Why Outsourcing Is An Option for Your Church

Why should your church or ministry consider outsourcing some digital communications? Find out now 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 psychic 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 justin nava justin has his own marketing agency and today we talk about what it looks like for a church or a ministry to outsource it now hear me out a little bit I'm not into outsourcing really but there are sometimes some exceptions and today we talk about what those exceptions are and Justin really breaks down the importance of outsourcing website and email stuff because there's some real great opportunities for your church your ministry if it's done properly. And so Justin and I talk about that, what it looks like, and how you can do it today. So that's what we talk about, and I'm excited about having them on the podcast. But before we get into that, I want to highlight thechurch.digital. At thechurch.digital, we have some great coaches, some great cohorts, some great blogs and podcasts, all designed to help you in your online ministry, whether it's metaverse ministry, digital ministry, whether it's just digital communications or whatnot. If you're dealing with online ministry in any capacity, thechurch.digital is the place to go. So if you've never checked it out, go there right now, check out all the blogs, the podcasts, and the resources, and see how you can be encouraged to do ministry more effectively today than you were yesterday because you're checking out The Church Digital. All right, everyone. Well, now let's get into the conversation with Justin Nava. All right. With me right now is my friend, Justin Nava. Justin, how are you?

Doing fantastic, Tom. Thanks for having me today. Thank you for your audience for listening or watching, however they're doing it today. I am so glad you're going to listen to this episode. My goal for today is to make this the most valuable thing you listen to all week, nay, all month, and I'm excited to get into it.

Well, then I'm just going to shut up then and just let you do all this hawking. That's just kidding. But hey, Justin, it's great having you on the podcast. You always bring some great insights and I'm excited about our topic that we're going to talk about today. But before we do that, just let's reintroduce you. I mean, you've been on my podcast numerous times, but just in case somebody's listening for the very first time, who are you and what do you do?

If you're listening to this for the very first time, first of all, kudos to you. You could not have picked a better podcast to listen to. I love how Tom approaches ministry in a very practical way. Tom, I think churches could make a larger impact on their community and for the kingdom if more people just knew they existed. The community needs to know not only that a church exists, I mean, you asked 100 people the definition of a church, you're gonna get 173 different answers. What I want them to know is that your church exists, that your church is for them, the local church, the church that's not out there to put on a fancy production, a church that's not out there to put on a show, and it's certainly not a church out there that's just to fund the pastor's bank account. This is a church that seriously wants to love like Jesus loved. served like jesus served and equipped people to go out and make disciples like jesus told us to the community needs to know a church like that your church if you're listening to this that you exist and so what i did was i started an agency nava church marketing to help churches uh go out and promote themselves be better known to open up new discipleship opportunities we do that through numerous ways basically it's through knowing who you are helping you figure out and filter out all the ideas in your head to communicate who you are why you are basically figure out who you're equipped to serve and go out and be known by those people uh through websites seo advertising public relations going out and being on podcasts and getting interviews and everything that goes along with it, because I believe it's our moral obligation to make sure that everyone in the community knows about your local church like they know about the local Walmart. They know when it's open, they know where it is, and they know what to expect when they go. Everyone should know. where your church is who you are when you're open and what to expect when they connect with you so i'm excited to be here now if you haven't if you didn't know about me i take full responsibility for that i'm so glad we're having this conversation now well that's awesome uh and we'll we'll

tell people where to connect with you a little bit later in the show and it'll be in the show notes so if you want to click on the show notes you can um i love your passion for ministry i love your passion for helping other people i don't like your passion for the houston astros but outside of that we're we're good we're good you and i you're you're gonna have to deal with it because we just had a walk off uh we just had an insane five run comeback two nights ago we didn't play yesterday

five run comeback with a walk off. I'm super pumped. This season's not as strong of a start for the Astros, but hey, you know, we'll have our time against you in the playoffs, I'm sure.

It's a long time, it's a long season. And I will say, I'm just pleased that the Nationals don't stink as bad as I thought they were going to stink this year.

And I'm disappointed because the Astros have not been rocking as hard as I thought they would rock. So I don't know, we'll see. I would love to go face off against the Nats in the World Series again.

know you and i are sure are going to do another stake bet uh but anyways you know hey this this isn't sports talk with tom and justin let's get let's get back to the conversation here before too many people tune out okay so here here we go here we go i'm going to paint the picture for you justin and i'm going to talk to you about this is like in an ideal world You have a church, whether it's a church of 50 or a church of 5,000. You have a church congregation that loves your church and want to be a part of your church. And you have a church staff that would love to get things accomplished. And we can't do as much as we'd like to because there's only so many hours in the week and whatnot. But that's why we have a volunteer team that comes and helps us and supports us. But sometimes there are things that... You can't get accomplished. Maybe a volunteer or volunteer team can't get accomplished. So we're going to talk about outsourcing some of the stuff. My first question is, what is outsourcing? And then let's get into some more of the nitty gritty of it.

