The Ministry of the Inbox: eCatholic's New Book on Parish Email & SMS Communication Is Here
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June 10, 2026There's a moment every parish communicator knows well.
You spend an hour crafting the perfect email newsletter, making sure every detail is just right. You hit send, and a few days later, you check the open rate and find that fewer than 1 in 5 people even opened it.
It's discouraging, we get it! And the worst part? It's not because your parishioners don't care. It's because there's a gap between the ministry you want to do and the communication tools and habits that help you actually do it.
We call it the Digital Engagement Gap. And closing it is exactly what our newest resource is designed to help with.
The Channel Your Parishioners Are Already Using
Before we talk about the book, consider this: SMS text messages see an open rate of 98% (!!!), making text one of the most effective communication channels available today. The book notes that texts are read within minutes of delivery, while an email, no matter how well-crafted, may sit unopened in an inbox for hours or days, if it gets opened at all.
Your parishioners are already on their phones, all day, every day. The question isn't whether to meet them there. It's whether your parish knows how. And that's exactly why we wrote The Ministry of the Inbox: The Art of Mastering Parish Email & SMS Communication.
A Ministry Guide, Not A Marketing Manual
In the book's preface, our CEO, Jason Jaynes, frames it plainly: "The Ministry of the Inbox isn't a product manual, it's a ministry guide."
In over two decades serving parishes, schools, dioceses, and ministries, the team at eCatholic has seen how dedicated Catholic communicators are, and how often they feel like they're shouting into the void. Whether it's emails that don't get opened, announcements that only reach a fraction of the intended audience, or families who slowly drift from the parish, not because of a crisis in faith, but because of a gap in communication that nobody intended or quite knew how to close.The best strategies aren't invented in a marketing textbook, they're discovered in the daily reality of people trying to serve their communities well. – The Ministry of the Inbox
What's Inside
The book covers seven chapters of practical, actionable guidance:Chapter 1: Your Inbox Is a Pulpit frames communication as an act of pastoral care, placing parish email and SMS in the long tradition of the Church reaching out to its people in some written form or other, from Saint Paul's letters to the Corinthians to your Tuesday morning newsletter.
Chapter 2: Why Nobody Is Opening Your Emails gets honest about the three root causes of low engagement: weak subject lines, irrelevant recipients, and a trust deficit built up through years of inbox noise. It includes a simple self-audit that any communicator can run in five minutes.
Chapter 3: The Subject Line Is the Hook delivers five subject line formulas that consistently earn opens in a parish context, complete with real before-and-after examples drawn from actual parish email habits.
Chapter 4: Sending to the Right Pew introduces list segmentation in approachable, ministry-centered terms, showing how to stop writing every email for everyone and start writing each one for someone.
Chapter 5: The Text That Gets a Response unlocks SMS as a push-notification layer for urgent, time-sensitive communication, offering insights on when to use it, how to use it responsibly, and how eCatholic Connect brings email and SMS together in a single platform so your team isn't juggling two separate systems.
Chapter 6: Rhythms, Not Blasts replaces the reactive "Important Announcement" scramble with a sustainable, liturgical-calendar-based communication rhythm that any parish team can actually maintain.
Chapter 7: Measuring What Matters demystifies email analytics into exactly three numbers (e.g., open rate, click rate, and unsubscribe rate) and shows how to use them not as a performance scorecard, but as a form of listening to your community.
A Story Worth Sharing
Danielle Nepustil is the Director of Communications at Saint Catherine of Siena Catholic Church in Austin, Texas, and is one of the real voices featured in the book. When her parish switched to eCatholic Connect for its email communications, one of its first decisions was bold: it stopped printing a paper bulletin entirely, replacing it with a weekly email linked to a digital version on its website.
"It's nice because we can see how many people have opened the emails every week," Danielle explains. "We can see the different groups and what they're doing with it."
That shift (from a passive, printed handout to an active, trackable communication) is exactly the kind of move this book is designed to help parishes make. It doesn't always require a technology overhaul; just a decision to communicate differently, backed by the right tools and practices.
The Ministry of the Inbox is available now–and it's free!Whether your parish is just getting started with digital communication or looking to sharpen what you already have, this guide meets you where you are.
Download your free copy
Built for Mission. Built for This Moment.
The principles in The Ministry of the Inbox aren't platform-specific; they work regardless of the communication tools a parish uses. But eCatholic built Connect specifically to make these practices as easy as possible to implement: unified email and SMS in one place, built-in analytics after every send, and a group structure that makes segmentation practical rather than overwhelming.
Because when ministry leaders have the right knowledge and the right tools, the gap between the community they have and the community they're called to build gets a little smaller every week.
That family in the third pew? They're still out there. And your next email (or text) might be the one that keeps them.
Ready to put these principles into practice? eCatholic Connect gives your parish everything it needs to communicate with clarity and consistency, with email, SMS text messaging, analytics, and more – all in one place.