THE VIBRANT PARISH NEWSLETTER

65 Unique Ways to Reach Your Neighborhood

How well does your neighborhood know your parish? Are you involved in local festivities and events? Do your neighbors know about your St. Vincent de Paul program, your grief support group, or other ministries you offer? If you need some help reaching out to the communities around your parish, we’ve collected 65 unique approaches to help share your story!

Mailers — Do you know about Every Door Direct Mail by the USPS? The USPS has a super simple way for you to create and send out mailers to everyone in your surrounding neighborhoods right from their website! You can even download one of the thousands of graphics available on WeCreate, or a flyer template to get you started on a beautiful mailer to send out!

Use neighborhood mailers to spread the news about:

• Holiday Mass invites and times
• Your open-invite church picnic
• Special events happening at your church
• Registration for youth ministry programs/events
• Graduation celebrations
• Ministry days, health fairs, vaccination clinics, etc.
• A general invite to attend Mass plus who to contact if you want to get involved

Church Swag — Having clothing, stickers, and more helps your community stand out wherever your parishioners go! Consider including an inviting message on your church swag that inspires people to look up your website or start a conversation. Partner with local printers to print your swag! If they aren’t already, local printers might also be interested in advertising in your church bulletin! Don’t have a great church logo yet? Our design team can help you with that!

Church swag ideas to get the word out:

• T-Shirts
• Hats
• Stickers
• Tote bags
• Car window flags/clings — Alongside the name of your parish, you could use your church’s tagline or use one of these catchy phrases.
• Need prayer? Ask me!
• You are loved!
• On Mission
• Blessed
• All are welcome!

Lawn Signs — Create lawn signs for your parishioners to take home and put on their property. Imagine having customized signs advertising your church or ministries wherever your parishioners live! Just be sure to include a large enough QR code that someone could scan it from their car to access more information from your church homepage.

Here are some ideas for take-home lawn signs:

• I love my church! St. Clare, Shoreline
• Need Prayer? Let us know at St. Clare, Shoreline
• Looking for community? We welcome all at St. Clare, Shoreline!

Local Schools — Your parish may have a school connected to it but, if not, be sure to seek out the local school(s) in the area because there is a plethora of ways that your community can be active alongside your neighbors via your attached or local school.

School outreach could look like:

• Teacher/educator appreciation nights
• Back to school celebrations
• Support any food insecurity initiatives like Feeding America’s BackPack Program
• Helping the school find volunteers from your parish
• Sponsor school events
• Partner up with schools to advertise school games, celebrations, concerts, plays, and more, in your bulletin or church announcements
• Better yet, organize staff and families to attend these events!
• Write cards to educators for holidays
• Celebrate graduating seniors and other school accomplishments like sports team’s championships
• Provide meeting space for overflow school meetings like the PTA
• Check out 6 more back-to-school outreach ideas on this previous LPI blog post.

Community Events/Celebrations — Become a frequent sponsor at local events!

These could include:

• Farmers markets
• Holiday celebrations like tree lightings
• City celebration days like anniversaries
• Community concerts
• Local sporting events
• Art Walks
• Pet Adoption Events
• Parades — especially ones centered around holidays like Christmas, St. Patrick’s Day, and more! You could add a fun element by having someone from your parish dress up as St. Nicholas or St. Patrick!

Your Website and Other Apps — Is your homepage dialed in? Can people easily access information about what events are happening and what ministries your parish offers? We recently posted a blog with 4 tips to help you make sure that your parish’s homepage is super inviting. Check it out here.

Be sure to advertise events in the following places online:

• Your parish’s homepage
• Local neighborhood Facebook groups
• Your parish’s Instagram
• The Nextdoor app

Partner With Local Small Businesses — especially those businesses advertising in your bulletin! These are folks in your neighborhood who are already invested in your parish community, so you have every reason to work with them! If they aren’t already advertising with you, participating in their events might help you develop the relationship you need in order to secure them as an advertiser!

Ways to partner with local businesses:

• Hold a meeting or bible study at a local coffee house or public house
• Put together a neighborhood clean-up near where an advertiser’s business is and don’t forget to tell them ahead of time!
• Organize parishioner volunteer groups to help with events a local business might be hosting
• Celebrate their wins with announcements, shout outs, and participation with regard to their business anniversary, special events, or other occasions they might be celebrating
• Use local restaurants who advertise with you as your first choice for catering your events!

Share Your Space — do you have a church hall, meeting rooms, or grounds that could be used by other organizations in your neighborhood? This might be something you’d want to advertise to your parishioners or via your online social networks so that the greater community outside of your parish members knows that you have space available!

