Save Your Church Time And Frustration With Integrated Communications

One of the biggest time killers for church administrators and communicators are the siloed systems we tend to use.

What is a siloed system? 

It’s any system that works independently from all of the other systems in the church communications arsenal. 

A good example of this is when a church uses something like a spreadsheet to manage their contacts, which then needs weekly updating and importing into a separate email marketing platform. It’s a tedious recurring task, a total pain, and is wide open for user errors.

Enter the integration.

For some people, integrating their communications systems is old news. But a surprising majority of churches aren’t doing it. In my experience, the biggest reason for this is not a lack of desire or know-how, but the fact that their outdated systems simply aren’t capable of it.

So I wanted to share a short list of systems and platforms I use, all of which have powerful integrations, which will save you tons of time!

Squarespace

9 times out of 10, this is my go-to website builder and its powerful integrations are one of the reasons why. 

Squarespace connects with your social media platforms, both pushing and pulling content back and forth. It integrates with MailChimp, Google Drive, and Zapier, all of which give you a massive amount of systems integration control.

If you take full advantage of the integrations Squarespace has to offer, you’ll be well on your way to a very efficient coms strategy.

Planning Center

People often ask me why I recommend Planning Center over ANY other Church Management System. One of the biggest reasons I usually say is their integrations. 

While most Church Management Systems out there are pretty much closed systems (only accessible with something called an API which you need to be a developer to understand and access), Planning Center advertises their integrations with major platforms like MailChimp for email marketing, Checkr for background checks, Stripe for payments and donations. What’s more, Planning Center allows outside developers to seamlessly connect with their platform.

What does all this mean? It means you can keep one contact list in Planning Center People (which is free by the way), which pushes updates to all your other communications systems automatically.

Thank you Planning Center. 

MailChimp

MailChimp is an important platform for integrations in two ways. First, it’s the go-to email marketing platform for Squarespace and Planning Center and so when you use these other two platforms, it’s the obvious choice for mass email.

But MailChimp also has its own built-in integrations with Social Media that allows you to auto-publish your content whenever you send out a new campaign.

In Conclusion

Obviously, if you use outdated platforms for your communications, you’ll need to make some big changes before you can do any of this. All of these systems are pretty user-friendly and if you have a decent communications director, getting them off the ground shouldn’t be a problem.

Even so, I know there’s a lot of churches out there that simply don’t have the bandwidth to tackle any of these projects. 

Have no fear! That's our passion at Clearpath. 

We love partnering with churches to help them accomplish all of their communications goals. If you’d like to talk about what a partnership looks like, click the link below and let’s set-up a time to talk!