Sure. So outsourcing. And if you think about it with my definition, volunteering, volunteers are outsourcing. It's a form of outsourcing. But outsourcing is basically going outside of your staff to get a job done that needs to be done. Now, usually outsourcing is that vernacular vocabulary is used in terms of service oriented businesses. I mean, if you think about it, hiring a plumber is a form of outsourcing. If a pipe breaks. Pastor could fix it. A staff member could fix it, but you're probably going to outsource it to a plumber that has expertise in fixing that pipe. So outsourcing, when we talk about it today and in the future, if you see anything from me and Tom, we're specifically talking about hiring from outside your staff or your organization. to get a job done, usually in the term of service. And of course, we today are mostly talking about communication and marketing outsourcing.

Yeah. And because I think communication and marketing are very niche things that you really have to be good at in order to be effective at doing it. I mean, listen, anybody can put together an email. Anybody can put together a website. Anybody can do this. But... really have to know the nitty gritty of it to really be effective at it. So let's talk about outsourcing. Again, we're beyond like, church secretaries used to be able to do the communication stuff and get the bulletin together and all this kind of stuff together. But now it's so much more digital and there's so much more to it than just the church bulletin that you would put together once a week. What does outsourcing look like for marketing and communications at a church today?

Well, first of all, I want to clarify again we got to get on the same page with vocabulary i think this is something that we've made a mistake in with trying to be uh not politically correct but emotionally correct i think a lot of churches want to avoid the word marketing because marketing has such a negative connotation in in relation to sales but really we need to take a step back and we need to realize as churches that communication includes marketing but marketing doesn't necessarily include communications by that i mean when i talk about church communications that is your internal communications okay if you work in a business if you're bi-vocational if you're volunteer if you ever worked in a business in the past you have to understand that there's both external and internal communications for example let's take for example a fencing company i have a friend that runs a fencing company he has a a service area of three million people in houston but he has a team of about seven people and maybe a dozen contractors, okay? So there's two forms of communications. There's communications internally, where as a business, you've got to communicate to your staff, your team, your HR department has to communicate to your staff, your finance committee needs, or excuse me, finance team. needs to communicate with your personnel and and your management needs to communicate to their team and the other managers right but then you have external communications which is we need to promote our services to be known in the community so when someone needs a fence they know who to call Same thing for churches. We have internal communications and external communications. The reason why, despite the feelings of everyone else it seems sometimes, the reason why my agency is a marketing agency is because we are focused on helping you get known in your community. Now, I love how you said like the secretary used to be or the receptionist or whoever, the youth pastor even used to be great at doing the bulletins and the newsletters and emails. I think they're still great at that because it's internal communications. It's communicating to your people. And as churches, we have a much harder job than say the fence contractor because they have a staff of seven and they just need to keep seven people on the same page. As churches, we have churches as small as 30 people plus a staff and leadership of maybe a dozen that we need to keep on the same page and as we grow the church that number becomes even greater 30 50 100 now you've got a receptionist that's in charge of keeping a hundred people on the same page and we all know how difficult that is at the end of the year when you try to get end of year statements out okay you know how hard it is to keep everyone on the same page with that and as as american churches are trying to reinsert ourselves as cornerstones of the community, meaning we're here to serve the community. We're not televangelists. We're not crazy people, right? We just care about our community. We want to improve your life. We want to change your life through Jesus Christ. We want to live life together. We want to form a faith community. You need to communicate that externally. And so while you're trying to figure out how do I communicate to these hundred people and keep them on the same page? it becomes even more daunting to figure out how am i going to communicate to 50 000 people in our town of which 10 000 our church is absolutely equipped to serve so how do we even communicate to those 10 000 that's the really hard part of doing it so i want to make sure all of that to say that you understand listener and tom i know you understand is that communications is almost separate from marketing and that marketing is a form of communications but communications is not always a form of marketing So when we discuss today, and if you ever listen to me in the future, when I refer to communications, I'm more talking about your internal communications, your newsletters, your emails, your texts, your congregations, phone calls. When I talk to marketing, I'm specifically talking to people that are not part of your faith community, not part of your church membership, not active participants or active attendees. These are people that may know your church, may not know your church, but they are not plugged in. So all that to say, so Tom, so yeah, we used to, the receptionist or secretary, whoever used to do communications, that's because communications was really just internal stuff. The church was the cornerstone of the community. People knew, trusted the church. They trusted the authority of the church, the experience of the church. And thanks to social media, media itself, news, whatever, all the negative stuff, because we're humans too, has gotten out there and people just inherently don't trust the church or they have their own form of self excuse me church hurt that they have to deal with and you know unfortunately we have to overcome that we have to fight a battle that another church has set up for us so we have to do that as part of marketing so all that to say i think a lot of church communications has been easier because it was mostly internal focus where now we have to turn and put some effort and energy externally and that's what's made it really difficult is now that receptionist now has to be not only a communicator for the church but also a marketer for 10 to 50 to 100 000 to a million people

