Kommunikationsstrategier inom tre församlingar, en jämförande studie

Sammanfattning: The purpose of this thesis is to study and compare communication strategies in three different parishes located in three quite different contexts to get a starting point to answering questions concerning the rate of members leaving the Swedish church, 1.6% per year. It is of outmost importance for a parish to be regarded as a positive and responsible organisation contributing to the local community and to its members. If the church and/or parishes fail in these aspects, the result will be that people do not want to stay as members. My main research questions have been the following: A) How do parishes see themselves, their mission and organisation; B) What are the parishes’ strategies and goals with their external communication; C) What, and how, do the parishes communicate externally; D) What response do the parishes receive on their external communication; E) How can the effect of the external communications be measured? To get a broad picture of the situation, I have conducted semi structured interviews with informants working with external communication in one parish located close to a larger city, one parish located in a part of a larger city and one parish located in the countryside of Sweden. The result has shown that there is a need for the Swedish church and its parishes to take a look at their strategic external communication with the goal to reach more people with messages that makes them positively inclined to the church and perhaps get an interest in becoming, or remaining, members of the Church. The parishes in this study gives a unanimous result of an overlooked external communication, without clearly defined goals, strategies and without trained communication personnel taking care of communication as one task in their work. Furthermore, no measurements are made to see if the communication is effective.