Collaborate Better: Mastering Slack for Church Staff
Since 2017, our church staff (and elders, too) have exclusively used Slack to communicate with each other. It solved an immediate problem we had then (which I’ll get to), and following the pandemic and our multi-congregational structure, Slack has become essential to effective communication at Arrowhead Church.
In the years since, I’ve actually gone through Slack’s training and assessment program and become “Slack Certified,” which just means I’m a nerd who knows too much about this one app. But, that knowledge comes in handy when figuring out how to reduce communication inefficiencies.
What is Slack?
A cute video Slack made to explain itself
Slack is a messaging app for work. It is meant to replace email and texting entirely. It has all the benefits of email (official communication, file attachments, search, accountability, secure) and all the benefits of text messaging (fast, informal, group messages, threads). And actually, it does a lot more, too. You can collaborate on projects, schedule messages, hop in and out of calls for quick questions and ideas, share gigantic files, find that PDF from 5 years ago, acknowledge messages without a full response, send audio messages, post work status messages (like where you’re working from), even set times when you can’t be reached so you can focus on something else for a while.
At Arrowhead, we use Slack for all staff communication. Rather than send a text or email, send a Slack. Because the entire organization is in Slack as well, you can even message a staff member from another congregation (“Hey, what have you been doing for volunteer appreciation lately? Looking for some ideas!”).
It’s incredible.
But I’ll be honest- Slack is not cheap and shifting how employees communicate with each other requires intentional guidance and constant effort. It was a hard sell to most of our team at first. And even though it does have its drawbacks and hasn’t solved all our problems, we communicate better than ever.
This is the story of how we took our church staff communication to the next level using Slack.
Why we made the switch
In 2017, our church staff had a problem familiar to many organizations: bad internal communication. By “bad,” I mean that it was chaotic and limited. Most of our internal communication was over email, which as our team grew, became very difficult to manage.
Here’s an example:
Our lead pastor might send 8 of our staff an email asking for feedback about potential Easter weekend schedules. Three people would respond with completely different ideas without seeing each other’s response first. Two people would respond without hitting “reply all” and suddenly the lead pastor is responding to emails no one else has seen. We’d realize we should have looped in the kids director and so we add her in later, but now she isn’t getting the responses from people who are replying to the earlier email without her in it. Some people’s inbox automatically threads the follow-up emails; some people’s inbox creates an entirely new email per response. The intern, who doesn’t really have any preferences on the Easter Schedule, has their inbox blowing up at all the responses with no way to differentiate the notifications from ones that really pertain to them. However, in the seventeenth response, the lead pastor asks an intern a question specifically, but assuming none of the thread required her input, she hadn’t been closely following and has no idea. The video director saw a cool clip on Instagram they could use to promote the new schedule, but the video attachment got blocked by half of the staff’s inboxes. Meanwhile, the worship pastor has not opened their email inbox in 5 days.
And this is just one email thread. Every day, dozens of these kinds of internal communication issues were popping up. Sometimes messages were sent via text, especially time sensitive ones, and sometimes it would be via email. It was chaotic and stressful to our staff. It created a lot of friction.
So in 2017, we heard that Slack could streamline some of these issues and we gave it a shot.
Transitioning our staff
I should say right off the bat: our leadership team recognized the communication issue and was willing to try some new solutions. That’s not always the case in an organization and if our leadership hadn’t been championing a new communication tool, it would have been a much harder transition for us. That may not be your situation and if not, it might require pointing out pain points that your leadership doesn’t realize are there.
We had read somewhere that if your organization was going to try Slack, you should implement a new rule: all internal communication had to happen on Slack.
No more work email.
No more work text messages.
So that’s what we did. We (leadership) became very familiar with how to use Slack over the course of a week, then we met with our staff, did a training, downloaded the apps together, and made sure we were all familiar enough to get started. And we implemented that rule: No digital communication outside of Slack.
That may seem harsh, but it’s the only way to (a) learn the new system thoroughly and (b) streamline where communication could be found, which was the whole point.
If staff had to keep up with internal emails, text messages, and now Slack, we’ve not solved any problems, we’ve added work. It required a hard cut-off. “All work communication now happens here”.
Our staff were overjoyed and immediately saw the value in Slack.
Just kidding.
Most of our staff were annoyed. Slack felt like a whole new thing for them to learn, unnecessarily complicated, and gave the impression that they would now be expected to respond to messages around the clock (a real problem that yes, you will need to solve, more on that in a minute). While simple, Slack is feature-packed and entirely new to most people. Especially to your less-tech savvy staff, it’s more complicated than email they’ve known for three decades. But even if our staff were wary of it, they followed the instructions and logged on.
