Clearpath
Strategic
Partnerships
Take your church communications from aimless & sloppy, to sharp and strategic.
The Clearpath Strategic Partnership is a custom communications development pathway, designed specifically for your church and your team. Each partnership sets specific communications and marketing goals and we provide consulting, training, and platform updating in order to help you achieve them.
OUR PROCESS
Once we’ve finished your Church Communications Assessment, we’ll have clarity on what your strategic pathway looks like. Regardless of your church’s specific goals, we’ll be using a combination of consulting, systems updating, and training to help archieve them.
Consulting
COMPREHENSIVE STRATEGY
During the consulting portion of your partnership, we focus on your comprehensive communications and marketing strategy. We take into account your strengths and weaknesses and decide where to put your church’s focus, time, and resources.
All components of your partnership are ongoing, but the consulting portion is focused mostly during the beginning.
Updating
PLATFORM DEVELOPMENT
Often a necessary part of our partnerships include updating one or more components of your communications systems. Often it’s upgrading an old website, creating a church management system, or designing a new logo.
Platform development will be completed at whatever point in our partnership it best fits.
Training
SKILLS DEVELOPMENT
A key aspect to our partnership will likely be training your team on the skills and competencies it takes to run an effective communications team. Examples of this can be learning to use a church management system, build a website, or even optimize social media.
The training portion of your partnership will be based on your team’s needs, not one-size-fits-all.
What’s typically covered in a communications development pathway?
Every pathway is customized for each church; however, the consulting, updating, and training we usually do cover the follow topics, strategies, and systems.
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The first thing we’ll do during our CDP is optimize the CDP by clarifying and strategizing your communications and marketing goals. During this time we will:
Determine who from your team will be a part of the process
Establish a meeting, updating, and training schedule
Solidify the partnership goals
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Depending on the age and quality of your current platforms, we may need to do some updates. The process usually take place near the beginning of the partnership as part of your training will focus on these new systems. The following are some of the typically updates we need to make:
Church Management System - we encourage church to use Planning Center
Website - we recommend using a flexible & affordable platform like Squarespace
Branding - from logo to vision statements, you’re branding may need some updating as well
Marketing - email and text marketing platform like MailChimp and Clearstream will help maximize your engagement.
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We need to get your website optimized for visitors. That means we need to help you create content that will help get website visitors to become church visitors. We’ll also want to make sure you’re website is easy to find on google and other ways people find websites.
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An essential area where we’ll spend lots of time is coaching your communications team to become more intentional, creative, consistent, and productive. We’ll be work with your team to establish the rhythms and systems they’ll need to work better as a team in the respective tasks.
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We contact with a social media expert to put churches through a multi-week, one-on-one course to help churches determine which platforms to use, how to use them, how to maximize engagement, and more.
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Having a church management system is one thing, using it effectively is something else. Your ChMS is the hub of church organization and communication. If you are properly trained on how it works and what it can achieve, you could be missing out on connecting more people with your ministry.
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We’ll train your creatives to use tools like Photoshop and Canva in order to create graphic design for the church. This will help you create ongoing graphic like social media and sermon art, as well as one-off project like banners and signs.
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One important area of communications churches often miss is creating a dedicated space for internal communications. Your website is generally for NEW people, so creating a secondary website or app that’s design for your people, can really help get people connect. We’ll help you create this space and optimize it for your community.
WHO LEADS THE STRATEGIC PARTNERSHIP?
Our strategic partnerships are lead by Josh Wierenga (Chief Simplifier) and Amber Bosman (Project Simplifier). We’ll also bring on specific trainers to equip you in various specially areas as they apply. Tap/click to meet the rest of the team.
Josh Wierenga
Josh launched Clearpath in 2016 out of a desire to see normal-sized churches create and maintain effective communication. In that time, Josh has consulted with over 75 churches, where he’s helped teams like yours clarify and maximize their communications and marketing ministries.
Amber Bosman
Amber is the Project Simplifier at Clearpath and comes alongside our church partnerships to organize, guide and equip. In our assessment partnerships, Amber takes care of all administrative responsibilities so our church partners can get the most out of their assessment.