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Here is a sticky one in the new 2 hour approach – Less Announcments. Much of it I get. We can waste an entire good meeting on announcements. However without announcements some things will get lost. Such as humanitarian efforts.
In my ward we have no paper bulletin. Ours is sent by email on Saturday night. No one reads them (not that there was much to news in them anyway). But people my parents age, still do rely on paper printed items. Even if they are email connected many 65+ people only look at email once a week and only whats at the top of the page.
Starting in January we will be dropping the 2nd hour announcements. I am curious to see how long that holds out.
Time will tell.
I’m all in favor of the less announcements thing. I get that some people don’t do social media and/or don’t text or even email. If you need to have a paper bulletin just for those people (and if you need to beef it up) then I think that’s what needs to happen. I don;t go to church to hear about: 1) things I already know about because I do look at the calendar in LDS tools or
2) things I don’t care about because I’m not going anyway or
3) the “it was fun” report on the latest campout/youth activity or
4) the plea for free labor (as opposed to actual service) that I’m also not going to
Seriously, my ward gets so carried away in these things sometimes that they are in excess of 20 minutes. It’s not quite as bad in SM, but I have sat through 10 minutes of announcements there, too (because sometimes my bishop can’t help himself when he begins to pontificate).
I know I got my wish (finally) with the two hour block, now I’m going for the 1 hour block (30 minute SM, 25 minute other meeting).
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I know I got my wish (finally) with the two hour block, now I’m going for the 1 hour block (30 minute SM, 25 minute other meeting).I plan to start practicing in January. SM and some hall time, every other week. I don’t think I will be alone. SS has been an absentee program in my ward for a while.
mom3 wrote:
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I know I got my wish (finally) with the two hour block, now I’m going for the 1 hour block (30 minute SM, 25 minute other meeting).I plan to start practicing in January. SM and some hall time, every other week. I don’t think I will be alone. SS has been an absentee program in my ward for a while.
Mine, too. More than half the people are in the hall/foyer or chapel. I think SS will be too big to hold in the RS room now so it will have to move to the chapel.
I made a joke in my talk today about the two hour block being good because I won’t waste that middle hour in the hall anymore. The truth is I’m going to miss it a bit – and don’t shoot me – it’s actually when I do a lot of ministering (assigned and unassigned).
:shh: A peeve of mine is that we do not do a very good job of advertising our activities. For a missionary minded church it seems strange that the primary means of communication is over the pulpit to those that are sitting in the pews. Seems to me to be a variation of “preaching to the choir.” What to do about it? Email lists, pamphlets, bulletin boards, and websites would be my suggestions.
Quote:Mine, too. More than half the people are in the hall/foyer or chapel. I think SS will be too big to hold in the RS room now so it will have to move to the chapel.
I made a joke in my talk today about the two hour block being good because I won’t waste that middle hour in the hall anymore. The truth is I’m going to miss it a bit – and don’t shoot me – it’s actually when I do a lot of ministering (assigned and unassigned).
I too actually use it for ministering – both to people on my list and those not. I learn things that are useful when I am in the “hall class”. In January, our ward is moving to an older building. We will be sandwiched in between 2 other wards. Hall time will be a necessity.
Roy – I hear you.
Quote:A peeve of mine is that we do not do a very good job of advertising our activities. For a missionary minded church it seems strange that the primary means of communication is over the pulpit to those that are sitting in the pews.
We had a less active sister pop up and ask when Christmas Craft day was on Facebook. With all our millions of dollars, why not invest in nice local print material that can be distributed to members and the community alike. We had a music event and it was not a problem to print out glossy cards, flyers, but then they just got left on a table in the foyer. So Sunday only attendees had access to them. Now I know the idea was for Sunday Attendee’s to pass it along, but with our buildings being locked up all week long, a stack of nice cards isn’t going to be picked up by a stranger crossing our threshold.
I was poking around some historic general church handbooks of instruction recently and chanced upon the following in the 1960 edition, it was bolded: Quote:Making too many announcements should be avoided. The essential notices should be given at the beginning of the service.I didn’t read every handbook ever to see where this language first appears. Suffice to say that it has been an issue for the last 60 years which tells me that if you like announcements (your turn to teach a lesson/fill the time) then you can rest easy. If you don’t like announcements, you’re in for a lifetime of disappointment.
My first thought when I heard they were doing away with announcements? “What are the teachers going to do with that extra 15-20 minutes?”
