How Sustainability in Ministry Marketing Can Save Your Sanity, and Your Brand

I’ve been a part of many different size ministries, from a solo marketer in an organization with a total of 3 staff, to a communications team of two, to a development team of around 20 in a ministry of over 200 staff. The question that consistently came up wasn’t just, “What should we be doing?” but, “How much should we be doing?” This is an important question for teams everywhere, especially for marketing teams that plan and produce much of their own workload.

Effective Boundaries in Ministry

Years ago, I was part of a great team that operated mostly as the production arm of the ministry, rather than as a strategic marketing group that thought through what we were doing and why. That changed when a new manager came in and began asking difficult but valid questions. We started setting up guardrails, like request forms, timeline minimums, and even negotiations with executive and managerial staff. We all practiced the word “no” a lot. You can’t always use that word, but with respect, whenever necessary (if possible), we did. With the CEO, we used a different tactic. We would always say yes but inform her that doing the requested project would push back all the other work we had (as we showed her the list of projects we were working on). This informed, but still left her with the final say.

Ministry Marketing Workloads

It was a larger team, but we still had real limits. At almost every weekly staff meeting, we would ask, “How do we repurpose, recycle, or reuse something we’ve already created?” The idea was that if we can’t get at least two uses out of something we pour our time and expertise into, is it worth producing? Here’s an overview of our workload: multiple social posts per day, 1-2 blog posts every week, a printed color 6-page newsletter 8 times per year, 2 major and 4-5 minor events every year, 20 unique radio spots every month all year long, somewhere in the realm of 50-60 unique mass emails each year, and of course our fall campaign that involved probably a dozen marketing layers from TV to billboards to LIVE social media posts. Whew! That is not an exhaustive list – but it was an exhausting one at times.

Repurpose, Reuse, Recycle

Imagine for a moment that everything we did was single-use and essentially thrown away afterward. That gets depressing quickly. Now let’s picture a team half the size and a quarter the budget. You still need to rise above the fray through consistent communication. You still need to guide your audience, inspire them to give, and support the ministry side of the organization. In that scenario, single-use work becomes an absolute non-starter. Now, take all your unique efforts from the last 12 months, figure out how to repurpose each one of those finished projects, and just like that, you have doubled what you could normally produce.

In some instances, you can create many pieces of content from a single project. Take a video interview as an example. From the initial interview video itself, you can transcribe the video and create a blog post, then pull 2-3 different quotes to use on social media. You can also take the video interview and cut that into 3-4 powerful video/audio soundbites. So, from a single project, there is potential for a dozen spin-off pieces, saving you many hours of work and greatly increasing your output.

Marketing Systems and Software Sustainability

It’s not only organizational boundaries and project repurposing that are necessary to help a team thrive. The software and services you use can create chaos or alleviate your daily workload. Your website platform, donor database, online donation software, etc. can help make your job simpler or cause endless headaches with complex use and a lack of technical support. A question I always ask when working with an organization “Are the solutions and softwares I’m suggesting sustainable for this team?” If the answer is no, we find a different solution that fits better. I’ve worked with organizations using incredible software that requires dedicated staff that they did not have. This left them with expensive tools they could not utilize and a daily reality that would slowly grind forward because of the complexity. Other organizations I’ve worked with have had archaic systems that don’t accomplish what they need, but it’s what they know (or who they know), and they are reluctant to take the leap to a new way of doing things.

My suggestion for organizations whose marketing team is smaller than 5 people is to prefer ease-of-use over cost-savings. Prefer integrated, user-friendly solutions that remove requirements rather than add them. All-in-one solutions (more realistically most-in-one’s) are great considerations. HubSpot is a good example of this: they are a contact database with donation records, website builder, email marketing platform, social posts and ads hub. Paired with a donation platform like FundraiseUp, most of your online interactions flow seamlessly to one location for your reporting and online workload. I love the phrase, “Work smarter not harder.” It’s a big deal to automate tasks that your team previously had to do manually, and the more of that you do, the less pressure your team will feel day-to-day.

Conclusion

You and your team have a lot on your plate. You are raising awareness and finances for a ministry I’m sure you believe in and are inspired by. By engaging in some or all of these suggestions you can increase team health and productivity for your ministry, and that’s a rare combination. I’ve been practicing this for close to 20 years, and nothing you do is going to be perfect, especially the first attempt. Don’t lose heart. That large organization I was a part of that was able to do these things – it took us almost a decade to pull off. We’re playing the long game, and much of what I’ve shared simply takes patience and consistency to implement well, one step at a time. If you or anyone you know could use help in any of these areas, or you need support with other marketing efforts, James Bishop Co. was created exclusively to be a ministry to ministries. Reach out and let’s have a conversation.