you said, is field tested by everyday youth pastors. So we love. And if you look at the website, you're like, man, I'm a small church and we just can't pull off, you know, affording some of these things. We want to help you. So never, ever think that. stuff's on there only for sale. You just contact me. I would love to be a part of that. And then beyond that, we're just trying to do more and more of the resource. So we're starting to do some speaking, some training. I have some opportunities and some availability this fall into early winter. So if you need some help in your local church, I would love to come and help you. If you need a fill-in speaker, you need a speaker for your camp, your retreat. We're starting to do a lot more of that now as we kind of head into the new fall into the late winter season next year.

That's awesome. And give me your website one more time.

It's youthmenthub.com.

Youthment Hub. Again, I'll have the link on it, but Youthment Hub. Dan, how can people connect with you if they just want to reach out to you right now?

Yeah, for sure. distvanek at youthminthub.com is my easiest email to respond to me about things like this. I'm all over social media, so you can just find Youth Mint Hub on a lot of different places. You can find me on social media all over the place as well. And then we also, we just relaunched a game Facebook group called Youth Mission Game Hub. So there's about a lot of about 12,000 members in our group that shares games every single day. So it's been fun to be able to do that. And once again, just free resourcing. So people just come and share their game ideas, ask their game questions. And so it's been fun just to kind of see, you know, God just really bless and grow what we're doing on the Youth Mid Hub into a lot of different venues.

That's awesome. I will include that link as well, because I know this, I still help out with the middle school program. And I'm always looking for games because I'm like, what game can we play today? I mean, so I'm always looking. So that's great. That's awesome. So yeah, well, as always, it's great talking to you and catching up with you. So thanks so much for being with me today.

Yeah, thanks for having me on again.

All right, so what did you think of the conversation that Dan and I have? I know I dated myself a little bit by talking about flyers that you hand out and mailings that you send. But that's how we did ministry back then. Today's ministry is different, and there's really that huge online and digital component that Dan really highlighted. And so I'm curious to see. What stood out to you? What encouraged you? What challenged you? What questions do you have? Let's carry this conversation on a little bit more. Go over to Twitter, at TAPounders by Twitter handle. I would love to talk to you a little bit more. Or you can put a comment in the comment section. I would love for you to talk about that. Again, let's carry this conversation on so we can be effectively communicating to families better every single day. All right, heroes, well, that wraps it up for another episode of the Church Digital Psychic Podcast. As always, if you enjoyed the podcast, go and subscribe to it. It's on YouTube. It's on Apple, Google, Amazon. It's also on thechurch.digital, where you can go and get encouragement there. And you've got podcasts there, but also you've got my blogs there as well. So go there and subscribe to it and get more information and encouragement on how to do ministry more effectively online. All right, heroes, well, I hope you have a great rest of your day. And until next time, have a great one.