There are so many ministries out there with a unified team, a clear vision and an obvious need for the work they do, but there simply aren’t enough hours in the day to do it all.

As a leader, you carry a lot. There are people to serve, stories to tell, technology to manage, staff to take care of and communications to plan and execute. As your ministry grows, it can seem like your capacity starts to shrink.

I’m reading a book right now called Saving Eutychus: How to Preach God’s Word and Keep People Awake. One specific line has stayed with me this week: “The more you say, the less people will remember.” I’ve seen this challenge throughout my years in communications...

There’s a strange thing that can happen when you work with a brand long enough: you start to get tired of it. You’ve used the same colours, fonts and visual elements in your graphic design for years. You’ve said the same things and posted variations of the same ideas, over and over.

So you start thinking that maybe you should change things up. Before you do, consider how your audience feels. They’re seeing far less of your brand than you are.

I've started to see a growing trend in ministries. More and more senior leaders are using AI to produce internal materials, and they're genuinely pleased with the results. The documents look polished and professional, but anyone familiar with AI-generated writing can spot the signs.

One of the hardest things about social media is accepting that people probably aren’t paying as much attention to your brand as you think they are.

You can spend hours creating a post and writing the perfect caption. Then you publish it… and move on.

Your audience does too.

I recently walked into a sandwich shop and saw a six-foot-tall poster of a sandwich on the wall. Something about it was deeply wrong. The bread did not look like bread; the fillings looked unnatural — to the point where I felt uneasy looking at the image. The image was clearly generated by AI, and I learned that day that I don’t want artificial intelligence anywhere near my food.

Walk into almost any Costco and you’ll see the same thing: packed aisles, long checkout lines and people leaving with carts full of products they probably didn’t plan on buying. On paper, this scenario sounds like a personal nightmare. Yet I, along with millions of people, happily pay for a Costco membership every year.

Why? 

A lot of ads sound the same. Have you noticed?

Messaging like this is everywhere:

"Our product helps teams boost productivity.""Quality you can trust.""A dining experience you'll never forget."

While these things might be true, they don't tell people what makes them different.

Every year, I see the same pattern play out with ministries. 

Spring gets busy, summer sneaks up faster than expected, and before long, the calendar is full of vacations and all the normal demands of life. Then September arrives, and everyone suddenly realizes the fall communications plan is not quite as ready as they hoped. The website still needs work, the donor calendar is only partially mapped out, social media has lost momentum and the year-end campaign is still more of an idea than a plan.