In her blog, Kem Meyer noted how Park Church is doing away with their weekly bulletin.

This move has received mixed reviews in the blogosphere here, here, and here, but has definitely attracted my attention since we’ve been reviewing the possiblity of doing something similar.

Here are our goals:

Connect people with what’s happening at ResLife
Give people easy access to accurate info via e-mail and our web site
Reduce expenses

So how do we go about doing moving people to our website and reducing our bulletin?

We decided to get more information before proceeding…

First I evaluated our database and found that we currently only have e-mail addresses for about 24% of our active attenders/members — not enough to make a major shift without alienating thousands. We really don’t actually know how much of our congregation is actively using the Web or e-mail.

So, we developed a little 10 question survey that we’re distributing by hand through classes, small groups, individually, etc. The purpose is to get real answers from the real people we’re trying to reach with a revised bulletin and a future digital push.

We didn’t do this as an online poll because that would have skewed the data toward tech users. There were many other questions we could have asked, but we wanted to limit it to 10 questions to get a good sampling of our congregation. We’d like to have 300-500 responses. Continue reading →