Yeah, no, 100%. The job has become too big in many ways. And unfortunately, I think church staffs have decreased since COVID, which puts more pressure on more people or fewer people to do more of the work. And so that's why I think outsourcing is a very viable option here for you and your church. But one of the barriers, I would say, this is one of the barriers that comes to mind is, as you and I were talking about this beforehand, is that there's a money component to it. There's a financial, they're like, oh, I don't want to have to pay somebody for doing this. I think we have to get over that roadblock because I think that's not a really adequate roadblock to prevent us from doing something. So how would you encourage people in churches to overcome that? What would you say to them?

Yeah, I absolutely get it. It's difficult to say we could do this ourselves. why should we have to pay someone to do it the reality is we do that all the time administrate not is not excluded from that take for example you go out and you got to buy some pencils okay you are going to outsource the process of creating that pencil by going out and buying a pencil you are not going to go down chop a tree dig in a mine to pull out the graphite graph graphene graphite i don't know whatever they use uh in pencils and then go down and also uh rubberize a tree or whatever to make the eraser you're not going to do all that you're going to go out and buy an eraser because the fact is the people that are making billions of pencils can make them faster more effective they can make a better pencil than you ever could by yourself the reason why we hire a plumber to think about a service right that's consumable let's talk about a service is because the as a pastor uh you could go fix the plumbing or you could get a volunteer who knows a little bit about plumbing to fix your plumbing but you're gonna have to also buy duct tape you're also gonna have to take three trips to home depot on the church credit card probably um you're probably gonna have to keep a closer eye on them you're gonna have to work around their schedule because they may be bivocational or you could just hire a plumber they come in yeah you're gonna pay them a little bit more but they're gonna get it done in five minutes it's gonna be warranted right uh and and And you could, for example, a great example, Tom, if you're watching, is this video or is this just audio? It's both, it's both, yeah. Perfect, if you're watching the video, it looks like I'm calling you from a prison conference room. The truth is, normally you know what my office looks like. I am here because a plumber, instead of paying $150 for a plumber to fix our guest bathroom, I tried to do it myself and I caused $36,000 of housing damage due to a leak, okay? I am the prime example. of man that 150 plumber sounds really cheap right now and now i have to spend and now me and my two kids and my wife have to spend a month and a half uh leasing a house for my dad so it it it's really it's really simple right like is this worth the time energy and effort or can we go and just get it done quickly now a plumber is easy right the problem is i think we have a mindset of Anyone can create a website. We see the Squarespace commercials during the Super Bowl, every Super Bowl for the last decade. We get advertisements. Oh, 365 days of social media posts. You know, swipe this social media ad and see your church grow. Like, I get that. Those are sexy. Those are attractive. Like, hey, I could do this myself and it's only going to take five minutes. You and I both know it's not going to take five minutes, right? same thing if i watch a youtube video it's four and a half minutes of how to fix your toilet flapper it's going to take me three trips to lowe's it's going to take me an hour and a half to find the right monkey wrench that i know is in my garage somewhere and then my wife's going to come up to me in the next morning hey why is this kneeling in the kitchen brown right so all that to say you're you're already outsourcing something i think there just needs to be a mental unlock of this is something that a professional can do and can do well now let me bring it back to our conversation on communications and marketing again i started a marketing company because what i like to do is take what you have and bring it to the masses I am not, and my team is not going to create your social media posts organically. We'll run your ads. But we're not going to do your social media posts. We're not going to do your bulletin. We're not going to do your emails because that's internal communication. I believe that is best handled by someone on staff or volunteer, someone that's involved in the church because you're internally speaking. It's one body part talking to the other body parts. What we do is we take your body and say, hey, look at this person over here. they're on to something you can be like them or you can experience the same transformation as them so when you're looking at communications like keep doing your own communications because no one's going to do it better than you church especially in the church communication space agencies are coming and going because they think they can do that at scale but it's really really hard So that's why we're focused on the marketing part of it. You bring us in, we're going to bring your church to the masses, or we're going to bring the masses to your church. That's the important thing because, again, it's really hard to communicate just to the 30 to 100 to 1,000 people in your church. It's nay impossible unless you have a marketing team of three, four, or five on your staff, in which case you're going to be paying $100,000 to $200,000 of salary. or you can pay an agency a couple hundred dollars up to a few thousand dollars a month and you get the whole stack right you get the brand designer you get multiple designers you get a copywriter you get a web designer you get ad designer you get ad seo specialist you get a pr specialist that's going to book your interviews you get all that for the price of one maybe full-time communicator and if you think about if you think about it that way it's it's much cheaper even though it's not a w-2 employee it's much cheaper to outsource than to try to have one individual handle all of that