It took a few weeks before the majority of the staff got comfortable and began to see the improvements to communication over our “system” before. But it happened. It has cons and some pain points of its own (we’ll get to those), but our staff has found the benefits of Slack far outweigh the drawbacks. It’s reduced communication issue and stress enormously.
So which Slack plan did we choose?
For the first year or so, we used the free plan. The main drawback was that it only kept the most recent 10,000 messages and 5GB of files (the free plan has since changed). Initially, we thought 10,000 sounded like far more than we needed. But quickly, you see the value in being able to find any message you’ve ever sent or received. After a year, our staff switched to the Pro plan, which we are still on today. Our elders remain on the free plan and the short life of the messages is still a pain.
How we use Slack
There are a billion ways to use Slack- it’s highly customizable for no additional cost. That’s likely one of the reasons so many organizations use it. That said, here are the primary practices that we implement (and train toward) in 2024, starting with the most basic to the most custom.
We put it on every device
We immediately have staff install Slack on every device - Mac, PC, iPhones, Android phones - everywhere. They don’t have to always use it and they are allowed to mute notifications (below), but we just need to know that they can get to messages and send follow-ups from anywhere.
Direct Messages
The thing people will be doing most on Slack is simply direct messaging (DM) someone. It’s as easy as a text message. You can message one person, or add in up to eight people. A message can be as short or as long as you want and because it’s more like a text- there’s no need for the formality of email. You can simply ask a co-worker a question (“hey, what are the dates for VBS, again?”). You can share files. And your entire message history with someone is forever available (and searchable) to you.
Slack Channels
One of the main features of Slack is called “Channels,” which are essentially ongoing group messages with an established purpose or project. They’re always named with lower-case letters and begin with a # (hashtag). You can create or delete new channels anytime. The idea is to keep the same conversational topics in one place.
A great example would be to make an Easter planning channel. Maybe around January, you start a channel called "#easter-2024 and invite six of your staff. Here, you all can plan out the schedule, events, programming, share links and inspiration, assign tasks, and set a marketing plan. This channel could be private, so no other staff can join, or it could be open to anyone who wants to see what’s going on in there. Then, after March 31, you could archive the channel. Make sense?
Anyone can create a channel, too. So your staff have the autonomy to see gaps in communication and take their own action to fill them.
Of course, channels don’t have to be serious or even about work! Channels are a great way for team building and morale. Think about these kind of channel ideas:
#lunch-plans-today
#funny-videos
#prayer-requests
#encouragement-notes
#personal-wins
#dog-photos
#fantasy-football-2024
Emoji Reactions
Not every message demands a response (“I think Sunday’s setlist looks great”), but early on we realized we needed everyone to at least acknowledge they’ve seen a message, simply as a courtesy if nothing else. Those acknowledgments reduced the annoying real life question “hey, did you see my Slack?” In Slack, there’s an easy way to do this - you can react to a message with an emoji. Actually, any emoji you can imagine, even new ones you upload for the team! An emoji reaction often replaces the need for a follow-up message.
Mentions
When messaging in a channel, notifications can sometimes get out of hand and messages can get missed. So “mentions” are a direct way to notify a certain person of something that needs their attention, especially when it’s in a channel where they might not have notifications turned on. It’s like saying in a meeting, “Hey Jared, what do you think?”
To mention someone, type the @ symbol and then the person’s name.
If someone is in the channel already, they’ll be notified that you mentioned them.
If someone is not in the channel and it’s set to private, they won’t be notified unless you invite them to your channel.
Scheduled Messages
A really useful feature that our lead pastors love is the ability to schedule a message for a later date. This is a great way to prevent unnecessary stress for your co-workers. If on Saturday, you think of something that you want a staff member to think about on Monday, just write the message and schedule it to drop in their inbox at 9am on Monday. This helps communicate how timely a message is - as sending a message on a Saturday might convey that it needs immediate attention.
Set Notification Preferences
This is important. We want our staff to take breaks. We don’t want them working 24/7. This is a common complaint with Slack - if companies aren’t careful, this tool can force employees to be “always available” and burn them out.
But that doesn’t have to be the case. We train our employees to completely customize how and when they are notified about a Slack message. Getting this right will help make sure they don’t miss something important but also that your phone isn’t blowing up with every little thing. An employee can:
Set a schedule for notifications. If you don’t want to get any notifications on Fridays, for example, you can do that. That means you can still access any messages, but your phone won’t let you know. It’s a built-in work sabbath, something we require from all our staff at Arrowhead Church.
