The world changed, attention fragmented and trust got harder to earn. Most communications strategies in the sector have not caught up — and the gap is now measurable.
Something worth noticing about the way most Christian organisations in Europe talk to their audiences: the underlying assumptions have barely moved in more than a decade. The channels changed. The thinking did not.
The assumption that broke
The old model assumed attention was something you could buy or borrow — a broadcast slot, a mailing list, a stand at a conference. Reach was the metric that mattered because reach was scarce and roughly equivalent to attention.
Neither half of that holds now. Reach is cheap and attention is scarce, which inverts the entire calculation.
What replaces it
Trust, mostly. Not as a warm word but as a measurable asset: whether an audience will open the next thing you send, and whether they will act on it.
That is harder to build and slower to show up in a dashboard, which is exactly why so few organisations have made the shift. The quarterly number rewards reach. The decade rewards trust.
This piece is placeholder content, kept as a draft while Edition 1 is being prepared. It is here to exercise the article template — replace it with the real thing before launch.