Tag Archives: communication

Changes to our Communication

Anthropology, Church, Thoughts, , , ,

We have been communicating about our Wycliffe ministry for almost two decades, and during that time we have tried to communicate well in both content and form. Our first newsletter was very plain, with a small picture and lots of text:
Header from the first newsletter we sent

By our next newsletter, we had a title, header, tagline, the Wycliffe logo, and those cool marble bars that came standard with Publisher:
Header from our first Philologos newsletter

Later on, we went minimalist, removing some of the busyness to focus more on verbal and pictorial content, with more white space:
revamped philologos header

Even later, we used pictures as header backgrounds, allowing more visual appeal, but also another place to put a picture, without crowding the rest of the newsletter:

Header for Philologos XIII number 3

In all these reworkings of our newsletter, one thing we had not really re-evaluated is the quarterly two page production itself. Since we joined Wycliffe 17 years ago, we have seen blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and other media platforms come (and go). Today our friends and family are more connected by social media than by Email. Similarly, people are more connected by phone than by computer.

Given these changes, it seems that we’ve been writing too much and too little. A two page newsletter is longer than most people seem to read in a single sitting. At the same time, hearing from us each quarter means that an eternity (in social networking time) passes between each newsletter. So, with your permission, we are going to try putting out shorter updates more often.  Don’t worry, those of you who fear missing out on my wordiness will find links to longer articles (like this one) here on our blog. 🙂

I say “with your permission” in all seriousness, because we want to help you be a real part of our work. The last thing we want is to spam anyone, or stuff your inbox with more mail than you asked for. This is one of the reasons we now use Mailchimp, because they don’t allow spam, and because they have a simple unsubscribe function in each footer. But we would love to hear from you if you have any questions or concerns about this change —or about just about anything else. :-)

Our Email address is on each of our Emailed newsletters; if you don’t have one handy, you can also send us a message through our Wycliffe ministry page, through the “Finances/Write Us” link above right (or below on mobile devices), which goes here.

We welcome your feedback! Tell us what you think, and we’ll see what we can do.
Our goal, after all, is to communicate well.

I thank my God in all my remembrance of you, always
in every prayer of mine for you all making my prayer with joy,
because of your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now.
—Philippians 1:3-5 (ESV)

A New Blog? Really?

Family,

So what, we’re starting up a new blog. When we signed on to work with Wycliffe, we hadn’t yet heard of blogs (amazing how things change), and each time we come back to the US for awhile, there seems to have been a complete makeover on how Americans communicate. After our first term, we discovered blogging, and used it during our second term. But we started a number of blogs, most of which we didn’t know what to do with. One survived, which was essentially stories and pictures about life in Africa. We weren’t really sure about talking about work issues (either how much people would care about the details, or what the rules were on this kind of communication). So we hesitated talking much about work on our blog, and didn’t have any real way to do that.

Meanwhile, Facebook and other social media took over the internet, and blogs seemed to be already largely passé. Who wants to sit through a couple pages, when you can get the gist in 140 characters? Most of our successful communication with people during our second term in Africa seemed to be through Kim’s time on Facebook, as ironic as that seemed to me.

But we continued to put out quarterly newsletters more or less faithfully, and we continued to put out more frequent text Email updates, though those were less frequent than we had hoped. And over the years, our address list transitioned from one system to another, and got more complicated and cumbersome. This became so extreme that the last couple times we sent something out, we took waaay too long to get the address lists ready, and probably made a few mistakes (sorry!).

So we decided to make an overhaul of our communication, and this summer seemed as good a time as any to do it. We now have one place to park all of our communication, at atoznback.org. This site has some basic information, as well as links to other resources such as this blog, a sign-up page to receive our news, and a new page on Wycliffe.org where people can also connect with us, including supporting our Wycliffe ministry financially.

And the news sign-up and distribution is being handled by mailchimp, which seems to have become a standard for polite (non-SPAM) distribution of Emails.  It has bugged me for over a decade, that we don’t have any straightforward way for people to say “Thanks, but we really don’t want your news anymore.” So the one or two people who have said that really stick out to us, and everyone else just keeps getting our news.  We hope and trust that they want it, but now people have a non-intrusive way of backing out, if they want to.

In addition to mailchimp organizing the list, it also organizes groupings.  We’ve always had a quarterly newsletter which is both printed and mailed, as well as Emailed, as well as more frequent text-only updates. But this also had become excessively complicated in our database, especially where addresses went stale, or we hadn’t heard from someone in a long time. Now, if someone is getting our more frequent news, but just wants the quarterly newsletter (or vice versa), they can just click on the “update subscription preferences” link, and indicate whatever they want to receive. So in short, we’re looking to put the power to the people, in addition to streamlining our processes; hopefully we all see that as a win-win.

So I’m not sure how much, or in what way, this blog will get used, but I have hope for the future of our communication.  I’m looking forward to more information and relationship, and less frustration and logistics. But then again, aren’t we all? ;-)