Effective Church Communications

Effective Church Communications provides Timeless Strategy and Biblical Inspiration to help churches create communications that fully fulfill the Great Commission

Effective Church Communications provides Timeless Strategy and Biblical Inspiration to help churches create communications that fully fulfill the Great Commission.

PLEASE READ!!!! BIG revision to Effective Church Communications coming soon; site will be down for a time

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I love books, but who can find anything in a place like this? I fear this website is in a similar state and drastic measures are called for, so I'll close down for a time to tidy.

Do you have a closet that started out organized and useful and filled with wonderful things, but then after you added this or that or put in one more thing you couldn't bear to part with your lovely closet, seemingly overnight turned into unmanageable chaos where you can't find a thing?

That's how I feel this website has become. Lots of good and useful stuff here, but what a mess.

I can't find things and I wrote them all.

For the last few months in the background I've been trying to reorganize things as we go into the important holiday season. In addition, I've been working on the new Training part of the website and trying to figure out how to integrate that and it's like trying to fit in five more pairs of shoes into that already overflowing closet. Not working well at all.

Drastic measures are needed.

I've spent lots of time praying and planning; researching and experimenting and I think I've come up with a solution. In summary, I'm going to reorganize the site into four areas:

  • Strategy
  • Templates
  • Training
  • Resources

I could go into reams of details for how and why, but I'd rather just wait and show you.

But to do this, I have to take the site off-line for a couple of weeks.

I tried to not do that, but though I'm pretty techie, mocking up a site just doesn't work for me (and I've wasted weeks trying).

We are in-between major holidays and I'll have the site up with lots of new things for Christmas in plenty of time so as of Tuesday, Halloween, Oct. 31, I'll be taking the site off-line.

Please pray LOTS for me for wisdom and that I follow the Lord's will in all. Many of you have prayed for me over the years for the many changes and I believe this is one of the most important ones. In many ways I want to greatly simplify the organization of the material and make it more accessible to church communicators of all levels all over the world.

This is scary. But the Lord knows what He wants me to do to obey His voice and serve His people. Please pray I hear and obey.

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One more thing: I may be giving updates on the ECC Facebook page.

No promises, but I know I do need to be better on posting on it and while the site itself is down, this would probably be a good time to try.

 

 

FREE for everyone! An invitation to church with your Trick or Treat Candies

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Halloween Invite to Church p6
Put an invitation to church with your Halloween treats and see how the Lord might use it!

Hundreds of children will be coming to your doors this Halloween—why not take this opportunity to invite them to church? Below are some cards that can help you do this.

I'm making this file FREE for everyone because it's exciting to think about what might happen if many of you make up hundreds of these cards and give them to the children of all ages who come to your homes on Halloween.

Here is how it works:

  • Below the images is a ZIP file containing the cards.
  • It has PDFs of business-card size invitations back to church. They are fairly generic because I wanted you to not have to do anything, but print them off and on the back side you can create a personalized message for your church.
  • In addition to the PDFs, I also enclosed the editable MS Publisher file so if you want to change the wording or put info about your church on the front you can.

PLEASE share this with friends, other churches, people who go to your church. [Read more...]

Fall Event Registration Cards to make sure people come back to church after your outreach event

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Fall Event Registration Card
A registration card like this for a door prize will help you get in touch with people after your Fall Outreach Event.

Fall outreach events typically get large turnouts from your community and here is a tool that will help bring them back to church after the event.

More than a connection card, which people have little reason to fill out at a fun, outreach event, this card is a REGISTRATION for a DOOR PRIZE.

For fall you might fill a big pumpkin with lots of candy and other goodies or a basket of local treats. Do something that is colorful and impressive and have it at a table as people come in, consider using eye-catching table runners, at CV Linens you can find table liners cheap products. Invite them to fill out the card for a drawing. Don't make them have to stay for it if you are doing the drawing at the end of the event and you'll get more cards filled out.

The content on the card is designed for unchurched people and here is what it says:

We are so glad you’re here! Please take a minute to fill out this card so you can be entered into our door-prize drawing and so that we have a record of your attendance and a way to contact you about future events for your family. Be assured this information will not be shared or used outside the church office and you can have your names removed from the list at any time by calling the church office.

It lets them know you will be contacting them again, assures them it is for church use only and lets them know they can have their name removed from your list at any time. At the same time you get all the information you need to follow up with social media or postcards.

