How to Write and Distribute Church Announcements [With 5 Examples]

Church announcements are a fantastic way to keep your community connected and up to date. Unfortunately, some churches neglect to consider whether their followers are receptive to these messages. Your announcements could be more engaging.

At ChMeetings, we have found a few church announcements examples worth noting. Your messages and strategies will vary based on the composition of your congregation and the demographics you’re trying to attract. Whether you’re trying to grow your church attendance or engage your existing parish, you’ll benefit from the suggestions that follow.

Written vs. Spoken Church Announcements

Some make church announcements in person, others distribute them as online messages or physical bulletins. There is no “right” way to deliver them. You can use both strategies. 

If you’re looking to grow your church attendance, then written announcements are best. For instance, you might want to re-engage past churchgoers missing from your pews lately. In that case, you can send email newsletters provided you have these people’s addresses. You could also put out social media posts on Facebook and Instagram. Use these platforms to advertise your events.

On the other hand, spoken announcements will guarantee that you reach the people attending mass. As long as everyone is quiet, they’ll have no choice but to listen to your words. You should still pick a good speaker to make your announcements. 

Make sure that you deliver these announcements at the beginning or end of your service. People always forget the middle part.

Tips for Producing a Church Announcement

A good church announcement incorporates both written content and pleasing visuals. Here are our tips for creating them.

Start With a Church Announcements Template

Using a church announcements template will make your life far easier than it would have been otherwise. Avoid writer’s block and use this template as a guiding hand.

• Write an attention-grabbing headline.

Your headline should give the reader no choice but to continue reading. That said, know your target audience. You can’t be overly provocative.

• Start by greeting new people.

Not everyone is familiar with your church even though you are. Give people a short introduction before diving right in.

• Mention a few of the past week’s happenings.

These are the things that people want to hear about. Don’t bury the lede. Common examples include births and deaths. But you could also discuss some of your events over the past week.

• Mention events that are going on next week with a call to action.

This is the part that gives value both to you and your readers, you need to ask them to come to your events. Give them all the necessary details like who is participating, what is happening, when and where it’s taking place, and finally, the reason why people should come.

• End by thanking them and perhaps asking for prayer requests.

It’s a matter of politeness. If they read or listened that far, they deserve thanks

Write in an Engaging Tone

Writing is about finding your voice. What type of voice will your audience respond to best? That will depend on the platform you use. For instance, Facebook and Instagram are both social media platforms and require a casual voice, and you can expect a younger audience on the latter platform.

Your delivery won’t be too different whether you’re writing or speaking. We recommend that you write the same way as you speak. This will sound more authentic to the reader. If you still find yourself struggling to write, try to find a volunteer from your congregation that is proficient in this skill. 

Cut Out Time-wasters

Not everyone’s message merits inclusion in your church announcement. Of course, you want to include a few pertinent events, but they need to be relevant to your congregation. For your weekly announcements, set a deadline for submissions. Let people know that there is limited space for events and not everyone will have theirs included. The listings should be at your discretion.

Consider Aesthetics

No matter where you broadcast your announcements, you’ll need to make them visually pleasing. This is usually what catches people’s eyes in the first place. You can look at these church newsletter templates to get an idea of what you might like to use.

One way to help promote your future events is to use cool images from your past ones. These will increase your conversion rate wherever you are. You could present them on slides in person or in an email newsletter online.

Promote The Announcement Everywhere

Don’t limit yourself to traditional paper announcements. Use the power of the internet to get your church announcements in front of as many eyes as possible. Facebook, Instagram, and email lists are all great ways to reach people. You don’t have to stick to a single strategy.

Even if you use online methods, you could still find ways to distribute paper copies of your announcements. Leaving them in places where people typically congregate works well. The only tradeoff is that using so much paper might seem irresponsible. Unless they’re at your church, just handing people a copy of the bulletin isn’t enough. 

5 Church Announcements Examples

We’ve come up with 5 online church announcements examples. These are perfect for helping you boost your online presence. Indeed, you should be trying to use more technology at your church in general. That way, you’ll reach more people than you would have with in-person announcements. Here are the 5 formats we’re looking at:

• Newsletter
• Instagram Post
• Website
• Facebook
• Church Bulletin

For each of these sample church announcements, we’ll take note of what works and what doesn’t. In addition, we’ll show you how to measure the success of each one.

1. Newsletter

We like this example because it’s short and to the point. Some email newsletters can go on forever. Naturally, including images of children is relevant given that it’s a children’s church.

Each paragraph covers a single topic. If you’re interested, you can click to read more. Otherwise, you move on. Including a note from the pastor is a good way to engage people as well.