Yeah. You just said a lot. So let's, let's break some of this.

I can't help myself, Tom. I'm sorry.

Listen, I love a good YouTube video just as much as the other one. I've actually saved myself some money by watching a YouTube video to fix a few things here. There. One thing I will not do is touch anything where the water line is involved. And so that's when I will hire someone. I've learned that lesson now. yeah i mean i've picked you know my washer before but it was not a water component washer thing but but the reality is in this day and age you can go on youtube and learn how to do a variety of different things but like you said when you say yes to something you're saying no to something else and with ministry leaders we are so booked with so many different things you could probably learn how to do these things but as justin already highlighted you're gonna look you're gonna have to watch the video you're gonna have to practice a little bit it's gonna cost you way more time than to just hire someone to do it and i also think too if finances are a problem and you're like we don't have the money for this well then maybe you do a campaign where you do run money for this again vision bleeds you know if you cast the vision to your church to say this is why we need to raise some money because we need to do x y and z you cast the vision and show them what's going to happen because of this i i believe that you can really raise the money for outsourcing marketing kind of stuff but also the um the thing about it is you it is like what justin said it is it is cheaper than hiring someone full-time because you don't have to do benefits you don't have to do all these other tax stuff it by you outsourcing just paying a flat fee for something it is really relatively cheaper

Yeah. And I mean, if you want to talk benefits of hiring an agency, we don't take vacations. Right. You don't have we don't get time off. We don't take six days. OK. And we're easy to fire. We're easy to hire and we're easy to fire. OK. Some states, it's impossible to fire people, even if you are a religious organization. Other places, you know, you try us for a few months and either you get your money back through a refund because there's a trial period or a refund guarantee. You don't have that with employees. And also you hire a W-2 employee. I mean, you're literally putting someone's full-time livelihood. And if it doesn't work out, it's going to be even harder to fire them. Whereas an agency, yeah, we have a relationship. We have a business relationship. and us personally we will do whatever it takes to correct an issue if there is an issue but it's not going to be while we're in hawaii for the week on a honeymoon if one of us takes a honeymoon there is someone else that's going to pick up that slack so you know if you want to talk about the benefits that that's a few benefits now there are some red flags you can't just go out and hire any agency which we can talk about that if you want tom uh but uh but yeah there is certainly advantages to having volunteers and staff to to do the work for you but again volunteers gonna take a lot of time they're gonna take a lot of overhead they're gonna need a lot from you um and they're gonna have to learn a lot and even staff people are gonna have to learn a lot too in fact that's kind of how i got my start was uh i had to learn how to make a website because i was hired on to do it and i had no idea what i was doing and essentially the church paid me 18 000 in salary to learn how to make a website whereas they could have just hired an agency for I mean, they could have hired a primo agency for half that.

That's right. Well, what have you seen to be some of the more effective things that some of the more popular things that people are outsourcing today?

