April’s Fools’ Day is not my favorite day. This is especially true when a good portion of my work is done online and I rely on the internet for a lot of my information. So you can see how a day full of jokes and misinformation in my Twitter feed can get things off track. However, this year Katie Allred and I decided to have a little fun.
Now when I say that April Fools’ Day isn’t my favorite day, it’s not that I don’t like to have fun. It’s just that April Fools’ Day can go wrong real quick. Jokes aren’t funny, feelings can get hurt. So the key to making this day work is to have fun in such a way that everyone involved will get a kick out of the joke.
The thing about April Fool’s this year is that it fell on the week before Easter, which means like most church staffs, we’re running around trying to button down the details on the biggest day of year for our church. So, Katie and I figured that our staff needed good laugh to break the stress. Now this wasn’t a pre-planned joke. This was a true spur-of-the-moment type of joke. In fact, here’s Katie and I’s conversation on Slack:
Me: It’s April fools. Which means we should replace all the senior leadership teams photos on the website with cartoon characters.
Katie: CAN WE?
Me: I think so…
That’s it. Katie and I met and briefly identified which cartoon characters to use. Of course we landed on the Muppets (I mean, who doesn’t love the Muppets?). Katie then uploaded the photos and we were good to go. Here’s how the joke turned out: (Click on the image to see all the staff.)
Once the images were replaced, we then posted the link on Facebook and Twitter.
Really proud of our new staff page. I know that @michaelvolbeda and @BrianDodridge are going to love it. http://t.co/zZNJpQgfBU
— Darrel Girardier (@dgirardier) April 1, 2015
So what did we learn from our little April Fools’ joke? Well here’s a quick rundown:
Our Leadership Has a Great Sense of Humor
I was a little nervous about how some of our leadership would react, but that quickly subsided once I saw that our leadership retweeted our tweets about the page. Brian Dodridge (our executive pastor) even sent out this tweet:
@dgirardier @michaelvolbeda @brentwoodbc I’m now seeing impending permanent changes to the communications staff page as well
— Brian Dodridge (@BrianDodridge) April 1, 2015
Our Church Loves Seeing the Staff Having Fun
Of course, the other thing to worry about was how our church would take the joke. Would they get it? How would they react? Well, let’s take a look at our Facebook post.
As you can see, we received a pretty good reaction from our audience. We reached over 7,500 news feeds and received over 80 likes. These aren’t ground-breaking numbers, but they do show us that our church likes to see us have fun. It makes us wonder what else we can do in the future that will get the same type of reaction.
As you can tell we had some fun on April Fools’ Day and I’m sure we’ll do something next year. Did your church do anything on April Fools Day or did you see something from another church? If so, click here to share below.