From the Desk of Pastor Marsha
What’s Happening 2.1.24
This coming Sunday we are having our Annual Congregational Meeting following worship at 10:45 am. We will stay in the worship sanctuary and just give people a chance to get up and get registered, take a bathroom break, grab a cup of coffee.
We will do all the usual things congregations do at annual meetings, including the passing of the budget. If you weren’t here last week and attended the Budget presentation meeting, you will not have heard that we are asking for the approval of hiring a half-time Administrative Assistant with a focus on Social Media Coordination. I wanted to take a moment and share your leadership’s thinking about this need we are seeing in our staffing.
When we hired Kari in October of 2022, we really had no idea how much one person could do with the job description we gave her. We threw in everything that previous Parish administrators, receptionists and bookkeepers had been doing. We were aware that several people had done these jobs in a number of different arrangements within the last 10 or so years. But we had to start somewhere, knowing we might eventually have to change things up a bit.
As we have talked about a number of times here at Zion communication is a huge piece of the life of a congregation, and we were missing a number of those tools that could make up a good communication strategy. As we were re-building many of the ministries here at Zion we were slowly trying to work on the communication piece. We made a couple of tries at the creation of a new website but to little fruition. We finally found the name of the person who had just redesigned the synod’s website and made contact with him. We wrote up a grant request from the Mission Endowment Fund in order to hire him, and he did an amazing job working with a handful of staff and volunteers throughout the fall and early winter. We were able to launch the new site on Jan 22. There is still more work to be done on it, but we are plugging away.
Similarly our public Facebook page got taken down when the majority of staff left a couple of years ago, and while the Zion group Facebook page was still in use, it wasn’t very user-friendly for outsiders. We are just now in the process of creating a new public Facebook page so we can reach, not only Zion members, but others who might be interested in knowing what is going on at Zion. We were also told by our young members we need to also have an Instagram account if we want to reach their generation. This is also in the works.
But back to Kari, we have found that her plate is pretty much full and a bit overflowing. There is no way she can take on the management of our social media needs. And in fact, could use some assistance with some of her other work. Zion is a very busy place and she is the face everyone sees when they walk in the office. She greets them warmly and offers them assistance with a countless number of questions and needs. But she is also doing bulletins, e-news, and a whole bunch of bookkeeping, as well as a number of other tasks.
It was decided by the council at our January meeting that we needed to hire some assistance for her and for all our new social media needs we are hoping to get up and running here soon. The Finance committee reviewed and approved that, the budget appears to be able to afford it, so it was approved to write up a job description for a half-time position to primarily do social media, but also some clerical work alongside Kari. If the budget is approved at our annual meeting, the job description will be reviewed and approved in February and the hiring process will begin after that.
We know people like to be made aware of adding new positions and the reasoning behind such positions. I think it is important so that people can understand and therefore support our staff and work well with them. I hope I have made that clear, but If you have any questions please contact myself or Sue our president, or anyone on the council.
