How to organise church WhatsApp groups and announcements
TL;DR
Keep an up-to-date list of groups, their purpose and the person responsible for each. Store lasting details on your website, link to them from WhatsApp, and give group leaders clear messages to copy rather than paraphrase.
Want another WhatsApp group?
Today I want to talk about WhatsApp.
It’s less about whether your church should use it, and more about the fact that most churches already do, in about twenty-seven different places, and nobody ever decided what any of it was for.
Now before we get into it, I want to say one thing.
WhatsApp is awesome at specific thing - Getting your message read.
There might not be a platform on earth as reliable as WhatsApp when it comes to open rates (especially in the UK and Europe, I know in the USA it's still growing).
But it has a big downside...
How church WhatsApp groups grow without a shared plan
Your church almost certainly has a WhatsApp strategy. It just wasn’t designed, it grew organically.
A small-group leader started a group. The worship team started one. Then children’s volunteers, then youth, then a prayer chain, then a second prayer chain because somebody couldn’t find the first one.
Every one of those was a sensible decision on its own. But nobody ever stood back and looked at the whole thing. And the staff team probably aren’t in 90% of those groups, so they don’t really know what’s being communicated.
I don’t think the answer is to centralise it.
Half the value of a small-group WhatsApp is that the leader can talk to their ten people without the church office having to administer it.
Why messages become hard to coordinate across groups
Let’s imagine a scenario.
There’s an important last-minute announcement you have to get to the entire church. A service time change, say.
Of course you’ll email it. But maybe half your list opens that, if that. Perhaps you can send a text as well, except your system doesn't have everyones numbers, and hardly anyone in the UK reads texts any more.
Whereas WhatsApp messages actually get read.
So what do you do? You ask your group leaders to put the mssage in their groups - if you can find them!
And now twelve people are communicating the message on your behalf and you're just hoping most of the congregation hear it.
One rewrites it slightly.
Three forget.
Somebody forwards the wrong link.
Somebody else answers a question wrongly, and confidently.
And then you have no idea who actually knows.
That isn’t really a WhatsApp problem. WhatsApp is excellent at delivering a message. It’s just that nobody has any oversight of it once it has gone out.
So nobody can tell you who received it, and three weeks later nobody can find it either, it's lost in the group thread.
There isn’t a neat solution to this, sadly. But there are some practical applications.
Store lasting details on the website and link from WhatsApp
Dates, policies, registration links, event details. All of that belongs on your website or your church management system, where it stays put and anyone can find it. WhatsApp points at it. Train your WhatsApp administrators to always link to your website, rather than just writing details in the group.
Give group leaders a clear church message to copy
“Dave says we’re meeting at eleven” and “the church has moved the service to eleven” are very different things, and your congregation can’t always tell them apart.
So write the message yourself and ask your group leaders to copy and paste it, rather than asking them to pass it on in their own words.
Keep an up-to-date record of group responsibilities
Not who created it seven years ago on a personal number. Who is responsible for it now. Keep that somewhere you can actually keep up to date.
That way you've got an up-to-date idea of what groups exist, who runs them and who is in them.
Now, the more technical among you may be wondering about the Business app, or the WhatsApp Platform and API. That’s a topic for another email, and we’ll definitely get to it in the coming weeks.
But none of that helps you yet.
The most important thing over the next few weeks is to get a grasp of what WhatsApp groups actually exist in your church, who manages them, and how you could best use them when the moment comes.
List your church WhatsApp groups, purposes and owners
Sit down with your staff team or leadership and write out every WhatsApp group connected to your church.
Then next to each one, write three things. What it is for, and who is responsible for it and if possible, who is in the group.
Most churches find something uncomfortable on that list. An admin who left the church two years ago. Three duplicates. A group carrying pastoral information that nobody has properly thought about. Two groups receiving all the church notices and three receiving none.
You don’t have to fix any of it this week. Just make the list. You can’t govern something you can’t see.