Not every church has a paid staff person devoted to church communications. In a lot of churches, the marketing and communication elements of ministry fall on volunteers. What's different (besides pay) for a volunteer communications lead? How do volunteers do things differently than staff? Today we talk with Tammy Pallot, who serves in many volunteer leadership roles in her church, and we talk about what it's like to be a volunteer in leadership and how your church can take steps to empower its volunteers.
Tammy Pallot, volunteer at St. Francis Episcopal Church in Mason, GA
Tammy often refers to herself as the Chief Logistics Officer for St. Francis Episcopal Church. In a small church setting, most of the church's administrative and operational needs fall on volunteers. For Tammy, that means anything that needs to be done typically goes through her. In this busy volunteer role, Tammy oversees typical administrative duties like managing the office. But more than ordering supplies, Tammy also leads the communication efforts—she takes care of the bulletin, website, database, email and other communication elements of the church.
Jeanette Yates:
Today we're talking to a volunteer church communicator and learning what it's like to be in her shoes.
Bryan Haley:
Hey, friends. Welcome to another episode of the Church Juice Podcast. Whatever your role or your title, whether you're paid or volunteer, we know that you are here because you enjoy communications. And we are here energizing church communications at Church Juice, so welcome to another episode. I'm Bryan Haley, the producer of Church Juice. I'm joined, as always, by my good co-host, Jeanette Yates.
Jeanette Yates:
Why, thank you, Bryan. I think you're doing a great job as well. We have a lot of fun on this podcast, energizing church communications. And every season, we have a lot of discussions with thought leaders or experts, and then sometimes it's just you and me, bud. Just you and me. But one element we're trying to do more of this season is to have more discussions with men and women in the daily trenches of communications work. And what better place to start than introducing you to today's guest to the show, Tammy. On top of her other roles and responsibilities, Tammy volunteers to lead communications and much more at St. Francis Episcopal Church in Macon, Georgia. Tammy, thank you for joining us today and sharing your story with us.
Tammy:
Thank you for having me.
Bryan Haley:
Absolutely. I'm excited for this conversation. Let's just dive in. Is that okay?
Tammy:
Sure, let's do it.
Bryan Haley:
My first question for you, we know that communication is kind of a catch all for a lot of things in ministry and in different parishes and churches, so I'm curious what position looks like when you're a volunteer. I feel like that just takes it to another level. So why don't you start us off by kind of introducing us to what your role looks like at St. Francis and how that's a little bit different because you're a volunteer.
Tammy:
Sure. So I serve, within the church, two separate roles that both involve communications, one more so than the other. I serve as the chair of the commission on stewardship for the fiscal diocese of Atlanta, which means that I travel throughout the diocese preaching and talking about stewardship and leading stewardship education programs. And that also is volunteer. Then at my home parish at St. Francis, I am officially the chair of the pastoral care team, the chair of the architectural committee, the chair of the communications team, and the IT department. I love when things say contact your IT department. So in addition to that, I'm also responsible for a lot of parish administrator type duties like making sure diocesan reports are submitted, keeping everyone's training up to date, maintaining our databases, ordering supplies. But I like to refer to myself as the chief logistics officer, because when something needs-
Bryan Haley:
That sounds like it fits.
Jeanette Yates:
Yes.
Tammy:
Yeah. Well, the reality is when something needs doing, it usually comes through me, and I help make sure all the little pieces get put in place, that it gets publicized in all the right places, that we have, whatever we need in place, all the details. Because I tend to be detail-oriented.
Jeanette Yates:
That is needed a lot of times too. You have people in different roles, but somebody that can tie all those pieces together, I think, is so important. So I'm glad that they have you. I think probably a lot of our listeners are probably like, hey, we need a Tammy at our church too. But speaking of your church, I want to hear more about the people that make up the church at St. Francis. Can you tell me who makes up the church there, what your congregation is like?
Tammy:
St. Francis was established 63 years ago. We are a small church located in Middle Georgia. Our chapel is small, and it only seats about 80 people. But we are located on six acres of land that is a beautiful oasis in North Macon with a long history. Our buildings were originally part of Appleton Children's Home, which was an orphanage for daughters of Confederate soldiers originally. As a people, we are known to be creation care and social justice advocates, believing very firmly, very loudly that God loves all of God's children regardless of gender identity, sexual orientation, race, socioeconomic status. We are not a wealthy church, most folks here are middle class, but we are a very highly educated group of folks with lots of college professors and mental health therapists in the congregation.
