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.

Communications that will get people to come back to church after Easter, why, how to do them, and examples of effective ones

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Note: this is from our archives and many of the publications have updated versions in the TEMPLATES section. However, the overall theory here is an important summary for why you need to do all the things you need to do to get people involved in your church following Easter and I thought it would be useful for you to go through. The PDF download at the end has all the publications pictured.

In most churches their biggest turnout of the year is for Easter Sunday. This doesn't happen by accident-churches pour time, money, and resources into their church communications prior to Easter and it pays off with a full-sanctuary for multiple services. However, few churches have a continuing increase in attendance after Easter.

Brunch Invitation
You may have published a invitation to church or ministry brunch in your bulletin, but why not create a personalized invitation people can give out?

Easter week may have been fantastic, but without intentionally working on developing a continuing relationship with the people who only come at this time of year, we aren't communicating the total message of Easter. Jesus came to earth, died on the cross, and rose from the grave to enable us to have an eternal relationship with him, not just a yearly visit to his church.

For the Easter activities of your church to build relationships, you may need to expand your goals in the communications you create for this time of year. The remainder of this article will give you some ideas on how to do this.

Make Easter a connecting point, not the end result

Invite friends to Easter
A bulletin insert like this will encourage your people to invite friends for Easter.

In the church communication production prior to the Easter season, almost everything is geared solely towards getting people to the Easter week services. Though this is a worthwhile goal, if it is your only goal, you'll not accomplish all you could to make a lasting impact in people's lives and in the growth of your church.

Instead of seeing Easter week attendance as the only goal and end result, consider changing your thinking and strategy. Look at Easter as a connection point between your community and Jesus and your church. You want to bring people into the church Easter week, but you don't want them to go away and never come back-you want them to meet Jesus, to begin and grow in a relationship with Him.  In addition, you want them to get to know your church and to enter into a continuing relationship with your church community.

To accomplish these purposes, you have to be very intentional long before Easter in not only the communications you create to get them there (which you most likely already have in place as you are reading this) but also in what you give people at each event or service during Easter week.

There are two overall areas in which you need to create communications at this time: communications to introduce and connect them to Jesus and communications to introduce and connect them to your church [Read more...]

Sample of seasonal jpg file in a church bulletin, and how you can use the ones on this site for your publications

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This is a wonderful example of how a church communicator took one of the jpg images, available to Effective Church Communications Members for all the holidays, and how she took the one for Easter and used it in her bulletin.

Some churches prefer not to have loose bulletin inserts (either way works, it is matter of what your church prefers) and so this church communicator emailed and asked that I do the inserts in a graphic file format. I was every happy to do that and don't know why I hadn't done it before! The RED arrow points to the jpg graphic from Effective Church Communications. If you click on the image you can download a PDF where you can see the entire bulletin. It is very nicely done and I'm sure you'll get some great ideas from it.

Many of the Template files now have images included with them for you to use either in print or social media. Many have a line drawn around the images so they will stand out from background. If you want that removed, you can go to the original MS Publisher files, remove it from the Master Page and resave that page as an image file.

Not only does this illustrate an idea of how to use an image, but two other things:

  1. I really appreciate and try to carry out your suggestions when possible on what you would like on the site and what might be useful for you, so do feel free to send them to me at yvon@effectivechurchcom.com.
  2. It is great to have samples of how people are using materials from ECC in their publications. Please send them to me with your permission to use them.  These GREATLY help your fellow church communicators. For information on our Great Idea Swap, CLICK HERE.

 

Bookmarks and Bulletin inserts that explain what you do regularly for Easter Visitors to return

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Church Bookmark that will help bring people back to church after Easter.
Church Bookmark that will help bring people back to church after Easter. FREE for all, click to download.

You've worked hard to get people to your Easter service and that's wonderful, but the work doesn't stop there! You need to work equally hard to get them to come back and to continue to connect them with the church on a continuing basis. This is especially important after having guests at your church for Easter as churches usually have a different schedule and different activities that Sunday than they have at any other time.