Below are a set of designs FREE and are ready to download, print, and use.

The ZIP file below contains a ready-to-print PDFs, editable MS Publisher files and jpeg files of each design. If you aren't a Member of Effective Church Communications, you won't be able to see the download. CLICK HERE for Membership Information or to sign up.

CLICK the link following to download the ZIP FILE for Fall Registration Cards: Fall Event Registration Cards

Print and Digital—More Powerful Together! videos and studies to show you why

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Print and Digital E-book, more powerful together! by Yvon Prehn
If your want people to respond to your communications, use every tool you can!

People are busy, stressed, and time-starved—what is the best way to reach them? Many voices would answer "SOCIAL MEDIA!"

But if that is the answer, why aren't our churches filled and every event well-attended, when social media costs almost nothing to produce and we can push it out to the world?

Part of the problem could be that we have confused the popularity of social media with effectiveness (source for this idea in the video below). We assume social media is the way most people communicate today, and though that idea is wildly incorrect for many congregations, even among those who do live glued to a Twitter feed, don't necessarily take action on what they see on social media.

What follows isn't about bashing social media

Far from it--keep tweeting, Facebooking, Pinning and Instagramming, as the Apostle Paul said, "we need to become all things to all people to win some" (1 Cor 9:22).

But consider re-introducing PRINT into a more significant place in your church communication mix. As you'll see a number of communication and marketing studies show this is the most effective way to get an audience to respond to your message.

Below are 2 videos--one a more lengthy teaching one about the effectiveness of combining print and digital for any non-profit group and the second one is a series of slides with thought provoking quotes and commentary.

Below each of them are handouts of the presentation.

Below both is PDF e-book that has the quotes, studies listed and more.

Why here, now and free to all?

As I've been working on Fall and Christmas communications I've realized that unless you understand some of the key points in the material that follows your fall outreach will not be as successful as it could or should be.

Either one of the videos would make an excellent discussion topic for your next staff meeting because communication ministry is the foundation of the success of many ministries in the church and it is far more difficult today than it was in the past when you only needed to worry about how many times you printed an announcement in the bulletin.

I'm working on a longer class and book on this topic, but I felt it was too important not to get out now what I did have ready.


CLICK THE FOLLOWING LINK TO DOWNLOAD THE PDF of NOTES for the video above: Print & Digital More Powerful Together HANDOUTS


CLICK THE FOLLOWING LINK TO DOWNLOAD THE PDF of NOTES for the video above: Slide Show of Print and Digital Quotes, HANDOUTS

Print and Digital E-book, more powerful together! by Yvon Prehn
Click on the image to download a copy of this e-book.

Essential website housekeeping and updating for Fall

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Cleaning up your website
You wouldn't go for years without cleaning your car or your house. Be sure your digital church life is as tidy as your physical church.

Just like we often clean the house before a special event, we also want our digital church home to be tidy. With your website and social media, going into fall is a good time to make certain that essential house-keeping tasks are taken care of for your website. Though not as exciting as creating special materials for special events, these tasks are essential for a church to have the most basic credibility. Some of these  for social media overall include:

Updated and complete bios of your staff

People want to know who your leaders are their background, education, why they do what they do. In an age when almost all business leaders have Facebook pages, blogs, Twitter accounts and almost everything else you can imagine for maximum exposure, for your church leaders to not have at least an updated and complete bio on your website does not communicate a positive image of your staff.

Updated links to staff blogs, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter accounts.

Visitors today expect to get to know church leaders through social media. If the church leader is not able to do this for him or herself, as is often the case when the leader is a baby-boomer who went to seminary before the days of the personal computer, assign a "web buddy" or editor, or co-writer to update or create this content. This is a wonderful expression of how we can serve and support one another in the church. It is important to be honest about this. This is also a good time to drop links if the staff person isn't using them.

Church Facebook pages should be more than photo albums

Yes, it's very nice to have pictures of your latest fun event, but if you don't also have some commentary about what's going on, why you do what you do, and have comments that make it clear the material is for people outside the church, your church Facebook page will look like an insider photo album only for the people already attending. In the same way that you need captions for pictures for them to make sense to anyone besides the person who takes them, you need captions on the Facebook images you share.

Your website also needs some house-keeping and following are some suggestions for that:

[Read more...]