Pause notifications. Time to go heads-down and get some work done. There are hours when you don’t need to be disturbed because you need to focus on a singular task. Pausing notifications is perfect for this! Slack will hold all of your notifications until your pause is over (let’s say, after 2 hours) and then deliver everything you missed.
Set notifications settings per channel. For example, maybe you don’t need to be notified about every single message within the #social-media-plan channel, so just turn off notifications completely from that channel.
Set notifications settings per mention. You can set a channel so that you only get notified if someone mentions you, specifically. This is great for channels that you’re in but that 99% of the time have nothing to do with you. Let’s say you’re a student pastor and you’re in the #kids-ministry channel for some reason, but their stuff almost never applies to you. That might be a good situation to set your notifications to mentions only.
Remember that this is for notifications only. Any messages will still be in your Slack, but you would have to open up Slack to know they are there if you aren’t notified.
Set a Slack Status Everyday
Slack users can set a daily status that other employees can see. It’s helpful to let your team know how quickly you can respond to a message and when you’re available. You could set your status as your location, such as “Working at Starbucks” or “In the office.” You could say “Morning meetings" to let people know they might not be able to reach you until noon. These statuses expire and you set how long they last (for example, if you’re going on vacation for 5 days, set your “Vacation” status to clear after 5 days).
We ask our staff to try and set a Slack status everyday. It just helps!
Slack Huddles
At Arrowhead Church, almost no one has an office. That wasn’t always the case and it’s a sacrifice we’ve made over the years. One surprisingly helpful element we lost was the ability to quickly pop into someone’s office and bounce an idea off them, or jump into a conversation that’s already happening in the hallway. Maybe you feel like you would love to lose those interactions, and I get where you’re coming from, but what they sacrifice in efficiency they make up for in communication.
Slack has a tool to virtually recreate this experience called “Huddles.” A huddle is a quick audio or video conversation. You can start a huddle in any channel or direct message (DM), invite specific people to join, and share your screen to work side-by-side with your team. It’s a video call, but often it isn’t planned - you can just instantly invite someone to huddle with you and they can choose to join or ignore it.
Anyone in a conversation can join a huddle once it starts. When a huddle starts in a DM or channel, all members will receive an invitation.
A Slack Huddle is not a scheduled or planned meeting where everyone has to be present. There is no link to send out beforehand. Huddles are spontaneous and informal and designed to do one thing: foster quick conversations.
Some leaders create a huddle in a team’s channel—often on a regular schedule, like, 2-3 p.m. every Thursday—where anyone in the channel is welcome to join. We’ve done this in certain seasons (COVID).
Pinned Files
There are certain files that staff need to access often. For example, a PDF of our church’s tax exempt form. Slack allows you to “pin” files to a channel or DM, which basically means it’s bookmarked for everyone to refer back to whenever they might need it in the future.
Requests (Check requests, creative requests, facility requests)
There are hundreds of third-party plugins built for Slack. One that we use daily is called SideQuest. It’s a project request system built right into Slack. We use it to allow staff to request to check (either for an invoice or a reimbursement), to request something from our creative team (such as an event graphic or a video), or a facility maintenance issue. When they submit a request, it automatically goes to the staff member in charge of that kind of request. At that point, the request becomes a conversation between the person who submitted it and the person responsible for fulfilling it. When it’s done, they “complete” it. All of this happens on Slack through the SideQuest plugin. SideQuest isn’t free, it’s a monthly fee, but here’s a hint: they offer a HUGE discount for non-profits if you email them about it.
Threads
There’s a really handy tool where you can reply to only one single message. It’s called threads. Imagine a situation where your boss sends you four messages in a row with four questions that are completely unrelated. Using threads, you can reply to each message individually so that your response stays in context to the original question. Maybe that sounds confusing if you’ve not use a feature like that before, but in practice it is really helpful. It can keep your inbox from blowing up, especially when using a channel.
A note here is that threads is super helpful in a channel for notification management. If you post a message in a channel, everyone is notified as usual. But then any replies in the thread after that original message will only notify people if:
They are @mentioned by name
They reply to the thread at all.
The Pros to Slack
I’ve likely already covered all the reasons we find Slack to be a valuable tool, but here’s a summary of the pros for a church considering Slack as the primary means of internal communication:
Instant Communication
Slack facilitates real-time messaging, which significantly speeds up communication compared to email. It allows staff to quickly share information, ask questions, and get responses without the delay often associated with email. This immediacy can be particularly beneficial for coordinating events, addressing urgent matters, and fostering a sense of community among the team.
Organized Conversations
With Slack, conversations can be organized into channels based on topics, teams, or projects. This organization helps keep discussions focused and easily accessible, unlike email where threads can become convoluted. It also allows new team members to catch up on previous discussions, providing a valuable archive of information and decisions.
