Somewhere in your church right now, a flyer is being asked to do five jobs. Announce the event. Invite the unchurched. Thank the volunteers. Recruit new ones. And could we fit the theme verse — actually, all three verses from the series?
Every request is reasonable. The sum is a piece that does nothing, because a reader gives you about three seconds, and five messages divided into three seconds rounds to zero.
One job, stated before design starts
The discipline is simple to say and hard to hold: every deliverable gets one job, written down before anyone opens design software. This card exists to get a first-time guest to Sunday. This video exists to make someone feel what the ministry actually does. One job, one primary audience, one action you want taken.
Everything else — the extra announcements, the second audience, the third verse — isn't forbidden. It just needs its own deliverable. That's not extra work; it's the same work, divided so each piece can actually win.
The one-job test is also a kindness
Here's what took me years to see: "one job" isn't just a design rule, it's respect for the reader. When we built the Mending the Soul workbook for Native American communities, the job was singular: make a survivor of trauma feel that this material was made for them — their imagery, their context, their dignity — and not adapted at them as an afterthought. Every page decision got measured against that one job. Add a second job to that book and you don't get a more useful book. You get a compromised one, and the reader can feel the compromise even when they can't name it.
Where to enforce it
Not in the design review — that's too late. Enforce it at intake: the request form asks "what is this piece's one job, and what should the reader do next?" If the requester can't answer, the conversation that follows is the most valuable meeting you'll have that week. It's not gatekeeping. It's the moment the communication actually gets decided.
