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Holly Chaffee
2 years ago
I like this idea. Email is overused, and many people don't want their inboxes cluttered with newsletters. Many young people say they don't subscribe to email newsletters due to cluttered inboxes, and then there is the issue of obtaining email addresses.
I delivered mail for the post office for six months, so I have a bit of an inside view. Mail gets lost, carriers disregard what they don't think is essential to deliver (Even though it is against the law), etc. I do believe a high-quality, aesthetically pleasing newsletter may work. Kind of like speaking to a real person instead of a recording? Not sure if that is a good analogy.....
The upside here would be people may be delighted to get something in the mail of value. Of course, there will always be those who don't see the value and will throw it out, but maybe one day, they won't throw it out and read it. :) Then there are those looking for a new church, and I think a hard-copy newsletter would be delightful and effective. It could potentially showcase the church with a great first impression and create awareness.
Daniel Vos
2 years ago
What percentage of people within a 5 mile radius of your meeting place are aware that your church even exists? 1%? 2%? 5%? 20%?
When our founder, Douglas Vos, was a kid (in the 1960s and 70s), his mom was involved in helping the church send out a newsletter to every household in the community.
Perhaps this is an idea whose time has come once again. Imagine this: If every household within a 5-mile radius (or 2-mile radius, or 1-mile radius ... you decide!) received a double-sided, single-page newsletter from your church via snail mail, four times a year ... would this increase awareness of your church?
Here's how it would work:
You would click a button in your WordPress Dashboard called "Generate Print Newsletter"
You would answer a few questions about what you want to include in the newsletter: e.g., sermon titles, upcoming events, specific pages, etc.
In less than a minute, you would be presented with a draft of your print newsletter, which you could then edit. QR codes would be generated automatically, to make it easy to visit the parts of your website which interest them.
Once you edit the draft, you would then have a couple of options:
Option 1 - Save a PDF of the newsletter to your computer, which you could then print and mail to whomever you wish
Option 2 - Click a button to be walked through the process of generating/buying a list (e.g., "new movers in ZIP 12345," uploading the list, uploading the PDF, and then printing/mailing the newsletter using a click-to-mail service (e.g., https://click2mail.com/ or https://www.postgrid.com/).
In short, this tool would allow you to create and send a printed newsletter generated from your website content, on-demand, to large lists of local community members, in 60-90 minutes or less (if you are willing to pay the fees of a "click-to-mail" service).