So, again, I think the main thing you need to outsource is either your marketing or some kind of design, even if it's going to be internal stuff. Anything these days can be outsourced, Tom. I mean, really. I mean, we've even got, and I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing. Some pastors might. I don't think it's good. I don't think it's bad. I think it's what it is. We've even got some places that, some churches that are outsourcing their sermons, right? They have, we have platforms now. that will help you write your sermons um i think it's no different than a youth pastor that does hey we're going to do a dave platt series for our youth group or an andy stanley series for our youth group right you're outsourcing this content to help you teach your students so instead of sermon planning you're actually spending more time discipling your kids because you're not behind doing research and logos or logos or whatever it's pronounced you're not doing all that stuff you're outsourcing that so um anything can be outsourced the main question is is it helping you accomplish your mission if you're outsourcing things because you want to do it and it would be nice but it's not going to help you make disciples reach people change your city grow the kingdom whatever your mission statement is it is a waste of money even if it's the best deal in the world so i love outsourcing things people love to go find freelancers part-time contractors agencies that's all great Just make sure it's aligned with your mission. If it's aligned with your mission, there's no such thing as a bad deal. But my favorite things right now for outsourcing is either going to be design. So, hey, can you design our website even if we take it over because we can't pay you monthly? Can you design a new bulletin template? Can you design a couple email templates that we can use for our sending? I love one-time, we don't do that, but I love one-time setups. So at least if you're going to manage it, you don't have to spend months trying to figure out how to set it up. You just walk into a furnished home. I mean, we love that, walking into an Airbnb versus walking into an empty house.

Yeah. No, that's great. And tell people again why having a great website design is really important.

So a great website design is going to enhance the message. I will actually tell people that the website design is secondary. The content of the website is primary. Nobody ever came to church because they had a beautiful website. They come to church because the website shows them a life they could have. It shows them why their life isn't working out right now. And it introduces them to a messianic figure that can save them from their burdens and give them an everlasting life. Now, the design enhances that message. But if you have a pretty website and you don't have content that actually backs up and supports and accurately represents your church, that is the equivalent of having a sharp dressed, nice suit, shiny shoes preacher that isn't preaching the Bible. He's going up there and he's doing a motivational versus a guy who I mean, I remember one time at a family dinner. my family went to my cousin's church they're like i can't believe the preacher got up and was wearing shorts and sandals but man that guy could preach i mean he was convicting you know so i mean like even like a i'm not dressed up preacher that's preaching the bible and that god is moving through can change lives so a website design is important but it's not nearly as important as the content the messaging of the site the design just enhances that content again when people come to your church from the website they'll either say i saw people that looked like me which are pictures not design or they'll say you know what i really liked how this church does things which is not communicated through design it's communicated through what you write on the site and the design just makes sure that people pay attention it's worth paying attention to

Well, I agree. I agree with what you said. The content is so important. The design is helpful. And I also I think the design is really important, too, because a lot of people are watching. They're looking at their websites on phones. And so if you don't have a very mobile friendly website design, it's not going to it's going to confuse people more than it is going to direct them to the right content within your website. Correct.

yeah and if you try to make a mobile website look pretty you're going to work against yourself okay um you know what mobile mobile design is a totally different thing a little bit separate of the topic i mean if you're going to outsource it they need to be able to do a mobile design but it's one of those things where if you try to dress it up too much you're either going to slow it down you're going to make it so packed full of fancy doodads and design and stuff it's not going to be usable right i think we've all been to grandmother's house where she's got so many knickknacks you can't walk around it feels like you're walking around an antique shop you can't actually play at grandma's house which is what you want to do but you got to be careful where you play you can't go play over here and you have more restrictions than freedom so yeah definitely and again the con the message has to be there A great example of a site I just audited yesterday, beautiful design site, beautifully designed. I was like, guys, this is great. But no one's coming to your church from your website, and no one's visiting your website because you are saying nothing. You say, Sunday's at 1030, fill out a connect form. That's the first thing I see when I come to your website. So these guys don't need to outsource a designer. They need to outsource a content writer or a copywriter that can get the message of the church and transform it in a way that's going to communicate the right message to the right people in the right way. Because no one's walking around saying, oh, man, I wish I could fill out a connect form right now. No one's walking around the city saying that. uh no very few people are walking around saying i wish i could find a church that met on sunday mornings at 10 30. no what they're saying is i wish someone could figure out could tell me what's wrong with my life because i'm about to walk away from it all right that's that's the thing that we need to communicate with our websites and believe it or not our websites are not there to promote the church our website is there to promote jesus the vehicle of which is the church yeah again it's the content that you put in there and having someone there to kind of really be um a different set of eyes and different set of ears to help that is really really effective and really helpful yeah and getting that getting that third party feedback is invaluable you get a volunteer come in they're going to bring in their own history their own hang-ups or they're just going to reinforce your bad ideas and that's why church is constantly finding new platforms and new designs because they think the design is the problem it's not the design it's the message And messaging is a very hard thing to learn. And it's a very hard, it's a very easy thing to mess up. And so that's why, again, the design is often blamed when it's not the problem at all.