How to Write Your Own Newsletter

As with most written content, newsletters require a hook. Write a subject line that tempts people to open your email. You should select a good time to send your emails. Many consider 1PM the best time to send, but you might want to test this on your own.

Since 45% of email users are opening your newsletter on mobile, you should make sure that your newsletter is optimized for that, too. It should be just as readable on mobile as it is on your desktop.

Measure Your Newsletter’s Success

Many people use Mailchimp to gauge the performance of their email newsletters. Some statistics you should track include:

• Open rate, telling you how many people opened the email.
• Clickthrough rate, telling you how many people clicked on a call-to-action button inside the email newsletter.
• Sharing rate, telling you how many people shared the newsletter with others.
• Unsubscribe rate, telling you how many people clicked to stop receiving emails from you.

2. Instagram Post

Instagram is a more modern way to reach new followers. The example above shows you exactly how short and snippy the post needs to be. You should also note that the post is not an image, it’s a GIF, which can be more engaging.

How to Write and Design Your Own Instagram Post

Creating attractive church announcements for Instagram isn’t hard. You just need to use Canva or a similar platform to find tons of relevant templates. Afterward, you can plug and play any headlines or design pieces you want.

As for the written post, you won’t need to write much. Instagram users aren’t going to have a long attention span. Just provide a blurb about the motivation for the event and then a call to action to help them get more information.

Measure Your Post’s Success

Fortunately, Instagram allows you to switch to a business account for free. That will allow you to track all sorts of data including views and impressions. Tracking the clickthrough rate of your post might require something like a bit.ly link though.

3. Website

This online calendar from the apostolic church of God in Chicago demonstrates how you can use your website effectively. Include an “Announcements” or “Events” tab on your website so that visitors can access it easily.

We like the arrangement of the events – it shows you all the upcoming ones in the correct order. It even shows you an ongoing event at the top. Each event is presented simply with a thumbnail and a short description. It’s hard to go wrong with this format.

How to Publish Announcements on Your Website

This is a matter of web design. Create a page dedicated to your events and start posting them here. Use apps like Tockify to integrate calendar plugins into your website. As long as your website gets traffic, those who are curious about your church will click here.

Measure Your Website’s Success

In this case, it might be unnecessary to measure your website’s success so closely. If you already use a tool like SEMrush to gauge your organic web traffic, then you can easily use it to measure conversions on your events. Otherwise, you can just manage events with a tool like ChMeetings and keep track of the increase in attendees.

4. Facebook

Like Instagram, the intuition behind Facebook church announcements is simple. Write a short post with a hook to get people on board. Then, tell them how they can join.

The hook in this post works perfectly. Everyone thinks about making changes in January. They’re speaking directly to their target audience. “NOW can be your Restart!” is a particularly successful line.

How to Create Your Own Facebook Announcement

To replicate the post above, you’ll need to film a bit of video. Plus, you’ll need to come up with a snappy hook. Drawing on a seasonal theme like New Year’s is nice. It helps keep things relevant to your audience.

Measure Your Facebook Announcement’s Success

Facebook does not offer a simple business account to track your analytics as Instagram does. However, you can see your likes, and if you post videos, you can see your views too. You might also want to create events on Facebook and see how many people join.

5. Church Bulletin

City Life Church provides us with an excellent church bulletins example to peruse through. It’s printed in black and white to save money, but it still retains attractive stylistic features. The introduction is also quite enticing, the word from the senior minister at the beginning was a nice touch.

Since this is supposed to be a brochure, you’ll find that the “I’m New” part opens up on the second page. They invite newcomers to join them for a cup of coffee. Afterward, you see all their events and classes, each of which is advertised with a snippet of text. It’s great that they find a way for all ages to connect to the newsletter.

How to Write Your Own Church Bulletin

The church bulletins example above offers us a pretty good template. Here is a distilled version:

1. Start by introducing your vision for the church.
2. Acknowledge people who are new and make them feel welcome.
3. Tell them about your church’s upcoming events and weekly programs.
4. Discuss some of the services you perform in the community and add how others can get involved.
5. Give people a way they can reach you and keep in touch along with things like service times.

It’s quite similar to our announcements template from earlier. In this case, you need to provide contact info and community service though. It helps you build your reputation from the perspective of the reader.

Measure Your Bulletin’s Success

This is a bit more tricky. You could always track who comes to your events, but you can’t trace this back directly to the bulletin. You can keep track of the number of brochures people have taken.

Manage Your Church With ChMeetings

Writing church announcements is only one out of many aspects of managing your church. To save more time, you should start using ChMeetings to track people, events, and much more. Since over 3,000 churches and dioceses use our software, you know you can trust us.