Email used to be the great way to communicate digitally, but now it’s pretty niche. Except…
Except it’s still the default. There are far better solutions to every specific communication need. But just about everyone has decent email.
I’m going to be provocative and opinionated now. here goes.
Unless you can’t get one or both for free, your church (or church-affiliated organisation) should use either Google or Microsoft’s business-grade service for email, and everyone who is acting in any kind of official capacity should be on the same system.
That’s probably not where you are right now. And, I have to admit, it’s what I’m working towards, but I’m not there yet. But I think we have to get there, and here’s why: for the reputation of your church, for the reliability of your email itself, and for the extra resources that you’ll get.
I can’t pretend to know your situation. And I certainly can’t promise it will be easy moving from what you have today, because change is never easy. But if you’re thinking, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” I want to ask you, what will you do when it does break? When you have a data leak and realise there’s confidential information stored in places you’ve lost access to; when something just stops working and you can’t even work out who to call; when, yet again, everyone is complaining that emails aren’t reaching them or that they can’t access this or that important working document — that’s pain many of us have experienced, and it’s well worth avoiding!
Reputation
As a church, you’re used to navigating a lot of ambiguity. Churches are similar to other organisations, but different too in important ways.
You probably have a core team, but it’s not always clear where the wider team ends. Many individuals will have more than one role, and a few may have many roles. Different churches think of the people who engage in different ways, but even in churches that have a very clear and concrete idea of church membership, there will always be people in transition, and often a great many who engage occasionally or quite regularly may not be on that list.
Put simply, there’s lots of room for confusion.
But in the case of email, it’s possible to achieve far more clarity.
So in my view, there are three features that I think are essential to use email well as a church.
First, it’s important to be able to have role-based and personal email addresses, to have worked through how these are to be used, and to encourage individuals with responsibility and authority in the church to use their official church email addresses for all church business.
Second, it needs to be possible for more than one person to access specific mail boxes without sharing passwords.
Third and last from my critical list, it needs to be routine for email accounts to be closed or transferred when needed.
The non-profit commercial-grade email services from Microsoft and Google have these features, are widely used and well-supported. Are there other alternatives? Almost certainly. But for almost all of us, I don’t think it’s worth casting the net wider.
Reliability
Will your emails be delivered far more often than not? When something goes wrong, will it get sorted out? Like it or not, there are very few email platforms where you can be highly assured on both fronts, and Google and Microsoft have two of them.
The email for Church Free Web is handled by two systems. First, I use email services from the web host, Guru.co.uk for individual emails. So if I receive and reply to an email, that’s what’s doing the job. Second, for email newsletters and automatic emails produced by the website itself, I use MailPoet‘s email sending service. But for church, at the moment we use Microsoft’s business-grade email for key staff accounts, and Google’s equivalent for (almost) everyone and everything else personal. Our website and church management system has its own email capability and is connected to Microsoft and Google, so emails from this system use the correct server for each individual account, and a private system for bulk email (for the weekly newsletter, for instance).
So am I practising what I preach? I’m trying to, and that’s a work in progress.
For church, the “almost” is a work in progress, because there have been lots of individual gmail accounts used for church purposes and it’s a big exercise to rationalise. Email addresses go into email address books, so it takes time to make changes. Once we’re there, that will be in our favour, because even if we change the email systems, we won’t need to change the email addresses.
For this website, the primary use of email is for newsletters and the like, which is a specialist field (that I plan to revisit in future blog posts). That also means that I want to have both a connection and a distinction between the site-specific email address and my own personal and church email accounts. So a decent quality email service from my web host works well enough, and if at some future date I needed all those extra features, I could upgrade.
Resources
Both Microsoft’s and Google’s free-to-nonprofit services come with a host of other features and applications.
I’ll dig into this in more detail later, but for now I want to highlight a few features at headline level.
- Easy, secure file and folder sharing (Google: Drive; Microsoft: OneDrive)
- Real time collaboration tools (Microsoft: Word, Powerpoint, Excel and others; Google: Docs, Sheets and Slides and others)
- Admin console that can be shared, to manage all services
- Support
Plus Google offers Ad Grants: an account where you can use most Google advertising tools without any cost, with limits that are well in excess of what a typical church can even spend.
I’ll dig into the details more, and just make one clarifying point here. You’re probably familiar with the consumer-grade versions of all of these services. That’s good, because the learning curve is shallow. So for most of us, the key benefit isn’t the facilities as such, but the simplicity, security and manageability.
Disclaimer
My opinions may help your situation, or they may not. They aren’t unbiased, and I haven’t invested a great deal of time in thoroughly checking everything out.
I can offer to help you through the process of getting these tools, but I can’t guarantee success.
What I’m willing to be is a friend and fellow-builder of digital, missional resources. If that’s of use, I’m happy to work with you!
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