To make communicating with the church congregation easier, the Here I Am team continues to analyze different communication channels to find out what works best. Way back in July we wrote about cutting through the clutter of these channels and how an app-based approach can be a great solution to the information overload that people experience.
One form of communication that we see every church use is email. This makes sense – according to Statista more than 90% of all internet users use email (Source). Communication is all about going to where people are, but how reliable can it be when EVERYONE is trying to reach people through this medium?
Over the long Thanksgiving weekend, I was amazed at how many emails I was receiving from different retailers. Everyone had to share their Black Friday and cyber-Monday deals, flaunting absurd discounts and deals “too good” to pass up.
Tom and I both did a count to see how crazy it had gotten. Over three days since Thanksgiving night, Tom received 109 unique emails. 52 were advertisements, 21 were some form of notification, 6 were something he wanted to open. I received 170 emails with 100 of them being advertisements, 60 being notifications, and 10 being something I was interested in opening.
In summary, only 5% of emails in our inbox were something we wanted to see. The rest was clutter and noise. A simple channel, email, has become cluttered with advertisements and notifications that can quickly become overwhelming. Even when I started writing this blog, I received 3 separate emails about cyber-Monday deals that are “too good to pass up”.
With the overload of information that is going through email, it can feel like a chore every time the inbox is opened. Spending ten minutes a day sifting through the junk and spam to find what is important feels like doing the dishes, as opposed to enjoying communication with important groups and receiving valuable information.
Cutting through the clutter! It continues to be harder as everyone tries to use the same channel. In a day and age where every party is competing for information, churches need to make it as easy as possible to get messages out. Dedicated smartphone-based solutions are they can do just that.
