When I worked with TRS, I remember thinking: this isn’t broken because people don’t care — it’s broken because everything is competing at once.

TRS was active. Engaged. Deeply invested in its community. And communication was everywhere.

There was a main email newsletter. Auxiliary groups had their own email newsletters. There was a monthly magazine that went out digitally and in print. Later, we added a quarterly events guide, also digital and in print. Every channel had a reason for existing. None of them were coordinated.

The main email newsletter alone was so long that when we printed it out, it came to fourteen pages. Fourteen. And a lot of that same information — especially events — was also showing up in the magazine. Then you’d see it again in auxiliary newsletters, sometimes with small differences, sometimes with updates, sometimes not.

So people weren’t under-informed.
They were overwhelmed.

What stood out to me wasn’t the volume. It was the redundancy — and the fact that the audience was being asked to sort it all out on their own. Which version is right? Which channel matters most? Is this new, or did I already see it somewhere else?

That’s not a communication failure. That’s a design failure.

Once we named that, the work got clearer.

The first thing we had to do was decide what each channel was actually for. Not in theory — in practice. The email newsletter couldn’t be everything. The magazine couldn’t be a second calendar. Auxiliary groups couldn’t keep filling the gaps left by the main channels.

So we made choices.

The email newsletter became shorter — two or three pages instead of fourteen — and focused on what people needed to know now. The magazine stopped repeating events and started doing the work it was better suited for: reflection, storytelling, highlighting what was happening in the community beyond logistics.

That alone helped. But it wasn’t enough.

The real bottleneck was timing. Event information was coming in days before print deadlines, which meant everything felt urgent and nothing could be planned. So we changed the system. Directors collected content from their group leads and submitted it two weeks before we sent anything to the printer. We also asked for events quarterly, not monthly.

That shift mattered more than people expected.

It allowed us to create a quarterly events guide. People could actually look ahead. Register early. Decide what they wanted to attend instead of reacting at the last minute. Registration went up. Attendance stabilized. Leaders stopped competing for attention because the calendar finally made sense.

And something else happened quietly.

Once communication wasn’t frantic, it felt kinder. People weren’t rushing. There was space to connect. The magazine had room to celebrate faith and collaboration instead of just listing what was coming next. Communication started to feel like support instead of pressure.

What changed at TRS wasn’t commitment. Everyone was already trying.

What changed was alignment.

We stopped asking communication to do everything everywhere, and started designing it to work as a system. Structure first. Then systems. Then story, strategy, and stewardship followed naturally.

That project stayed with me because it confirmed something I’ve seen over and over again:
when communication is confusing, it’s rarely because people aren’t trying hard enough.

It’s because no one stopped to design the conditions the work needed to succeed.

Kam Hodge
Founder & CEO
Umber + Onyx Communications Agency

P.S., Here are the software skills that I developed to create data-driven and business-oriented results:

• Adobe Creative Cloud, specifically InDesign and Photoshop (print publication formatting)
• Bit.ly (short links)
• Buffer (social media scheduling)
• Canva (social media design)
• Microsoft 365 (document sharing)
• ShulCloud (CMS and email distribution)
• WordPress.org (website hosting and updates)