Right. 100%. Okay, well, let's talk about email a little bit because about what you guys do and encourage and how you can encourage with email marketing to people. What would you say about that?

So email is still great. Again, people always say, well, we don't check our emails. OK, then log off your email on your phone right now, please. Right now, they're not going to do that anyway. I am on my phone. Right. If if if you've got an issue with your your your paycheck. Right. HR ain't going to make a social media post to you. They're going to send you an email. OK, so email is still relevant. I worked in a college I.T. support desk. at the end of the 2010s, mid 2010s, I guess. And let me tell you, college kids, Gen Z, still using their email. So email is still relevant. People still check the email. They may not be checking your email because it's not valuable. It's not relative to them. It's not doing anything but asking them for more to do something that they don't really care about doing. So I love email. Now, remember, we're a marketing agency, so we can do some consulting on your internal stuff. But for your internal emails, I'll just say keep it simple. Don't use a MailChimp design. Don't use an active campaign design. Don't use any of those fancy designs. make it a personal email, okay? Make it from the pastor, make it from the receptionist, make it from whoever, but just say, hey, church, I wanna share this story with you. Hey, church, I wanna let you know about this event coming up and make it super relative to the person. as a as a dude i don't need to be getting information about the women of faith conference you should be emailing my wife about that as a as a parent as a grandchild as a grandparent with no children in the area i should not be getting kids information inviting my kids saying you're super excited for my kids to come to vbs i don't have kids my kids are 40 and then moved away right i might have grandkids but you ain't talking about my kids. So make them super relevant. It's going to take some time on the front end to set up. But once you do that, you're going to notice more people are checking your emails because they realize it's something important for them and make it super base. If I open a church email and it looks like a MailChimp template, it's going to look like a marketing email. I'm going to treat it like a marketing email. Disregard, right? And then I'm just going to stop checking emails altogether, right? You're building a habit. So make the emails personal text only make it from the pastor. Okay. And I, I personally, some people hate this, but Hey, if you have permission to write something on behalf of a pastor, sign it on behalf of the pastor, that's fine. Right? I think we've all had moments where there were letters that were sent out that the pastor said, Hey, i need a letter that says this and then the past this receptionist or whoever wrote it pastor signed it you know make sure the pastor okayed it make sure the pastor you know understands like the language or whatever but it's okay for these emails to go out from the pastor even though they're not literally written by the pastor good pastor has most important thing more important things to do okay believe it or not that that happens in almost everything okay the the person you follow on social media is not actually talking to you in the dms it's their assistant anyways all that to say Email is still very valuable as long as you make it valuable. If you treat it like, oh, I got to do another email. I got to write this up and send it out. No, you didn't care about it. And no one else is going to care about it either. Now, let me tell you my favorite. Can I tell you my favorite use for email? Yeah, that's going to be a really purpose driven church. by Rick Warren. It's the best church marketing book that was ever written, and it's not a church marketing book. I got that from Dan Kennedy, but it's absolutely true. He talks about the levels of involvement, and there's entire levels of involvement outside of your church. That's the people that have engaged in your church, your community, or the people that you're called to serve. And you have their emails. And if not, you could be getting their emails. Every block party you do, every VBS you do, every person that visits but didn't come back but did a connect card, you have their emails. use them use them you don't have to just call them after after they visit and say thanks and then never or put them into automation where they get automatic text inviting them back again you're not thinking about it they're not going to think about it but you can use those emails to say hey we appreciate you coming hey here's a cool story from someone from another parent uh that had their kid come to vbs or had their kid come to camp or thanks for coming to the block party this was so amazing by the way we have this other event that if you like that if you had a good time we want to invite you back again it's personal it's it's not a marketing email it really looks like a personal email and that's great because it should function that way and you you can encourage one-on-one dialogue get a random email from the pastor hey so and so haven't seen you a little bit can i pray for you and your family is there any help that we can serve you with right if we're going to say we're a church that loves people and wants to serve people stop sending messages constant messages that are saying can you help us No, send messages like, how can we help you? We say something, but then we don't treat our marketing that way. I firmly believe marketing for churches should be a discipleship tool to or at least open up discipleship opportunity. So let's treat them that way. If you sat down and you're going to write an email to someone, how can we use this as a discipleship tool? or how can we use it as a discipleship opportunity? You can do that with people outside of your church that come to events and you get their emails, or you can do it with people in your church. How can we disciple someone today on a Wednesday afternoon through this email and not just ask them for more free labor?

