Twenty-one days, six touchpoints a week, and Heart & Soul, a pivotal night everyone's invited to. This year, five different audiences needed five different invitations, running at the same time, without anyone feeling spammed, left out or as if communication was competing. Here's what we’ve found to work for us in this season, and what we'd hand to any team looking to do the same.

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Communicating For Clarity

This August, Pray First ran August 10th to the 31st: 21 days of prayer and fasting built around a full weekly rhythm.

• 6:30AM weekday Zoom Prayer: the daily anchor
• 12PM weekday Prayer on IG Live: a second daily touch for a different rhythm of people
• Two Wednesday Pray First Gatherings, back to back, hosted by each location
• Heart & Soul, a churchwide night on the last Wednesday of the 21 days
• Man Alive Prayer Breakfasts, every Saturday at VOUS Miami Gardens

Six recurring commitments, one 21-day window. The risk wasn't a missed announcement, it was wanting to avoid noise. What we’ve found is that if everything is important, nothing becomes important. Our goal was to create clarity for what was important to who. In other words, first who, then what. We did this by identifying segments of who we were communicating to. Information became specific and relevant to the receiver. Our hope was that by creating audience segmentation, we were able to create consistent lanes of communication through intentionality in who we’re communicating to.

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The Matrix

We built a shared spreadsheet, the Pray First Comms Matrix, and it became the source of communication for the campaign. Every row was one send: date, day, audience, campaign, channel, owner, status, and a notes column for exact copy or links, if applicable.

That structure did two jobs at once. First, it lets anyone on the team have visibility into the whole 21 days at a glance. This helps us identify what weeks would be communication heavy, and which weeks we could expect a lighter load keeping in mind the audiences we’re communicating to and how much they’re being asked to take a specific action. Secondly, it kept a paper trail: providing reference to what the focus copy would be, to whom, and on what day. This provides a framework for season over season both as a recap and a framework for next season's planning that doesn't start from scratch.

Find a copy of our Pray First Communications Matrix here.

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Segmenting the Audience

The matrix only worked because we didn't treat "the church" as one list. But instead, one church broke out into multiple segments. We ran the below:

• All Church: the big touches: kickoff, weekly emails, Heart & Soul invites
• Pray First Group: an opted-in text list, built by asking people to reply "PRAY" — this carried the daily rhythm
• By Locations: gathering invites specific to where someone actually shows up
• Man Alive: its own mini-campaign around the Men's Prayer Breakfasts
• Servant Leaders: a targeted reminder ahead of Heart & Soul

Segmenting first meant every message had one job. The person who opted into daily texts got a daily text reminding them of prayer the next morning or any important updates for Heart & Soul. The person who only touches email got the big invites without the day-to-day communications.

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Matching the Channel to the Moment

We didn't use every channel for every message.

Email carried the story beats: the kickoff, the Heart & Soul waves, the Man Alive Prayer Breakfast recaps. It's where there was room to explain the "why," not just the "when."

Text carried the daily habit. Short, one job per message, sent the night before: a quick "that was special, see you tomorrow at 6:30AM" plus the Zoom link. That single pattern, invite the morning, repeated for 21 days and did more to keep people showing up than any single big push could have.

Instagram Live met a different rhythm of people at midday, without asking them to opt into anything.

Zoom hosted the habit itself, the one thing we wanted to become automatic by day 21.

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Building Toward the Close

Heart & Soul didn't arrive as a single announcement. It built across three waves, first folded into the kickoff email, then repeated in communications, then landing as a direct, location-specific invite the week of. By the time the night arrived, most people had heard about it in separate ways, each one adding a little more detail than the last.

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A Resource for You

We're including a version of our Pray First Comms Matrix, the same columns we used, ready for your team to fill in with your own season, audiences, and channels. Copy it, adjust the audiences to match your church, and let it become the one place your team checks before anything goes out.