Amazing Documentation
Slack actually offers some of the best help, training, and documentation of any company I’ve seen. You can visit the Slack Help Center on the web and it’s very well organized and easy to follow, whether you’re just getting started or you need some help with something. There are videos, walk-throughs, articles, it’s some of the best support documentation out there. I haven’t ever needed to contact Slack about anything, so I can’t speak to their customer service, but I’d bet it’s good.
Integration with Other Tools
Slack integrates seamlessly with a wide array of productivity and management tools commonly used in church operations. This includes calendar apps, project management tools, and file-sharing services. I mentioned the SideQuest plugin earlier, but our church also uses GoCo for our HR management and they integrate with Slack, too, so our employees get Slack messages about documents they need to fill out or time-off requests. These integrations streamline workflows, reducing the need to switch between multiple applications and thereby increasing overall efficiency.
Enhancing Remote Collaboration
For churches with staff who work remotely or split their time between locations, Slack is an excellent tool for maintaining connectivity and collaboration. It bridges the gap created by physical distance, ensuring that team members stay informed and engaged regardless of their location.
Guest Accounts
I’m going to list the cost of Slack under the “cons” below, but there’s a really nice feature called “single channel guest accounts” that are free. If you have a paid plan on Slack, such as a pro plan, then you can invite someone to use Slack in only one channel for free. For example, suppose your church has a volunteer who directs VBS every year, but is not on payroll. You can add her to a #vbs-planning Slack channel as a guest for no cost whatsoever. She can use that one channel exactly the same as a full member can, DM anyone else in the Slack, upload files, even start a huddle with someone. Plus, you can set a guest’s account to expire after a certain date.
Cons of Using Slack
It’s not all smooth-sailing. There are absolutely drawbacks to using Slack, or at least, potential pitfalls you need to be aware of.
It’s Expensive
Slack is expensive, if you find that the free plan won’t work for you (as we did). As of January 2024, the pro plan will cost you $7.25 per month, per user. While Slack offers a non-profit discount, religious organizations like churches are notably excluded from this discount. This means that adopting Slack can represent a significant expense, especially for larger teams or churches with limited budgets. The cost can be a critical factor in deciding whether the tool is a viable option for church operations. Find current Slack pricing here.
Overwhelming Volume of Messages
As I mentioned earlier, Slack's ease of use can lead to a high volume of messages, which can be overwhelming for some users. Unlike emails, which can be methodically sorted and prioritized, Slack messages can come in rapidly and require immediate attention, potentially leading to information overload or distraction. This is why setting up notification preferences, away messages, statuses, and channels properly is so key. That kind of stuff needs to be communicated from leadership.
Learning Curve for New Users
For staff accustomed to traditional email, there can be a learning curve when transitioning to Slack. Understanding how to use channels effectively, manage notifications, and utilize integrations may require training and time, which can initially slow down communication rather than streamline it. Plan for training!
Dependence on Constant Connectivity
Slack relies on continuous internet access, which can be a limitation in areas with poor connectivity. Unlike emails that can be composed and read offline, Slack requires users to be constantly online to receive and respond to messages, potentially hindering communication in certain scenarios.
Wrapping Up - Our Slack Guide
A few years ago, we had a staff member leave our church (let’s call her Kate). Kate had been with us for a long time and was there when we transitioned our staff away from email and onto Slack. She did not like it, or so she thought. Sometimes, it overwhelmed her and she shared with me that on certain days, the messages felt like they wouldn’t stop coming in. But when she left our church and began working for an organization that did not use Slack (or anything like it), her opinion on Slack completely changed. She told me soon after, “When I worked at Arrowhead, I thought Slack was really annoying to use. Now that I’m back to just regular email, I actually really miss Slack. It makes communication way simpler.” And I think that opinion makes a lot of sense.
Work communication is essential, and no matter how it comes in, sometimes the requests and questions and comments and feedback is overwhelming. But Slack might be the best tool (currently) to manage all of that work communication, and without it, we’d be a lot more frustrated at Arrowhead Church.
Like any tool, it has great benefits and it needs to be used correctly. It’s also not the only work-communication tool out there, with similar offerings from Google and Microsoft, too. But if you’re experiencing some of the same work communication efficiencies that we were, maybe give the free Slack plan a try.
In 2021, I wrote a Slack Guide PDF which served as the basis for our new staff Slack onboarding. We used the opportunity to do a refresher with our existing staff, too. Frankly, I need to update it a little, but I’ve uploaded it here so you can see how we train employees on Slack. I don’t just hand this to them and say, “good luck!” But we sit down and work through this together.
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