Some groups who might want to use your spaces to meet are:

• Scouting troops
• School PTA or other school organizations
• Fitness classes like yoga or bootcamp
• Special events like birthday parties or retirement parties
• Special interest groups like quilting clubs

Host Neighborhood Events — You could also engage your neighborhood with special community events designed for outreach and engagement.

Consider the following engagement opportunities:

• Children’s movie nights — these can give parents an evening off to themselves! Some churches have one or two during peak holiday shopping times so that parents can drop their children off and then go Christmas shopping!
• Parish BBQ’s/Block Parties
• Concerts
• Car washes
• Family game nights
• Seminar/speaker series
• Educational events
• Hold a free coffee house/study time for college students during finals
• Talent shows/ open mics
• Clothing swaps
• Yard sales
• Family field days
• Neighborhood cleanups
• Hold a parish open house

Use Feedback From Your Community —Think of ways that you can make your neighborhood a part of your events and activities.

• If, for example, you're hosting an adoration event, consider sending volunteers through the neighborhood to inquire about any intentions that you can pray for.
  Have a long-term chapel? Find a weather-proof way for people to drop off prayer requests outside if they find themselves walking past.
• In November, pray for the dead. Put out the word to the neighborhood that you'll be cleaning graves and ask if any specific grave sites need care or if anyone desires prayer for their diseased relations.
• Pray for those in the service in your community, consider making a display around Armed Forces Day that can be visited by your neighbors.
• Put a prayer request box at your local laundromat. Collect these prayers every week and use them to pray for your community during the prayers of the faithful.

Do you have other fun ways that your parish engages your neighborhood? We’d love to hear about them in the comments!

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EDITOR FEATURE

Hey Everyone!

I’m Kyley, a member of the team that brings you these monthly tips to build your parish community. This month we’re focused on helping your unique parish communicate. Whether it’s through church events, the school, or the bulletin, we’re sharing creative ways to help you reach your neighborhood.

Next month we will talk about media releases and more. We have some fun ideas to share with you, so don’t miss it.

We’re excited to read your responses!

Happy Fall,

Kyley

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Using Parishioner Art on Bulletin Covers

Sean Reilly is the Director of Communications at Our Lady of the Wayside Parish in Arlington Heights, Illinois and he’s discovered a fantastic way to connect his church’s ministries to their larger church community using original bulletin cover art each week. We sat down with him to talk about this yearlong project and how it has positively impacted his community.

Q. Tell us a little about what inspired you to use parishioner art on the covers of your bulletins.

A. I came on as Director of Communications during the first of the COVID lockdowns and my goal was to make sure that any signs of life happening at our parish were conveyed to parishioners during those uncertain times. One of the things I recognized was that there were communication gaps between our church’s ministries, the good work each was doing, and our larger church community. We needed to find a way to bridge the gaps and create something interactive to bring families and community members together.

Q. Amazing! What ministries have contributed bulletin cover art?

A. Well, to start, we decided to focus on our parish youth, so we had our 3rd to 5th graders, both in the religious education program and in the school, create our first wave of covers. I asked our school and religious education leaders to present the idea to them, and to select the covers we’d be using from those submitted. When it came to cover selection, it wasn’t always about going with museum-quality art. Sometimes it was about assuring certain kids, who might be in need a self-esteem boost or peer-recognition, receive recognition. We figured this was vital, and what a church community is all about!

We received art from the youth from both the school and religious education programs including the youth group. It gave them a chance to have a spotlight in the parish. Youth whose covers were selected received framed copies of the covers so that they could hold it up and say, “I did that!” and be proud of their work.

We’ve gotten covers from the school, religious education program, youth ministry, our SPREAD program who work with young adults with disabilities, lectors, and ministers of care. Our summer VBS program submitted a boatload of covers over summer break! This week’s cover is from an adult choir member. Our goal is to have parishioners of all ages involved, not just our youth.

Q. How many covers will you do?

A. 52 covers! We started in Advent of 2021 and will finish in Advent of 2022, so, a full year’s worth of parishioner art on our bulletins. Advent was a great time to start because it is such a magical time in our church calendar and people are getting excited about Christmas.

Q. How have the covers been received by the community?

A. All positive! The parishioners have enjoyed seeing the covers and the interpretation of the week’s readings through the eyes of their younger members. One email I received from a long-time parishioner said:

“I love the children’s drawings on the cover of the bulletins. What a great way to get to the heart of the message that: We love God, we believe in God, we listen to God. And what a great way to help children know that they are an important part of the parish community.”

Q. Have you seen an uptick in bulletin distribution and interaction?

A. There were a few times when our reserve bulletin supply in the office totally ran out because people whose children’s art was featured wanted to pick up extras to give to family members and friends. That’s great because the bulletins become an evangelization tool that extends beyond the parish and into the greater community. The merits of this program exceeded my expectations and I believe it truly was Holy Spirit inspired!

