The comms director burnout problem nobody is solving

There's a number I've been tracking with friends who pastor mid-sized churches across central Indiana and beyond. The median tenure of a church communications director, in my admittedly anecdotal sample, sits somewhere around 18 to 24 months.

That's the median. Some are longer. A lot are shorter. The role chews through young, talented people and pushes them into corporate marketing jobs that pay 40% more and don't require them to be at the office on Sundays.

I want to talk about why. Most senior pastors I meet with assume the problem is hours. Hours are part of it. The bigger driver is surface area.

Surface area, more than hours

A comms director at a 600-attendance church is usually responsible for some combination of:

• Sermon series art and slides
• Weekly announcement graphics for 5 to 12 different ministries
• The church's main Instagram and Facebook
• Each ministry's separate social channels (sometimes)
• The bulletin
• The website
• Email newsletters
• Event campaigns (camp, conferences, baptism services, Easter, Christmas)
• Sermon recording and livestream coordination
• Hospitality signage, lobby screens
• Whatever the senior pastor texted at 9 PM Wednesday
• Whatever the kids pastor texted at 7 AM Thursday

That's the work of four jobs sitting in one role. The corporate marketing role they're competing with is one job. Even if the corporate salary were the same, the corporate role would still win on the surface area axis.

What actually breaks them

The hours are bad. Hours alone are survivable. What actually breaks them is this.

1. No one else on staff can do any of it. They can't take a real vacation. Every week they don't make the slides, the slides don't get made.
2. They're the youngest person on staff. They're being asked to manage volunteer designers, push back on senior leadership, and make brand decisions while being 24 and three years out of college.
3. They're being judged on Sunday morning, every week. A failed product launch in corporate marketing means a follow-up meeting. A weird-looking slide in church means 40 people glance up at the wrong moment.
4. Their workload swings violently with no warning. A normal week is 35 hours. The week before Easter is 80. Planning a life around that is hard.

Points three and four are inherent to the role. Points one and two are fixable.

What helps

Things that don't move the needle:

• "Take a Sabbath." (They will, then double-shift Monday to catch up.)
• Hiring a part-time admin. (Doesn't solve the design surface area.)
• Buying them a better laptop. (Wasn't the problem.)
• Reorganizing the org chart. (Doesn't change the work.)

Things that actually help:

• Take design off their plate. Outsource it to a designer who specifically does church work. The comms director gets to be a strategist instead of a slide-monkey.
• Give them backup that doesn't depend on volunteers. Volunteers vanish in summer. Volunteers can't be the load-bearing wall.
• Centralize their request system. One inbox. One place where ministry leaders submit needs. Anything beats seven different ministry leaders texting them at 9 PM.
• Set a hard limit on what they own. It's fine if the kids ministry has its own designer separate from the comms team. It's fine if the website is owned by someone else. Comms doesn't have to mean everything visual.

This is what the design subscription model exists for, and what I run at Create Church Media. The comms director's job, as currently scoped, is structurally hard. Carving out the design layer and handing it to one outside designer makes the role possible again.

The 18-month clock

If you have a comms director right now, set a calendar reminder for the 18-month mark. That's roughly when they'll start interviewing for the next role.

What keeps them is making their job something a person can actually sustain.