Bryan Haley:
I love that you guys are embracing the history there too and just kind of, I think, adapting the way that you're doing ministry. You've been in this role for a while, right, so the last couple years through the pandemic obviously impacted the way that you communicated and how the church interacted, how your congregation interacted. Why don't you talk us through a little bit. What did that look like for you guys?
Tammy:
Chaotic. Yeah, I think we all were in a state of total chaos and stress. It was very stressful, but it was important. And even in the moment, I think the weight of how significant and how important it was, was very palpable in the air. While everybody else was talking about being bored during the pandemic, I was dying because I had never worked so hard in my life. In the early days it felt a lot like MacGyver. I had a roll of duct tape and a stick of gum and somehow we were making it work. So that was a little crazy and funny, frequently. We were dealing with the logistics of how to pull it off, but we were also dealing with some theological issues too. The theological conversations were around communion, how do we handle that? Because an Episcopal church communion is part of our Sunday Eucharist and it's also a part of our rubrics that you don't have communion when you're not in community.
So we really had to talk about what does it mean to be in community. I was a very strong advocate of... We had tried morning prayer, but that didn't feel like... It's not the same. I love morning prayer, it has its place, but it's not the same. And especially during that initial period of turmoil, I think people really needed a sense of stability and a reminder of the never changing love of God that's still there in all this chaos, and one way we do that is through our rituals. So after a lot of discussion about we have to redefine community. No people aren't in the room with us, but they are very much in community with us. So we decided to do the full Eucharist. Not all churches were doing that.
We also made the decision early on... A lot of churches were pre-recording services and doing some editing and then broadcasting them. They were a lot smoother that way, no doubt, and a lot less stressful, I'm sure. But I really advocated, yes, we could take that way, but we want to have a sense of community, not be a TV show. So we really pushed to do live broadcast, that everything needed to be live so that we had interaction and real-time interaction and people were still building community and remaining connected with each other, which of course meant things were, whew, they were rough in the beginning.
Bryan Haley:
I feel like there's also a lot of churches that did the pre-recording and editing, you had a full-time or at least a part-time person on staff who could devote their time to splicing it all together and making it.
Tammy:
Honestly, it would've been easier for me to pre-record it.
Bryan Haley:
Okay. Okay.
Tammy:
And we did on a Christmas Eve service because I said, y'all, I have to draw some family limits here.
Bryan Haley:
Yeah.
Tammy:
So we prerecorded a few things. For the logistics stuff, we started out with just my computer and using that for the camera and the microphone, which wasn't fantastic. And as we progressed, what was crazy, that clearly I got a lot of feedback that other people were not aware of, which was a good thing I guess, was that every time I felt like, all right, we have figured it out, we know how to do this, something changed. Now, sometimes that something was, oh now there's people in the room, so all of the 10,000 wires we've got running through here that suddenly made our chapel look like a recording studio is no longer going to work.
We have to do something different. Or we've got a new piece of equipment, so now what our other system was doesn't work. So there was never a period of we've got it figured out, I'm good to go. But we've gone from that first computer, which that was all we were doing, was moving my laptop around to having successfully installed three NDI, PTZOptics cameras, a Behringer digital mixer, and running the system, the broadcast through OBS, Open Broadcast Software, from another room and having everything be pre-programmed. So we have made tremendous progress in a short amount of time.
Jeanette Yates:
Yeah. One of the things that's striking me as you're talking, a couple of different things that you said that really jumped out at me is that y'all had these... in the midst of this chaos, you took the time to have those conversations about what was going to make the most sense for your congregation and community to continue to build, to continue to stay connected. And I think that's so important for every church to do that, whatever their context is. And then I love that you said, yeah, everything keeps changing. That whole idea of you're never really like, woo, we've got it all figured out. Whether it's that whole situation, with the learning how to use the technology... Because when you were talking about your computer, our first week, it was our worship leader's cell phone on a tripod.
Tammy:
Mm-hmm.
Jeanette Yates:
That's what it was. And so I think everybody can relate to that. But the idea that in communications, whether it's with how to broadcast your worship or what new social media thing is out there that we have to figure out, what are cell phone carriers doing with texting, all of that stuff we all have to figure out, and there's a lot going on all the time. Which leads me to my next question. You're a volunteer, Tammy. A lot of the responsibilities... You talked about how small St. Francis is, and I know you don't have a lot of paid staff members, and so everything else falls on volunteers like you. And I want to know how that impacts the church's communication.
