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By Diane Ney
Washington Window
Vol. 73, No. 4, March 2005
Jim Naughton is the Diocese of Washington's director of communications. Here, he speaks about his work with writer Diane Ney.
Director of Communications - how would you define that?
I guess the easiest way to think about it is to divide it in two. There are internal communications, which are the ways we communicate with parishes, clergy and laity, and also how rectors and lay leaders communicate within their own congregations. And then there are external communications, which are the ways we represent ourselves to the larger world. The Web site is one of our primary tools for external communications. People can find us on the Web and learn a great deal about the diocese or about any of our individual parishes because we link to every parish through www.edow.org. It is a potent resource, and so we've really been working to get it noticed.
You have also established a new Web site to support the ad campaign playing in movie theaters.
Right. We don't have a huge advertising budget and the size of that budget dictates that we put it into either ads in movie theaters or into print ads. We decided we'd get much more bang for our buck in movie theaters. The ads involve 21 parishes and are being shown until the first week in March. Then we hope to get it back up again during back-to-school time. To support the ads, we've created a Web site called wewelcomeyou.org, where you can go to find out about particular churches. There is a lot of cross traffic between edow.org and wewelcomeyou.org, so the two really compliment one another.
Internal communications involves what?
This in some ways has been the most delightful part of my job. When you start to hook up with parish communicators, in a handful of instances you're dealing with dedicated professionals, but usually you're dealing with volunteers. And they're not necessarily people who have any background in communications or any degree of comfort with software programs, and yet there they are, willing to devote their time and energy to the job of trying to figure out how to tell the story of their church. You really come to admire these people and understand that they're essential players and unless they're effective you're not going to have a diocese that communicates with itself well. And you're also not going to have a diocese that is well-known to the rest of the world.
Does every parish have an assigned liaison to your office?
The network is still being formed. When some parishes see we're going to have a workshop, they might have three or four people who come, hook up with us and away we go. And then in other parishes, it's the parish administrators who take this on as one of the way-too-many tasks that they do on behalf of their church. They'd probably love to have somebody take it off their hands.
You mentioned workshops. What kind of workshops do you give?
Well, they'll evolve as we go along. In the first two we did - one last fall and another towards winter - basically, I talked about media relations, Amy Elliott, our Web master, talked about Web sites and Lucy Chumbley, editor of the Window talked about newsletters. But once you do these generalized workshops, you find that people want something that is targeted. Some people want to come and talk only about Web sites. Some people want to learn only about newsletters. I think that that's the direction our workshops will be going.
Is Bishop Chane a hard sell?
The bishop, because of his unusual background - I mean, unusual for a bishop - is a very easy sell. Right now he's in the Washingtonian for the second time in six months and the occasion in this instance was that he was the chaplain of the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team that beat the Russians at Lake Placid. He's been on National Public Radio and in the Washington Post and others all because of his band, The Chane Gang. Then what happens is his name is out there and people start to call to get his opinion on whatever comes up.
What's the benefit of that?
I'd say there are two benefits. First of all, it is good for morale. People within the diocese see that their bishop matters. He's somebody who's sought, who's listened to, so they feel that they're part of a group that's communicating its message effectively. The other benefit is that people who aren't members become familiar with the bishop. They see that he hasn't lived a cloistered life - that his interests and experiences are like their own, and they say to themselves: "Well, that's probably a church I can feel comfortable in, that's a church I wouldn't mind exploring."
What do you like best about your job?
I suppose it's that the variety is great. Last month, for instance, there was a bill in the Virginia state senate that could cause a lot of trouble for the Episcopal Church because it would have unilaterally changed the governing structure of our Church in a way that favored parishes eager to break away. So I worked with a few others folks to try to bring this legislation to people's attention - to kill it with sunshine. But at the same time, I was working with parish clergy and communicators to publicize their events, and with Amy to get our Lenten resources up on the Web site, and with Drescher Films to get the new diocesan movie up on the Web as well. So there's a real richness to the job. There are opportunities to do some good in lots of different ways. And they all call on different aspects of one's personality or professional repertoire. Sometimes you've got the door closed and you're writing and editing and sometimes you're speaking to a big group of people and sometimes you're sitting down with somebody explaining how they can save money by using Kinko's instead of a copying machine. So the range is beautiful, and it's fun.
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