09/02/2026
When our vicar left, we were told two things by our diocese:
Recruiting for a vicar is hard, especially if you’re trying to get people to come to the North
Your Parish Profile is critical in recruiting the right person
We were shown some examples of Parish Profiles that other churches had done, and they all had a similar style: standard A4 portrait document, with quite a lot of text, and a few photos. Comprehensive, but rarely inspiring.
The plan
We love our church and we wanted to have a good recruitment process so that we got some great candidates, and that got me thinking - what if we could do things a little differently? What if we could show potential candidates more than just a document with a few photos? What if we could bring the church community to life?
We wanted to achieve three things:
A Parish Profile that was colourful, contemporary, full of inspiring photos, with interesting and engaging written content.
Digital content that showed more of parish life than a document can
Engage as many different voices from the church community as possible
How we did it
The PCC was fully on board with these aims, so the first step was to write our content. We started by divvying out various areas of church life and asking people to write around 150-250 words for each area of ministry. Alongside this, church members were encouraged to send in photos of church life, (where appropriate permissions had been granted). All members of the PCC contributed to this process, and after a month of work we ended up with about 5000 words.
The next stage was to turn this into an engaging, contemporary document. Using Canva we were able to use one of the standard templates to develop our basic visual idea and start inputting the written and visual content. This took a few weeks to complete, but through constructive feedback from the PCC and others, we were able to design an exciting Parish Profile that gives a good representation of our church life.
The document, however, is only part of the content. We wanted to help potential candidates imagine what life was like in this role, and so we filmed some short videos to achieve this:
Parish tour – I walked around the parish with my phone, filming clips of significant areas. Using Canva, I was then able to splice these with an illustration of the Parish boundary that I had made and overlaid some music and narration.
Church tour – Our church is only 90 years old and does not look like a traditional CofE church, so we wanted to show how this relatively unusual space impacts and supports our ministry. Again, using a phone and Canva, I was able to make a short video tour of the church building that brings our spaces to life.
I also wanted to create some engaging content about the property, having heard from clergy that vicarage information is a key part of the decision-making process. I used design software (Adobe Illustrator) to create a floorplan (if you don’t have this, a sketch on paper will do!) and then along with some photos, I asked Microsoft CoPilot (AI) to write me “an estate agent style overview of this property”. It wasn’t perfect, but it gave me about 90% of what I needed.
The final piece of the jigsaw was engaging different voices from across the church. Each Lent and Christmas we record a series of daily reflections from people in our church community, and these are then shared by WhatsApp or Email each day. It’s lovely way to hear different voices and perspectives. In the same vein, we made a podcast, asking people to reflect on ‘things they love about St Gabriel’s’. We didn’t use fancy equipment, just people recording clips on their phones and sending them in. Then, using Spotify’s free editing software, we joined the clips together with a quick intro and outro, and uploaded it to make it public.
The Diocese put our Parish Profile on their website, and we also put a page on our church website with the same information and a link to the diocesan pages. We also embedded the YouTube and Spotify links on our site, alongside the Profile and the Vicarage information.
The key trick for engagement, however, was earlier on in the process where we created QR codes in the Parish Profile that linked through to our website, meaning that anyone who saw the profile could easily connect with the digital content and get that broader parish view.
You can find all of this content on our website, and you can see a live demonstration of the content that was created here and below.
What we learned
Through this process we learned a lot that we think would be transferable to other contexts:
Collective responsibility – it’s important to involve as many people as possible. It helps people in the congregation feel like they are part of the process, but it also brings a wealth of views and perspectives that showcase the life of the church.
Challenges – there are always challenges in every Parish and Church community, so don’t be afraid to share these. It means that potential candidates can start to see where they can bring something fresh to the table.
Vicarage floor plan – anytime anyone thinks about moving house, knowing what they’re moving to is important. Drawing a floorplan with dimensions, or obtaining one from the Diocese, means a potential candidate can imagine what life might be like. They can work out if their sofa will fit in the lounge. These things are important!
QR codes – through Canva, these are easy to create, super helpful shortcuts to digital content, which makes it simpler to share and navigate to any other content you might have as part of your advertising process. (Learn more: How to add and edit a QR code in Canva)
If you are starting your Parish Profile journey and you like the idea of some of these things, but don’t know where to start, have a look around the resources here or consider getting in touch with the communications department at your Diocese.
If you’d like to speak to Dave to hear more about what they did at St Gabriel’s, message [email protected] and we can put you in touch.
We love sharing stories about what churches are exploring - you can read more digital church case studies here. If you’d like to share something your church has tried to engage people using digital tools, we’d love to hear about it! You can tell us all about it using this form, or email us at [email protected]
