A new way to keep email communication relevant across Canada

By Leandro Palacios, Director of Communications

The Communications Team is pleased to introduce the Email Preference Centre, a new tool that will give you more control over the emails you receive from Community of Christ in Canada. Why is this important?

Our traditional newsletters—the Weekly Wire for Canada West and the What’s Happening for Canada East—were effective at keeping people informed in the past about news and events happening in the former mission centres. Moving onward together across Canada has expanded our perspective, but at the same time has created a communication challenge. On the one hand, we want to ensure people stay in the know, but on the other hand, we don’t want to overwhelm our audience with irrelevant content. For example, people in Vancouver may not be thrilled to receive invitations to in-person events in Ontario every week.

When emails are no longer effective at keeping subscribers engaged, people unsubscribe or simply ignore them, which causes mail servers to flag messages as promotional content or even spam. Last year, as we envisioned how we would bring together all congregations and members across Canada within a single structure, the Mission Centre Design Team recognized the need to offer a way to customize the content people would receive in their inbox.

The Email Preference Centre is our first step toward keeping emails relevant according to subscriber preferences—keeping people engaged, improving open rates, and helping messages reach inboxes consistently. This approach will also help us kickstart a campaign to grow our list of subscribers, because people are more likely to subscribe and stay engaged when they can choose what they want to receive. This keeps communication focused and meaningful, while still ensuring that everyone receives important updates that are relevant across Canada.

In this first stage, we are introducing targeted communication based on interests, starting with camping and campground updates. With six campgrounds across Canada, this means people can choose to receive updates only from the communities they are part of, instead of all camp-related news. In the next stage, we will add options for geographic regions and other areas of interest.

You can access the Email Preference Centre by clicking “update your preferences” at the bottom of any of our emails. You can also enter your email address and select your preferences using this form. If your email is already in our system, your preferences will be updated.

Make sure you select all the newsletters you would like to receive in your inbox, as well as the campgrounds you would like to receive news and updates from. Let us know if you have any questions or additional ideas for keeping the conversation relevant and engaging as we continue moving onward together across Canada.