Q. Do you have any favorite covers done by the youth?

A. It’s hard to choose a favorite but one that really blew me away was anonymously submitted by a member of the youth group and featured the Baptism of the Lord (that week’s gospel). It was rich with blue water and red fire swirling around, and when it hit my desk, I was just like, “Whoa, THAT is powerful!” and everyone who saw it agreed!

Q. What advice would you give a church interested in doing this themselves?

A. Just do it and, once you do it, promote it! Put it in the weekly newsletter, on the website, on your church’s social media channels, everywhere!

A great big thank you to Sean for sharing this experience with us! If you want to learn more about this special bulletin cover project, check out the OLW parish website or check out some of their covers.

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A Layperson’s Guide to Smartphone Church Photography

One of the most significant mistakes that we see churches make when it comes to their website, social media, and branding, is the use of outdated, low-quality, or irrelevant photography. Luckily this is also one of the easiest mistakes to remedy! Having current, high-quality photos of your community is one of the best ways to show how vibrant and relatable your parish is!

Are you already feeling overwhelmed? Don’t worry! You don’t need to hire a professional photographer every time there’s a parish event to build a high-quality photo library for your community! Here is an easy guide for the photography layperson to capture fantastic photos for your church’s digital and print media with just your smartphone.

The Best Equipment

Good news — You likely already have a high-definition camera built into your phone! If you aren’t sure how to use all of the features of your phone’s camera, a quick google search can help. Just search your phone’s make and model along with “camera tutorial” and watch a couple of the videos that come up. You may discover that your phone has more camera features than you realized!

If your photos are coming out blurry it may be that your indoor lighting is dim. Check to see if your phone has a low-light setting for indoor spaces. You probably don’t need to, but if you wanted to try out a new gadget you could use a smart phone enabled tripod to cut down on camera movement in dim lighting. Tripod stabilization can help you avoid using a flash during a Mass or ceremony!

5 Great Shot Ideas to Get You Started

Make sure to take a variety of wide-angle shots as well as close-ups. Shoot some in a vertical format as well as some horizontally so that you have a variety of formats! Take some during special church occasions as well as during Ordinary Time. Try to cover all liturgical seasons evenly.

These five photo ops are essential library starters:

Other Parish Photography Ideas:

• Advertise that you will be taking photos at a certain Mass time and date so that your parishioners can plan ahead! This way, they can prepare and come to this specific Mass expecting to be part of your community photos! We suggest doing this a couple of times a year.
• Have a photo booth at parish events where families can take pictures! You can’t always rely on families to share photos with you, so, make sure you have someone designated to take photo booth photos for the church’s collection too! Check out this online how-to for church photo booths.
• Speaking of encouraging individual parishioners to share photos with you — Be sure to create a hashtag (#) for your parish so that, when your community members use it, their photos are collected into a neat library for you to access. To make this work, though, you must create a very specific hashtag that’s unique to your parish. If you only use your church name, for example #StMark, the hashtag will yield results from St. Mark parishes all over the world. Instead, design your hashtag to be much more specific to your community. An easy way to do this is to add your church’s city and state abbreviation to the hashtag. For example, if St. Mark is in Kent, Georgia, your hashtag would be #StMarkKentGA. This will distinguish any photos that people tag with your hashtag as photos belonging to your specific community and not to a St. Mark parish somewhere else in the world.

Lastly, Don’t Forget:

To get people’s permission — especially when minors are in photographs. It’s important to have their parent’s permission to use a child’s photos online and in print. Does your parish have a standard photo-release? Some parishes build these into their faith formation program permission slips for parents. Click here for more information on photography releases.

To dedicate a specific place to store these photos — Many people may need access to your parish’s photo library. The youth minister might want to make a flyer that includes a recent photo of a parish family, or your administrator may be updating the website and need fresh photos for the homepage. Be sure that the parish staff all knows how to access up-to-date church photography and that it’s stored in a safe place. Storing photos in a web-accessible cloud storage space like Google Photo is a great way to ensure that password protected access is available to those who might need it, even from home!

To use these photographs all over your parish’s website, social media, and bulletin!

If you find yourself longing for a better-looking bulletin or website to match your newly updated photography, LPi can help!

I print with LPi and would love to learn how I can refresh my bulletin — Just contact your customer service agent to get started!

I don’t print with LPi but would love to learn more.

Learn about LPi’s church website tool, WeConnect.

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FREE Social Media Ideas

Social media offers a great way to communicate with your parishioners. Not sure what to post? Here are ideas to flesh out your month!

Revive Parish —
Communication Best Practices

Check out this short video from our friends at Revive Parishes with their recommendation to "Commit to Telling Stories."

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