Digital bulletins provide a connection point with your congregation at your services. Unlike a traditional printed bulletin, your digital service bulletin includes interactive elements, convey important information to your church, allow people to take live surveys, download contact or calendar information, interact with Bible Trivia, and much more. Each bulletin also automatically includes a visitor contact card to enables visitors to connect with your church directly from the bulletin.
If you use Faithlife Proclaim, a bulletin is automatically generated and published with each presentation. You can, of course, manually create a bulletin or edit an existing bulletin whether or not you use Faithlife Proclaim.
Skip ahead to:
- Create a Bulletin
- Customize a Bulletin
- Publish a Bulletin
- Print a Bulletin
- Download Contact Card Responses
- Assign Others to Your Bulletin Team
Create a Bulletin
You can create a bulletin in two different ways: manually or through Faithlife Proclaim. However you create a bulletin, you can access it from the Community panel of your church group. Expand Content in the Community panel and click Bulletins.
Note: Alternatively, you can open your bulletin from within Proclaim. Expand the Files menu and click View Digital Bulletin. A new tab will open in your web browser showing your bulletins.
- Create bulletin manually: to create bulletin, click the blue Create bulletin button.
- Create a bulletin with Faithlife Proclaim: if you are a Proclaim user, your presentations automatically generate and publish bulletins for your service. When you start working on your presentation for your service, Faithlife will generate a bulletin for you and publish it when you go On Air. You can edit the generated bulletin and add your own content before the service as shown below. To disable automatic bulletin publishing through Proclaim, click the Settings icon
and uncheck Auto-publish bulletins.
Note: To quickly create a bulletin, select a previous bulletin and click Duplicate.
If you set your church group to “open” – which means that anyone can find and join the group – then anyone will be able to view your previously published bulletins. If you are an Admin or Moderator of your main church group or a member of your church’s Bulletin team, you will have access to all bulletins—drafts, scheduled, and published bulletins.
Customize a Bulletin
Select any bulletin to view and edit its contents. As you build out your bulletin by adding or removing items, click Preview to view how your changes will look for your congregation.
Add new content
To start, add a cover photo (click Add a photo) and provide a title for your bulletin.
Note: Learn more about uploading files to your File Vault.
Drag and drop sections from the right to add new content to your bulletin.
- Text: Add any text to your bulletin.
- Media: Add a photo to your bulletin.
- Presentation: Add slides from any Proclaim presentation to your bulletin.
- Passage: Add a Bible passage from any available Bible.
- Events: Select events from your Faithlife church calendar to show in your bulletin with the option to download the calendar details.
Remove or restore content
To remove content from your bulletin, click × Delete to mark it at deleted.
To undo any changes click Undo delete.
Note: If your bulletin was auto-generated by Proclaim, some items may be hidden by default. Reinstate any of them by clicking Undo delete.
Publish a Bulletin
Depending on how you created your bulletin, it will be scheduled to publish immediately or at your set service time in Proclaim.
To adjust the date or timing, click the current schedule date and choose a new date and time. To publish immediately, click the red ×. When finished, click Done.
Did you know? You can preview your completed bulletin by clicking Preview at the top of the page.
When you’ve finished customizing your bulletin, click Publish to set your bulletin to publish at the scheduled time you set.
Did you know? You can customize your church’s mobile app to show your bulletins. Additionally, if you have a Faithlife Site, you can set your bulletin to auto-publish to your website.
Print a Bulletin
Click Preview to preview your finished bulletin and click Print in the right panel. This converts your bulletin to a printable version you can hand out to congregants. Alternatively, you can copy the text content of your bulletin for use in another application (click Copy and then Ctrl + C or ⌘CMD + C on Mac)
Note: There are advantages to sharing your bulletin digitally. Your people can directly access donation links, continue reading any passages that you’ve included in your presentation, and fill out surveys/contact cards to send directly to you! Additionally, any digital Signals used in your presentation will appear in-line, prompting your people to download calendar events, add contact cards, and more.
Download Contact Card Responses
To download any contact card responses from a given bulletin, open the bulletin, scroll down to the contact card section, and click Download responses.
Assign Others to Your Bulletin Team
Two groups of people can create, edit, and publish bulletins for your church:
- Admins or moderators of your main church group
- Members of your Bulletin Team
Generally speaking, it’s best to use teams to distribute permissions, rather than inviting people as admins or moderators of your church group (as it will also give them access to other important data, like people records).
Create a Bulletin Team
If you don’t have a Bulletin Team, an admin or moderator of your church group can create one from the Teams menu of your main church group (click the plus icon in the left-hand teams panel of your church group).
Search for “Bulletin” or find it in the list below. Check the Bulletin row and select Add to create your bulletin team.
Note: Learn more about using Teams on Faithlife.
Assign people to your team.
You can invite people directly from the team or while viewing all your teams. Click Add members, add team members in the input field, and choose Assign.
Note: Learn more about inviting people to a team.
