How some things change and how others stay the same! Below are two training videos from around 3 hours of training in creating communications with the computer which was a very NEW thing when I did the videos. I recently found them and decided to share them because it amazes me how the need for BASIC Training in church communication skills and the inspiration and motivation for why we do it in the church continues to be needed.
Below are the two videos and below them are the descriptions I put on the YouTube site. I know they are lengthy, but I do think they will be well worth your time to watch.
YouTube descriptions and background of the videos
This video, How to Use Your Computer to Make Better Newsletters, Bulletins, and More was made 25 years ago but the basic design principles in it are still useful. The description that follows is the same for both PART ONE and PART TWO of the video.
I recently (August 2021) found a copy of this video set in my files and though there is some outdated content and I have no idea what I did to get my hair to look like it does in the video, the majority of the video content is extremely useful. In addition, basic skills training like what is presented here is very hard to find for church communicators.
For training, you can find lots on the latest social media channel you should be using. How to write in a way that reaches busy people, basic design principles for any media, how to manage and stay strong spiritually in this challenging work is much harder to find. All this and much more is in the two videos.
The video was created as part of a video training set that went with my book, How to Use Your Computer to Create Better Bulletins, Newsletters, and More. That book was an updated version of the first book out on desktop publishing, The Desktop Publishing Remedy.
The video was produced and sold by Gospel Light Publishing. I retained the rights for all of it when the book went out of print. In case you are wondering, the audience in it signed a release for their images, to be used in any way related to the video at the time of filming.
Some history on what happened after the video was created
The video and the book that went with it were quite popular with my audiences as I traveled around North America teaching seminars to thousands of people in churches on the new challenge of how to use their computers to create communications in their churches. People were desperate for training in how to do the many demanding skills needed for church communications using the new technology and the skills that went along with it. For example, you didn’t need to decide on a typeface when you used a typewriter and suddenly church secretaries had to become experts in typography. There was one way to type a page with the typewriter, now you had to know about grids and layouts and combining graphics and text. There was little out there to help them.
"Professional" materials, for advertising agencies and similar groups, were not practical for churches. I started writing and teaching people in churches how to do this from the earliest days the desktop computer was invented. God had given me the opportunity to work as a professional writer, editor, and designer in the pre-computer days and into the invention of desktop publishing. I loved the incredible opportunities we now had to communicate the gospel with these tools, and I had been writing articles and books, plus teaching seminars all over North America to help churches learn these new skills.
As a result of the immense needs and popularity of anything churches could get to help them, I proposed to Gospel Light that we do a series of training like this to continue to help churches communicate more effectively. I told them the whole field was going to explode in use and churches needed all the help they could get. At the time I needed a partner like Gospel Light to continue producing training videos as even a short one cost $50,000 and up at the time.
They replied that they didn't see any future in churches creating communications with the computer and so they weren't going to invest any more resources in it.
How wrong they were.
The company was sold at a bankruptcy auction a few years later.
But God didn’t quit equipping His people.
I can now produce in my little office with inexpensive equipment, high-resolution videos, plus books, and podcasts, templates, and PDFs in far better quality than the quality of these videos and with tools much more effective than the overhead transparencies used in the video. The only limitation now is my crazy schedule and conflicting life demands.
But there is a lot that I trust is useful to you on these videos and I’m starting a new round of producing videos to give you much more.
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Please check out my website www.effectivechurchcom.com for more about how I can help you as a church communicator and for additional resources.
For the Effective Church Communications Podcast go to: https://anchor.fm/yvon-prehn, where you’ll find links to listen to it on iTunes and many other podcast channels
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