Tammy:
It adds another level of challenge. Because there are different volunteers with different life responsibilities, you can't expect the same things you would from an employee. That's not their only focus in life. So it makes things challenging to be consistent, for sure. And volunteers, some volunteers are very much just in their world. If they do children's ministries, they only do children's ministries and they're not overly aware of the overall picture, so it's hard to keep things tied in. And for communications, people often don't think about the need to publicize whatever it is they're doing. They think, oh, everybody who needs to know knows. Well, no, not really. And communications is about more than just my people know to show up because it's really important that other people know what's going on in the church, whether they choose to be involved in it or not.
And so you get a lot of last minute publications of, oh, you can just publicize this. And my favorite is when on the opposite extreme of that is, oh, yeah, yeah, we need to make big sign and put in the front yard, or we need to make flyers and hand them out with all of the local neighbors and do this... And I'm like, yeah, that's great, but who is this we? Can we define because we need to make usually means I need to make. Some balance there in trying to empower people to take responsibility for it, ensuring them that they have the skills, even if they don't think they do, and being able to make sure that you don't step into things you don't have to, which I'm not always great at. But I'm getting better. We were talking before about saying that's a great idea. Are you going to head that up for us?
Bryan Haley:
You also mentioned before we started recording, obviously, being a volunteer adds a little bit of complexity and like you were just talking about, but it also frees you up to say no a little bit. Why don't you talk into that a little bit?
Tammy:
Absolutely. The priest here has offered to hire me, and I refuse. Because right now, if he asked me to do something and I don't want to do it, I just go no, that would be a no. Nope. And if I don't... It also frees me up to say things I might not be able to say if I were employed. So I am frequently heard saying, wow, you didn't like that? Well, I guess you just need to cut my salary in a half.
Bryan Haley:
Right. Yeah. So let's talk a little bit more about what communication looks like at your parish, at your church. So what does communication look like throughout the month or throughout the week? What are your regular rhythms?
Tammy:
We send out a weekly e-news where we try to include everything that's happening. The e-news goes through Constant Contact, and we also post it on our Facebook page. We have morning prayer Monday through Friday on Facebook that parishioners do live from their homes, which is great because that builds community. And ironically, we used to have two or three people who would show up on morning prayer in person, and now there's 15, 20 people who are faithfully attending and participating, which is fantastic. We have verbal announcements, of course, on Sunday mornings. We create worship bulletins every week, which also includes the announcements. And that's been a new challenge too, because there's been a bit of some tension between how do we go about doing that in a way that remains inclusive for those who are immunocompromised and are at home?
Would we print... Printing the hymns in the bulletins. Well, we have hymnals sitting in the building. Well, yeah, we do, but people at home don't. So how do we navigate being responsible with our paper usage, with providing people online what they're doing without having to do totally different... without minimizing the workflow? We post, we do our worship Sunday worship services live on Facebook and YouTube. We have an Instagram account. There are not enough hours in the day to do all I would like to do. So we have a person, they're not new to the church, but they have recently said, look, I want to take this on and see. Because the data shows this is where we need to be focusing our PR, but there are only so many hours in the day, and in order for it to be effective, you need to be consistent and active. So I'm looking forward to that growing.
And we try to stay active within Facebook. We also use Realm. ACS Realm is our church database, which it's designed to be an all-in, a one-stop-shop for all things church, which includes communication within it. I am still struggling to convince people to utilize it. So we're in process of trying to figure out if I start using it more, will it kind of nudge people in that direction? And I'm finding that people generally don't change to a new system unless they don't have any other choice.
Bryan Haley:
Yeah, or you're providing real value is the other thing, right? It's hard to justify to the average parishioner that they need to be a part of this database because at the end of the day, it's a database, right?
Tammy:
Right.
Bryan Haley:
So it's not super exciting. So I think a lot of churches deal with that same thing. So yeah.
Tammy:
Absolutely. Well, for example, we have for years... Years ago, we set up email forwarders so that if you are on the youth committee, you would send an email... Or pastoral care, that's a better example. If you have something that needs to go to pastoral care, you email pastoralcare@stfrancismacon.org, and that email address goes to every member of the pastoral care committee, which is great. It's a great way to communicate easily. You don't have to keep up with who's on the pastoral care committee if you want to send an email. It just goes to the right people. Well Realm can do that for you within a... It's slightly different setting, but it has the same ability so that you can communicate within your group and share things within your group, which is great. But because people are used to this other system, they don't want to go there. But what that also means from our end is this is an additional database that we have to try to keep everybody's email addresses update and the lists right. So there's that pull in both directions.
Jeanette Yates:
We've been talking... And for you, Realm is something that's working for you, that's a tool that you use and are looking at ways to learn it more. But I'm going to flip that question now. Just like all of us fellow communicators, we've tried all the things probably. Is there anything, any strategy or anything that you've tried to use... You don't have to... We don't want to toss a company under the bus or anything, but is there anything that just wasn't working in your context that may work in others? The bulletin's always a big example, for it works for some people, it doesn't work for others, that kind of thing. So what kind of strategies or platforms or whatever have you realized doesn't really work for you, and what did you learn through that?