No, dude, this is great. A few things. Are you saying that when I DM you on Twitter, it's not you I'm talking to? It's some robot?

No, I've got a VA in Venezuela. No, I'm just kidding. I'm not big enough to not answer my own DMs. But no, you get me on the DMs. I love it when Tom DMs me or anyone, really.

The other thing is, I thought it was a very interesting point you made about the MailChimp template, because I think there's been a shift in how we do emails in church world. And it feels like I'm looking at my own church. When we send emails, we're sending, they look like newsletters, not emails anymore, but they come through email. And so it's like, I think we've got the mindset of we've got to promote, promote emails, make them look flashy, splashy design, everything. And then people will read them. But that's not the point of what you're saying at all. It's the content, kind of like what you're saying about.

Yeah. Again, no one's walking around saying, man, I wish I could read a newsletter right now. No one is thinking about your church as much as you do, pastor, church leader, volunteer. And you are interrupting their day. You've got to make it worth interrupting their day for. There are several newsletter lists that I'm on. and i get an email promoting their slippers no thanks but if i get an email that says message from our founder i'm gonna read that right because i like what is it are they shutting down are they taking a stance on something or commenting on something did something happen and he's like oh uh someone got did something bad it's not like like i'm interested um And if I get an email asking for money from my alma mater, disregard. But if it says, hey, here's the football schedule, that matters to me. So I'm going to look at the football schedule and see when I can get my free alumni gift. So when you write an email, again, you have to ask, why should they care? And really, I like to take it from assume they don't care. Because quite honestly, unless people are coming to your church every day, they probably don't care about your church every day. They may care about Jesus every day, but not so much the church building. So another thing is I'm not a fan of newsletters that try to pack everything in there. One newsletter, one topic, one call to action. That's it. I know you've got 10 things happening this summer. Send one email that's talking about one of those things and use it as a discipleship opportunity. Again, if you're going to promote VBS, Tell a story about what happened with a student last year and where that student is today. Tell a story about why you chose this VBS curriculum. What's the theme and what does it mean for us? Don't just say, VBS, Monday through Thursday in July, sign up here. Like, what's in it for me? Why should I care? What is VBS? I mean, maybe I know what it is, but I had a bad experience or I'm working that day. Why should I take off work to go volunteer at VBS? You have to really just assume that people don't care. And if you throw too much at them, you're going to make it really easy to not care and not do anything. But if you just focus on one thing at a time, it's going to be really easy for me to think about that. And if you only ask me to do one thing, a yes or no choice is easier than which do you choose? And then let's go figure out yes or no there. Like that's way too much choice.

Man, this has been awesome. I mean, I did not predict how this conversation was going to go.

We kind of went away from agency work, but...

But this has been enlightening because, again, I'm a big fan of this. Digital communications and online communications is vital for the next forefront of the church. We need to be really good in this area. If we want to be reaching our community, we've got to be doing this. And if we don't have anybody who can help us internally, the outsourcing can be a great thing. And hire someone like Justin Nava and his team. Again, it may seem like a big deal. But it's going to benefit your church, benefit your community on the long run so much more than spending a few bucks a month to get this kind of insight. This insight is really important. He just gave some great golden nuggets here that I think are really important, again, for the church to get into the next century and beyond as digital communications change. I mean, again. It wasn't 20 years ago. Actually, no, it was we had email for over 30 years now or so. But again, it's still like technology is changing so much that to be on the front end of this and knowing what's happening, how we can best communicate to our people in our community is so important. And we need a team like Justin and his team kind of around us to really help us.