I have a nice, gentle, grandfatherly, passive STUBBORN bishop. He would announce Teacher’s Council for me for a couple months when I was doing it regularly. In my view, after he saw I was committed, he refused to announce it to the Ward on the day it was to happen to remind them. As a result, I ended up passing out 1/4 page flyers to everyone affected. I also learned to use REMIND which is a free mass texting tool. Those things worked. The 1/4 page flyers caught the people who don’t text, and the REMIND message caught the people who text. I also developed an email list.
I don’t bother asking priesthood leaders for things anymore. They almost always disappoint. It’s almost always more important to me than it is to them. And when they are unsupportive, I stop caring and get negative. It’s best to be self-reliant in getting your message out. Therefore, I don’t care about the announcement reduction. I am captain of my own ship in that regard.
It’s really the only way I get to hear about some things. A lot of it *doesn’t* get put online. It’s funny, I started hearing about more stuff and getting a sense of what was going on in the branch when my husband was called as the executive secretary. NOTE: He is good about keeping the confidences of his calling – it’s just that I learned the channels of learning information and he told me non-confidential stuff:)
mom3 wrote:We had a less active sister pop up and ask when Christmas Craft day was on Facebook. With all our millions of dollars, why not invest in nice local print material that can be distributed to members and the community alike. We had a music event and it was not a problem to print out glossy cards, flyers, but then they just got left on a table in the foyer. So Sunday only attendees had access to them. Now I know the idea was for Sunday Attendee’s to pass it along, but with our buildings being locked up all week long, a stack of nice cards isn’t going to be picked up by a stranger crossing our threshold.
My ward tried proactively advertising an event once. Our youth spent their entire mutual night running around town, papering windshields with flyers and asking stores if they could put the announcement up in their window. Some of them even got chased off by a security guard who was excited that he actually had something to do for once.
Anyways, the night of the event came. Our bishop wanted the number of nonmembers who showed up tracked, to see how effective the flyers were. Not a single nonmember showed up. Our ward barely did more than a small paper insert in the program after that.
Quote:My ward tried proactively advertising an event once. Our youth spent their entire mutual night running around town, papering windshields with flyers and asking stores if they could put the announcement up in their window. Some of them even got chased off by a security guard who was excited that he actually had something to do for once.
Anyways, the night of the event came. Our bishop wanted the number of nonmembers who showed up tracked, to see how effective the flyers were. Not a single nonmember showed up. Our ward barely did more than a small paper insert in the program after that.
It is a challenge every religion has. Many churches now have a public Facebook and Webpage and a reader board out front. Sadly we don’t, nor can we. All Facebook pages have to be closed/private. The Salt Lake Church is the only one who can have a Webpage. No reader boards for us.
My input was based on Roy’s observation of being a missionary minded church but never passing out community announcements. He was spot on.
As to fliers on cars, even businesses lose on that. The other problem is our attitude of one invite should bring in the world. Not!! People come because a relationship exists. In the other churches I work with, they have office hours and staff (even if it’s just one old lady at the front desk), but a person can come in, ask questions, get assistance, etc. And pick up fliers or announcements in the lobby. Does it get you a rush of non-members (no matter what sect) – maybe not, but I have seen it create a trickle effect.
Our buildings are dark – every day but Sunday. At night, even with stuff going on, the parking lot is dark. We have no daytime office hours, except maybe a family history center. So suddenly one flier gets stuck on a car in a mall parking lot. It’s a throw away. But if there was an annual thing and people had a small relationship with the church, then it grows.
I could wax on forever on this. But my day is disjointed already. I get the struggle or fail you are pointing out. It will continue to fail until we make a strident game change. And in all the storm Nelson is brewing up, this one won’t happen.
PazamaManX wrote:
My ward tried proactively advertising an event once. Our youth spent their entire mutual night running around town, papering windshields with flyers and asking stores if they could put the announcement up in their window. Some of them even got chased off by a security guard who was excited that he actually had something to do for once.Anyways, the night of the event came. Our bishop wanted the number of nonmembers who showed up tracked, to see how effective the flyers were. Not a single nonmember showed up. Our ward barely did more than a small paper insert in the program after that.
We had two very similar experiences with a “family history fair” and a “emergency preparedness” event. Much community advertising, posters, flyers, pass along cards, newspaper, we even got radio spots. We got one old guy to the family history thing. These were both a few years ago, we’ve attempted nothing similar since.
That’s not just a church thing. I organized an event last Wednesday when practically everyone failed to turn up at. Yet the previous one had good attendance. The variable is the individual. Weather. Time of the week, month, or year all play a part.
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