Tammy:
Realm has been a... It's not working the way it should yet. I'm still optimistic yet. So that's certainly an example. For technology, it was before pandemic actually, I had gotten one of the Mevo cameras because they are supposed to track your movement and I thought that would be awesome. And I have no doubt they will be one day. You have to have it within, I don't know, four feet or something of the person who's moving. That's not practical the way our church works. So there was a bit of sadness when we had it arrive and realized it didn't work well.
Instagram is an example of things that we have tried that haven't worked well. I take full ownership of why it hasn't worked well in our context, which is for lack of consistency and lack of engagement with it. So I think that has been more things that didn't work well. I can say allowing our priest to be responsible for turning on and on off his own microphone does not work well here. He's not trustworthy. That led to having to get different equipment so that when I'm down the hall I can control and mute and unmute him. It didn't take long of how many times of him not turning the microphone back on.
Bryan Haley:
Well, I think there are so many things that make the role unique. We actually, just a couple weeks ago, recorded an episode about how you don't need to be on a social media platform just because everyone else is. Or know your limits, I think, was one of our points too. So I think that's super relatable to a lot of people in similar positions too. Yeah. So I appreciate you sharing that, even just to hear just like, yeah, I'm not alone in this, or for everyone listening. So, thank you.
Jeanette Yates:
We did in that episode, Bryan, talk about maybe you don't need to be on Instagram. Maybe it's not for you, especially if you don't have time. But I love how your team, your group of people, volunteers understand that maybe you do need to be on there, but you can't do it. So finding somebody willing to take on that role... It seems that you have a culture where people want to volunteer, and I think that sometimes people don't have that at their church. So I love that. That's what I'm hearing about what you're saying in all of this too.
Tammy:
We have historically been a church that believes we were here before the priest and we will be here after the priest. We love ya when you're our priest. I mean, don't get me wrong, we love our priest, but we have been a very strong lay leadership oriented church for as long as I've been here, and I've been here for 21 years, I think. So it's certainly ingrained in our culture. I can say through my work with the diocese, that is not true of all parishes. In fact, I've worked at quite a few places that are quite the opposite. And I think, with the communications piece, since it is so tied to technology now, a lot of times it's getting people... In order to empower people to do the work with you, it's getting them over their fear of technology or their belief that, oh no, I can't do that. This is too complicated.
Even with our broadcasting, at this point... In the beginning was it complicated? Yes, yes it was. It was a steep learning curve. It was a painfully steep learning curve, and I have the skinned knees to show it. But at this point we have it set up in a way that literally anyone could come in and run our service. And that was intentional because we want more people, A, because I don't want to be stuck in my office every Sunday for the rest of my life, but, B, because part of what we're called to do is draw people into ministry with us. So that's part of our challenge in communications too, is communicating that you too are capable.
Jeanette Yates:
Yes.
Bryan Haley:
Yeah. I would love to keep talking, but I have one final question just to wrap us up. What is your word of encouragement? What is something you would love to say to other church communicators who are following today's podcast?
Tammy:
Be brave enough to try new things that you don't know anything about, and if it turns out that you're trying the wrong thing, that's okay. Try something else. Let people know when you're taking a leap and be honest about what you know and what you don't know. And most importantly, to be patient with yourself. That's just part of the learning curve. You're going to make mistakes, and you'll get better at it.
Bryan Haley:
Thank you, Tammy. So appreciate your time today. Thank you for sharing your story and helping us learn a little bit about what makes your role unique and your church pretty unique too. So thank you for joining us.
Tammy:
Thank you for having me.
Bryan Haley:
Thanks for listening to the Church Juice Podcast. If you haven't already, make sure you subscribe wherever you are listening today. It would mean a lot if you took the time to leave us a review as well. That just helps other church leaders find the podcast so we can continue to serve and support churches by energizing communications. By the way, we'll continue today's discussion, and I would love to hear from you and your role in our Facebook group. You can find the link to that group along with today's show notes at churchjuice.com/podcast.
Jeanette Yates:
The Church Juice Podcast is a listener-supported production of Reframe Ministries, a family of programs designed to help you see your whole life reframed by God's gospel stories. Church Juice is produced by Bryan Haley with post-production by Minimal Media Company in Grand Rapids, Michigan. For more information about Church Juice, visit churchjuice.com. For more information on Reframe Ministries and our family of programs, visit reframeministries.org.