And there is nothing wrong either with outsourcing education. I think a lot of pastors know the importance of continuing education. We're reading books every week. We're going to workshops. We're going to local trainings or we're networking with other pastors to learn what's working with them. Maybe we're going to a conference once or twice a year. There's nothing wrong with equipping and outsourcing education. for whoever's doing your digital stuff. Get them on a platform like Church Marketing University, hire a consultant like myself that will come in and look at everything and say, okay, here's your roadmap. Here's what you need to do next. I think that's very important because just because someone says they can do something doesn't mean they can do it well for your church. And again, websites are a prime example. So many people come to us and say, hey, we want you to do our website. We quote them. We're on the more expensive side. I'm not going to hide that. they say we'll go with a local person because they know our town but the local sign shop that also does websites they can do consumer websites they can't do relationship building discipleship focused church websites and so then they come back to us three years later thinking it's the design when really it's the strategy the intent and the messaging within it that you just can't get from a commercial website developer um i think it's possible with squarespace but again you're gonna have to know how to navigate all that so even even investing in in an outsourced consulting or coaching program or just pay for an hour i in fact i have a call i had a call this morning with someone that she couldn't afford us to do it but she could afford us to take a couple hours to like walk her through some of the high priority and help figure out her messaging and then she can go out and put that into her website book more uh she's a ministry she's not church so she can book more interviews get more people looking at her book get more people listening to our podcast so i think that's very very important to also consider like you don't have to go all in just just get some education outsource that so that at least your in-sourced volunteers are well equipped uh because i think we all know i think we've all hired that i.t volunteer that brings with him the 20 year old technology that he's been using because that's what he knows that his business but it's not going to work for your church right so i think that's very important even if you can't outsource the job outsource some of the education so again you don't have to pay someone eighteen thousand dollars to learn how to build your website well you can you can get it for pennies on that that's right well justin this has been awesome um if someone's listening right now they're like man i i gotta talk to justin immediately how would you say where would you connect them to um if you want to talk to me immediately eight three two eight six one seven six five four we uh i i answer the phone uh I think one of the things where I started my agency and I said, what's wrong with agencies? No one wants to talk to the people that are paying them. I think that's wrong. So anyways, if you want to talk to me immediately, you can send me a text or call me on that number. But really what I want to encourage you to do, what I want to encourage your audience to do is if you want to learn more about what it means to be better known in your community, to get people like... saying when when's the next church service i have to go or i there is something here that i need for me uh just open up the same podcast that you're listening to this or on youtube and just search for the best known church show and hit subscribe on that because we're on a little hiatus but we're coming off of it uh because of the whole i can't use my office right now uh but that's exactly what we're talking about is getting your church out there what is it going to take to be better known to be actually known for who you are as a church And again, for people to know, love it or hate it, this church is out to do some good in this community, or this church is out to transform some lives through Jesus Christ. Like, I like to say, even vegetarians know the best steakhouse in town. And even though there are some people that are going to hate your church, they'll at least hate you for the right reasons. Right.

Now, dude, Justin is awesome.

Go find the best known church show in your podcast app or YouTube.

I'll include it in the links. I'll also include it in your website and your Twitter handle because you are very active on Twitter, which is great. So I appreciate that. I appreciate that, Tom. Yeah. Hey, Justin, as always, it's great talking to you. Thanks for being with me today.

Hey, thank you all for listening. If you have any other questions, you can, is there, I don't know, find me somewhere, just search me or whatever and ask those questions. The worst thing you can do is have a question and then forget about it. Like you have a question right now, you should ask it, ask Tom, ask me, ask someone, because I think that's the great thing about podcasts. It's not just to learn, but it's to get you critically thinking. What can I do next? I love that. Thank you very much for listening. I hope this was the most valuable show you've listened to this week, this month. And thank you guys. God bless all of you. Hey, thanks, Justin.

All right. So what did you think? What stood out to you? What encouraged you? What questions do you have? I would encourage you. This is an important topic. Digital communications is really important. if you're spending a lot of time trying to figure it out yourself you may not be using your time or your money wisely because like I said in the interview when you say yes to something you say no to something else and so today we want to make sure that you're saying yes to the right things and working on the right things so that your ministry and your church can be ministering to the community that you are serving right now and that may involve outsourcing So what questions do you have? What thoughts do you have? Hit me up. You can put it in the comment section below. You can email me tom at thechurch.digital or you can hit me up on Twitter at TAPounder. Justin's on there as well. Click on his link in the show notes. We would love to talk to you a little bit more about this. Even if you don't hire Justin, Justin's not into doing this just to get hired. He's in this because it's really important and he wants to encourage you. So hit us up on Twitter. email or whatnot, we'd love to talk to you a little bit more about this so that you can be serving your community more effectively. All right, heroes. Well, thanks so much for being with me today. As always, if you enjoyed the podcast, subscribe to it. It's on YouTube. It's in Facebook groups. It's also on Apple, Google, Amazon, all the different podcast platforms. Subscribe to it there, your favorite one, and listen to it every time it comes out. We'd love for you to do that. And we'd love for you to rate it. If you enjoyed it, rate it and give us a positive review. All right, heroes. Well, I hope you have a great rest of your day, a great rest of your week. And until next time, have a great one.