It's Been in the Bulletin For Weeks

Every church communications director has heard it.

You're standing in the lobby after a service, or in the break room on a Monday morning, and someone says it — casually, almost apologetically — as if they're doing you a favor by letting you know: "I didn't know that was happening, why wasn't it in the bulletin?"

And somewhere in the back of your mind, a quiet alarm goes off. Because you know exactly how many times you announced it. You put it in the bulletin for weeks. You sent the email. You posted it on three platforms. You had someone mention it from the stage. You updated the website. You did everything right, and somehow this person — a regular attender, not a first-time guest — had no idea.

So what do you do? Most of us reach for the same solution: more. More channels. More posts. More repetition. We add a text blast to the rotation. We send a second email. We ask the pastor to mention it again next week. We assume that if people aren't getting the information, it must be because we haven't said it enough.

More is rarely the answer. Chasing it will burn you out without solving the problem.

Why doesn’t saying it more often fix the problem?

When someone says "I didn't know about that," they're not telling you that you failed to communicate. They're telling you that the information didn't reach them in a way that stuck. Those are two very different problems, and they require two very different solutions.

Your congregation is managing hundreds of messages a day, from inboxes, social feeds, group chats, news apps, kids' school portals. By the time your church email lands, they've already decided, consciously or not, whether it's worth their attention. Adding volume to that environment doesn't break through the noise. It only becomes part of it.

The old marketing principle that a person needs to see something seven times before they internalize it doesn't translate cleanly to a world of smartphones and social media, where the average person fields a thousand messages a week. What it actually tells us today is that the burden is on the communicator to be relevant and clear, not just persistent.

Where does your congregation actually look for church news?

The question isn't "how many times did we say it?" The question is "did we say it in the right place and time, in the right way, and to the right people?"

Most church communications strategies are built around what the church wants to say, not around how the congregation actually receives information. Your congregation is not a monolith. A 68-year-old who has attended for thirty years and a 34-year-old who started coming last spring are not consuming information the same way. Your young families aren't necessarily reading the printed bulletin. Your older members may not have notifications on for the church app. Your college students aren't opening emails.

Before you add another channel to the rotation, do the diagnostic work. Survey your congregation, even informally. Ask people: Where do you actually look when you want to know what's happening at church? What's the first place you check? What's the one thing you actually read every week? The answers will probably surprise you. And they will tell you exactly where to put your energy.

Why does promoting everything everywhere stop working?

When everything is promoted everywhere at the same volume, people tune it out. Your bulletin becomes ignorable wallpaper. Your emails get deleted. The announcements from the stage become the time people check their phones. You've trained your audience to stop paying attention, not because they don't care, but because they've learned that not everything is relevant to them.

A better approach is to match the message to the medium and the audience. High-priority, whole-church information belongs in your highest-attention channels: a personal word from the pastor, a well-crafted email, a clear and simple slide before service. Targeted ministry information belongs in targeted places: a specific group text, a ministry-specific email list, a poster in the hallway where that group gathers. The goal is not to reach everyone with everything. It's to reach the right people with the right thing at the right moment.

When you make a pattern of valuable, relevant messaging in places people actually find it, something shifts. Your congregation starts to trust that when you communicate something, it matters. They stop filtering you out because you've stopped crying wolf.

Why does a clear message reach more people?

Inspiration that's easy to act on travels further than information that requires effort to decode. If your announcement requires someone to remember a date, a time, a location, and enter a long registration link in a mobile browser — and those details are buried in the third paragraph of an email — you've lost most people before they get there. If your social post has the same energy as every other post you've published, it won't stop anyone's thumb from scrolling.

One message. One ask. One next step. Make it easy to say yes. Answer the question the recipient is already asking: what's in it for me?

The next time someone tells you they didn't know about something, resist the urge to reach for more. Ask a better question instead: did we say it in the place they actually look, in a way that was clear enough to act on? If the answer is no, you don't need to say it louder. You need to say it smarter.