My recent post Getting strategic about content explained how content pillars can be a useful way of developing a set of a strategic themes to help guide your communications.
In this post I’m going to use churches as an example to show what this might look like in practice.
Finding the right content pillars for your church
It’s important to think about your audiences, your vision or mission statement, your values and goals. These will help you make sure that the themes you develop will resonate with your communities and serve your overall strategy. The most important thing is to be authentic to your church, honest about what it’s like, and provide clear, jargon free, content.
Some examples of content pillars for churches
These are quite broad so think about how they could be adapted in your context. Not every theme will resonate with every church and you will want to focus on the three to five that fit best. It’s not an exhaustive list and may prompt other ideas for you.
- Welcome – this might include posts that invite people to services or events, sharing pathways to getting more involved, or showing people what to expect at your services
- Educational – sharing resources, clips from sermons, or faith based explainers
- Community – going behind the scenes to share volunteer stories, testimony, or church events
- Entertain – bringing joy to feeds through sharing more light hearted stories or fun moments
- Conversational – prayer requests, polls and questions can be good ways of starting to build a digital community
- Inspire – these posts might be encouraging or uplifting, motivating people in their faith journeys
- Faith in action – showcasing practical projects in the community
- Everyday discipleship – helping people live out their faith day to day
- Local history – sharing stories of your building and people connected with it
Focused content pillars
In addition to using content pillars to inform general posting, churches can also explore more focused sets of pillars. One piece of work I really enjoyed was creating a set of Eco Church content pillars for a Methodist church looking to integrate their Eco Church journey into their existing comms. They were chosen to reflect things were important to the church:
- Locally rooted – posts sharing the church’s practical projects making a difference in the community (e.g. installing swift boxes, wildflower planting)
- Worship, prayer and teaching – posts exploring the Christian basis for climate action and creation care
- Awe and wonder – posts focused on the beauty of creation / the natural world
- Inspiration – posts helping people find ways to take action
It quickly became clear that the locally rooted pillar resonated beyond the walls of the church and the content became some of the most popular of all the church’s Facebook posts.
As well as highlighting things which are important to your church, focused content pillars might also be useful when launching a new project or as a way of supporting a particular area of ministry like youth work.
Read more
Helping churches share their environmental stories
What’s the difference between a comms strategy, policy and plan?
Helping charities and community groups use local history to engage with new audiences
If you’d like some help with identifying the best content pillars for your church or with content strategy more generally, then please get in touch.
Shelly Dennison 