Look at a parish newsletter from any tradition and you’ll find the same parts: a masthead with the church’s details, the week’s title, a table of services day by day, and a long run of notices. In Catholic parishes, the table has the intention for each Mass, and there’s often a feast day for each date.
We read weekly sheets from Catholic, Anglican and Methodist churches, from a single church to five rural ones sharing a priest. What struck us is how much of each sheet is the same as last week. The Mass times rarely change. Half the notices ran last week and will run next week. The intentions come from the book. Yet in most offices it’s all retyped or copied from last week’s Word file, every week, and that’s where mistakes creep in: a Mass time that changed a month ago, a notice for an event that’s already happened.
Pewbook’s newsletter starts from what it already knows.
The services table writes itself
Your service times for each church are already in Pewbook. So are this week’s changes: a Mass cancelled because Father is away, an extra service for a feast day. Since groups and activities can go in the diary too (the toddler group, confessions, the prayer group), the whole week is in one place.
When you open Newsletter and choose the week, the services table is built from all of that. Cancelled services show as cancelled, in your own words. Extra services and activities appear on their day. If your parish has more than one church, each entry shows which church it’s at.
For Catholic parishes using Mass intentions, the table has the intention for each Mass, straight from the register. Intentions a parishioner asked not to publish show as “Private intention”.
If your parish uses the liturgical calendar, the week’s title (“26th Sunday in Ordinary Time”) and the feast for each day are filled in for you, following the calendar for England and Wales. Otherwise you type a title for the week, or leave it blank.
Notices you only type once
Notices are most of a newsletter, and many of them repeat: parking, how to book a Mass, the baptism course, planned giving. In Pewbook, each notice has a first week and an end: This week only, 4 weeks, Until a date or Until further notice. It appears every week until it runs out, then stops by itself. You reorder them with Move up and Move down.
So each week you check the list, add what’s new, and the old notices drop off without anyone remembering to delete them.
It looks like your newsletter
Admins can set the layout once in Change the layout: which day the week starts, the masthead and closing text, which sections appear and in what order. There are three styles to start from:
- Classic: roomy A4 pages.
- Compact: one dense A4 page, with notices in two columns.
- Booklet: A5 pages, each section in a box, which you can print and fold.
Then Fine-tune lets you change one thing at a time, such as the text size, the fonts or the colour of the headings.
Or let Pewbook work it out. Upload last week’s newsletter as a PDF or a photo, and Pewbook suggests a style to match it. You see the change side by side and untick anything you don’t want before you apply it.
Getting it out
When it’s ready:
- Print it, on A4 or as a folded A5 booklet;
- Copy text and paste it into an email, a Word document or a message to your parish’s group;
- Publish it, which keeps a copy of the week exactly as it went out. If your parish chooses, the published newsletter also appears on your public page, without intentions.
Publishing keeps a record, too. Change a notice next week and the copy you published this week stays as it was.
Getting your service times in
The newsletter is only as good as the diary behind it, so it’s worth getting your service times right once. You can add each weekly service by hand, but if your times are already written down, Pewbook can read them for you. Paste the address of the page on your website that lists them, upload a newsletter as a PDF or a photo of the noticeboard, or paste them as text. You check the list, untick anything wrong and tap Add. Each parish has five free imports.
After that, keeping it current is a minute’s work: cancel a service on one date, or add an extra one. If your parish has the Assistant, you can type the change as you’d say it (“From 29 November the Saturday vigil moves from 6pm to 5.30pm”) and check exactly what it will do before anything changes.
A Friday afternoon, back
None of this is clever. It’s the same newsletter, built from information the office already keeps, so the only typing left is what’s actually new this week.
Read how to build the weekly newsletter in the help centre, or how to take Mass intention requests online if you’d like the intentions in the table to fill themselves in too.