What Goes in a Communications Audit (and Why You Should Do One Before Fall)
by Ashley Graham-Wilcox
Summer is a lie.
I mean that lovingly — and also literally. As I wrote a few weeks ago, there is no slow season in church work. But summer does have something that the rest of the year often doesn't: a little breathing room. The emails still come. The newsletters still need writing. But the pace shifts, even slightly, and that shift is worth something: It's worth using.
One of the best things you can do with a few hours of margin — before fall programming kicks off, before stewardship season is suddenly on the horizon, before Advent is somehow four weeks away — is to look honestly at your communications and ask: What is actually working?
That's a communications audit. And it doesn't have to be complicated.
What a Communications Audit Actually Is
A communications audit is not a performance review. It's not a reason to feel bad about what you haven't done. It's a structured look at the communications and messaging you're currently putting out into the world, and whether it's doing what your organization needs it to.
Think of it like cleaning out a closet. You're not trying to shame yourself for the things you've accumulated. You're just figuring out what fits, what you've outgrown, and what you forgot you even had.
What to Look At
Here's a simple framework. Go through each of your communications channels and ask the same four questions:
Is this reaching people? Pull the numbers: Email open rates, social reach, website traffic, bulletin pickup counts if you track them. You don't need a data science degree — you just need a sense of the trend. Is this channel connecting with people, or are you essentially posting into the void? This is somewhere AI can be really helpful. As I shared in last month’s workshop, I’ll take screen caps of my channel’s analytics screens, dump them into an AI tool, and ask for the trends and takeaways.
Is this serving a clear purpose? Every channel should be able to answer the question: Who is this for, and what do we want them to do? If you can't answer that for your church's Facebook page, or your weekly email, or your outdoor sign — that's useful information.
Is this sustainable? This is the question we skip most often. A channel might be reaching people AND serving a purpose, but if it's running on one exhausted person's energy with no backup plan, that's a fragile system. Sustainability counts.
Is this the right tool for the job? Sometimes we're using a channel out of habit, not because it's actually the best fit. Ask whether the people you're trying to reach are actually on this platform, reading this format, showing up in this space. I’m in the midst of completely dismantling a weekly enewsletter, because it takes more of my hours than the people who read it (basically).
A Few Specific Things Worth Checking
Email: What are your open rates? (Industry average for nonprofits hovers around 25-30%. Churches often do better — but if you're well below that, it's worth asking why.) Are people clicking anything? Are you cleaning your list, or carrying a long tail of addresses that haven't engaged in years?
Social media: Which posts actually got engagement in the last six months? Don't guess — look. The answer is often surprising, and it tells you something about what your community actually responds to.
Your website: When did you last look at it as if you'd never been there before? Check the homepage, the "I'm new here" pathway (if you have one), and the contact page. Are they accurate? Are they welcoming? Do they answer the questions a first-time visitor would actually ask?
The bulletin: Is it doing too much? (It usually is.) What's in there every week that nobody reads? What's missing that people actually need?
What to Do With What You Find
You don't have to fix everything. In fact, please don't try to fix everything at once. Instead, pick one or two things to stop doing, one or two things to improve, and one thing you want to pay more attention to in the fall. Write it down somewhere you'll actually see it again in August.
That's it. That's the audit.
☕ A Final Thought
The goal of a communications audit isn't to produce a report that lives in a Google Drive folder nobody opens. It's to give yourself permission to be intentional — to decide, on purpose, what you're going to do and why, instead of just carrying forward the same channels and habits because that's how it's always been done.
You've got a few weeks before fall changes everything, again. Use them well.
