Internal Communications

If you do not have a @veritascolumbus.com email address, contact Derek Nicol to join the slack team.

If you have already have an @veritascolumbus.com email address, you can join the Slack team on your own.

Slack is comprised of channels (public or private), direct messages, and group messages.

Channel: Channels are where you’ll hold most of your conversations in Slack. There are two kinds of channels: public channels and private channels.

Direct Message (DM): Direct messages are a private, one-to-one conversation between you and another team member. These conversations are visible and searchable only to you and the person you DM.

Group Message (Group DM): Group DMs are a private conversation between you and up to eight other team members. These conversations are visible and searchable only to you and the people you DM.

• All staff are required have a Slack account.
• All full time staff are expected to respond to a slack message within 1 day of receiving it.
• All part time staff are expected to respond to a slack message within 2 days of receiving it.
• All stipend staff are expected to respond to a slack message within 3 days of receiving it.
• Non-staff leaders are welcome to utilize Slack, but they are not required unless otherwise stated by their congregation pastor.

Click here to learn some tips and tricks of using Slack.

Some pastors, deacons, ministry leaders, and staff will carry @veritascolumbus.com email addresses on our Google Apps Suite. Because our Google Apps Suite has a limited number of aliases, we employ pre-conditions for establishing an email address and then conditions for maintaining one through Google Apps.

Preconditions:

• All staff are qualified to receive a Veritas domain email. At the point a staff person’s employment status changes, we re-evaluate the transitioning staff’s need for the email address and reserve the right to revoke the @veritascolumbus.com domain along with all content on Google apps (Drive, Contacts, Voice, etcetera…) if the person is leaving the Veritas community or his or her role no longer warrants the use of a Veritas email.
• The use of the email address should be indefinitely permanent. In other words, email addresses should not be created for seasonal or temporary uses.
• The person representing Veritas through the email address must be a member at Veritas.
• An email account must have a single, primary operator assigned to it who will abide by the conditions below.

Conditions:

• If full time staff, the person operating the Veritas email should respond to messages within three days the email was received. If not full-time staff, the email operator should respond within seven days the email was received.
• The person representing Veritas through the email account may not use their Gmail for correspondences nor Google Drive for storing content unrelated to their Veritas role(s).
• The person representing Veritas through the email account must comply to any audits of their email. Audits would involve a supervisor or pastor’s review of all content connected to their Veritas domain Google Suite account.

All full-time staff at Veritas must hold a @veritascolumbus.com email with the naming convention: [firstname.lastname@veritascolumbus.com]. (i.e. derek.nicol@veritascolumbus.com).

Other veritas domain emails may be created for operational purposes, but only if using a personal email address won’t serve the operation effectively. Consider using a contact form instead of creating a non-personal email address. The use of the email address should be indefinitely permanent. The email account must have a primary operator assigned to it who will be abide by the conditions outlined in “Veritas Domain Email.”

• General: veritas@veritascolumbus.com
• Projection for Sunday Gatherings:
  • Short North: snprojection@veritascolumbus.com
  • Tri-Village: tvprojection@veritascolumbus.com
  • West: josh_toohey@yahoo.com
• Congregation:
  • Short North: sn@veritascolumbus.com
  • Tri-Village: tv@veritascolumbus.com
  • West: west@veritascolumbus.com

Include All Stakeholders

1. Better that you risk over-communication than that you exclude people. If you want to include people, but you aren’t sure how important they are to the conversation, include them in the carbon copy field (see below).
2. When emailing members, consider involving spouses unless the conversation warrants a correspondence that is more private.

Use Carbon Copy (cc)

When you add recipients to your message, you have the option to add a “cc” field. Anyone in this field will see the other recipients of the message. “Cc” is often used to add recipients to an email who don’t need to take any action.

Use Blind Carbon Copy (bcc)

Use Blind-Carbon Copy when sending a mass email so that recipients cannot view other contacts on the list nor send a reply-all. Anyone you add to the “bcc” field will see that they were added using “bcc.” They will also see message recipients in the “to” and “cc” fields. People you add in “bcc” can’t see the name or email address of anyone else you add in the “bcc” field.