If you don't intentionally do something to let people know what you do on a regular basis and when you do it, they won't return. They may even want to come back—but you have to give them specific information to help them do that.

BOOKMARK FREE for ALL

To help you do that, the image to the left is a FREE Bookmark you can make up to give to guests. CLICK HERE or on the image to download a Zip file that has a PDF of it and editable MS Publisher file. The Template would look nice on colored stock, perhaps a parchment looking cardstock. Bookmarks work especially well as reminders as they are something people can keep and if you have the regular schedule and connecting information about your church on the back they are more likely to return.

In addition to the bookmark, below is a collection of Templates that include bulletin inserts of various sizes and other bookmarks for you to personalize with information about what you do on a regular basis. The file below has both ready-to-print PDFs and editable MS Publisher files.

 

To download the ZIP file of bulletin inserts to help people come back to church after Easter, Click the following link: Church Explanations for Easter Sunday

 

What can happen if you if you work hard on your event, but don’t work on event communications

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Church Communication disappointment
If we don't create connecting communications at our seasonal celebrations and few people return to church after them, we are bound to wonder what we did wrong. This article and website can help!

Ed. note: I have shared this story before, but it is such an important reminder of how we need to create communications that will help people connect with the church AFTER the big event.

This is a true story. Though the specific event discussed is Easter, the lessons learned from it can apply to any event. In addition to applying to any event, we can all identify with the situation here. The challenges of ministry are so huge, it is very easy to get overwhelmed in one area and totally forget another one. May the Lord have mercy and help us all.

In one of my seminars, at the break, a woman literally came running up the aisle to talk to me.

“Oh, thank you, thank you,” she said, “Now I understand what went wrong.”

I had just been discussing the same ideas I’ve presented here about the importance of an overall communication plan for maximum results from your holiday outreach. I knew it was useful, but her response was more excited than most so I asked her to tell me more about her experience.

She then told me about a special Easter service her church put on that was a huge amount of work and an equally huge disappointment in results. They were a new church plant and wanted to reach out to their community at Easter.

They were meeting in the grade school, but they wanted to grow and to do that committed to reach their community for Jesus this Easter. On faith, they rented the high school gym so they would have room for a huge crowd. They prayed hard and worked hard to get lots of community involvement. They got it—merchants put up posters; they got lots of media exposure. The day came and the church of 300 had over 1500 at the Easter service held at the local high school gym.

They were so excited. The next week back at the grade school, they set up hundreds more chairs, printed lots of extra bulletins. They were excited to see what would happen.

They didn’t need to go to the extra trouble.

[Read more...]

Look inward before you reach outward: make sure your church is ready for holiday and special event outreach guests

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Church
It doesn't matter how gorgeous your church is if the bathrooms are messy. Be sure every part of the church is at its best before Easter.

Around my home and for most people I know, one thing that always accompanies the holidays or any time guests are coming is a flurry of activity—cleaning, putting up decorations, making certain the bathrooms have nice soap and towels, flowers in the guest-room perhaps, and in special cases repainting and major household repairs. With actions big or little, we all do what we can to make guests feel welcome and the holidays special.

This is not only important for our homes when we are expecting visitors, but even more so for our churches. Not only is a check-up and perhaps some improvements important for the sake of a successful event, but if we want to make guests feel comfortable and come back, must make certain our church is ready for them.

Following are some areas that are important for you to check out and perhaps do a bit of renovation on before you invite your guests for holidays and special events so you'll not only be ready for the event itself, but for the growth in your church after it.

The physical plant of the church

The peeling paint in the bathroom, the junk stacked in the corner from a special event that has no permanent storage, the lack of handrails or handicapped access, the plants that need trimming—there are many things that we no longer see, because we see them every week, that are ugly eyesores to guests.

Take a clipboard in hand (or iPad these days) and go around the church asking the Lord to enable you to see the church as a visitor would see it. Note what needs to be done and schedule a "Welcome Home for the Holidays" workday at the church to tackle these tasks. [Read more...]