With urgent announcements, it’s always a good idea to have a plan in place to get information out there. Some circumstances this weekend gave our staff a unique opportunity to give our communications strategy a test run.
This year’s student camps for Middle School and High School took place over the last week and a half (we’re hearing awesome stories of life change at both camps!). As Middle School Camp wrapped up, our staff received reports of a bug going around among those returning from camp and some of the families at home.
As the weekend progressed, we heard more reports of the bug and decided that Sunday services would need to be canceled as a precautionary measure to prevent more folks from getting sick. This gave us the unique challenge of notifying the 5500+ folks that attend a Long Hollow campus on a given Sunday morning (parents had already been contacted days earlier to make them aware that a bug was going around).
Thankfully, the nature of social media can make it much easier to spread this sort of announcement these days. Here’s the strategy we put into practice.
Get the Initial News Out Fast
This was the first use of our “breaking news” alert that I built into our website during our recent redesign. As soon as I received the news, I added the one sentence alert to our site and mobile site as a placeholder until a more thourough explanation was available. No matter how you access our site, this alert takes over your screen before you can continue browsing anything else. You can see the alert in action below.
Post the Details Quickly
People are always going to be curious about details, especially in reaction to such a drastic cancelation. We quickly posted an article at the top of our news feed explaining the situation, providing as much detail as possible.
Spread the Same News in a Variety of Ways
Once the the detailed explanation was up, we began promoting the announcement along with a link to the detailed article through all of our communication avenues (email blasts, websites, blogs, Facebook, Twitter, etc). We wanted to make sure it was as easy as possible for people to access the information.
Respond to the Community
It’s natural to have questions surrounding a decision like this. We made every effort to monitor the flow of discussion on Twitter and sites like Facebook in order to answer questions and correct inaccurate information at the source. We also looked for folks that tweeted about visiting Long Hollow this Sunday and contacted them about the schedule change.
Through all of these methods, we were able to effectively communicate an important schedule change in ways that simply wouldn’t be possible only a few years ago. Having a strong communication strategy isn’t just for building community; it can be dramatically helpful when information needs to move quickly to your audience.
What’s your game plan for a situation like this? Do you feel like you can quickly inform your audience when necessary?
Great post, Eric. As we build out our new website, this is something that needs to have a priority. I’ve seen a lot of churches fail at this, and expect folks to read a news item on the page to find out about breaking news. I like your approach, the breaking news is annoying and un-avoidable.