South Pacific: Media Convergence and Higher Adventist Profile Top Communication Agenda

February 6, 2007 Sydney, Australia …. [Rajmund Dabrowski/Record/ANN]

Planning for a more effective public presence and deployment of Internet technology by local churches dominated the agenda of a meeting of top Seventh-day Adventist communicators in the church’s South Pacific region.

Concerns that the church is relatively unknown and needs to increase community presence, as well as name and mission recognition, were passionately expressed by some 30 top Adventist communicators representing a 400,000-member strong church in the region.

Covering Australia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea and numerous islands of the South Pacific, the church recently established the Adventist Media Network (AMN) to synergize the use of the media and present a coordinated message to the church and its communities.

Allen Steele, communication director of the church’s South Pacific region and CEO of AMN, refers to AMN as a “fusion of the media,” which in an experimental way will allow for a “cross-fertilization of production and promotion across the media, including print, radio, television and Internet, [and] will also be used in forming messages for the other media.” Steele hosted the communication advisory at the Adventist Media Centre in the Sydney suburb of Wahroonga, Jan. 29 to 31.

In practical terms, Steele says, the published materials such as books, magazines and journals provided by the church-owned Signs Publishing Company, Warburton, Victoria, will became a part of the communication strategy in the region and the editorial staff will lead all the church media in news gathering and dissemination. AMN has also created a marketing arm of the church’s public communication efforts, which will augment the public relations activities of the Adventist Church.

Steele, who also coordinates AMN television facilities at the Adventist Media Centre, says that they are gearing up for increased program production to serve the church’s publics.

The communication arm of the church, it was announced, will launch a 500-site Web network in July 2007, based on the netAdventist management system. Danny Houghton, representing United States-based TAGnet company, the developer of netAdventist, presented participants with the features and operation of the new Web platform, a software suite that combines localized Web sites with live streams of information and resources from the global church as well as interlinking church Websites, in this case across the South Pacific.

“This is a major step for us here,” says Jeanelle Issacs, an electronic media officer for Adventist Media Network. “After examining four different content management systems, we chose to go with netAdventist because it was the best at integrating and sharing information across our [territories] in a user-friendly way.”

The regional Web committee sees this development as part of a goal to expand the online Adventist witness with an intention of providing every church, school, union, conference, and ministry in the South Pacific with an innovative and intentionally operated system of Websites regionally, including the islands in French Polynesia whose Websites will be in French.

“Never in our wildest dreams did we ever think that our local churches in Papua, New Guinea, could have Websites,” says Matiput Darius, communication director for the church in Papua New Guinea.

Commenting on the media convergence through AMN, Nathan Brown, editor of the church’s weekly magazine “Record”, says that the “potential for working together in a creative sense and on major church and communication projects has promise. The possibility of using content generated by our various communicators across the different forms of media offers a wider impact for what we have to say.” However, Brown says that the communication restructure “has focused on corporate and management reorganization rather than the church actually coming up with something to say.”

That’s still to come and will be intentionally addressed as one of the priorities of the restructure, according to AMN administrators.

“The primary challenge to communication in this region is to be a voice that is not just making noise but is actually being heard in our society. This means we need to work on what we think is most important to say to our society as well as how we might go about saying it. We must address issues that are important to people around us and use these as a way of sharing the hope and goodness in what we believe,” Brown comments.

Julie Praestiin, corporate communications manager for church-owned Sanitarium Health Food Company, near Sydney, expressed similar sentiments. Praestiin, who is developing Sanitarium Community Care engagement strategy and its Corporate Social Responsibility profile, commented that “there is synergy to be gained by bringing the media channels together– this should bring about cost savings, the ability to propagate information across all mediums and potentially build a stronger profile for both the mediums themselves and the message they carry. United, these areas can really make an impact on communications.”

“In this media-noisy time the challenge will be to cut through and make a difference with a clear message,” she added.

“These meetings have inspired me to reach out to the public, to let them know about the church we love,” reflects Claudia Pereira, marketing manager for Adventist schools in the Greater Sydney Conference. “Networking with other communication leaders from across the South Pacific was invaluable.”

Copyright (c) 2007 by Adventist News Network.