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.

Summer Connection and Door Prize Drawing Cards, free MS Publisher Templates

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Free Summer Connection Cards
These cards are a great way to get information from summer guests so you can invite them back to activities year round!

Many of your churches are holding community outreach events in the summer. You have a great expectations for them, but often you don't see much church growth after them because you don't work to intentionally connect with the guests who come. This is VERY EASY to do if you offer a great door prize and have people sign up for it.

Below is a set of combined connection and door-prize drawing cards you can download, run off and use. In the download is a set of Free MS Publisher Templates, ready-to-print PDFs, and images.

Click the following link to download a ZIP file of the cards: Summer Connect & Door Prize Drawing Cards

PLEASE read this article on the incredible difference cards like this made for the summer outreach of one church: Why it isn't enough to be a community-friendly, free event-providing church

Video: about ECC TEMPLATES and an overview of FREE CHRISTMAS TEMPLATES

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Christmas is incredibly busy and Templates can be a great time saver when you want to do something quickly without having to take time to agonize over design or legal images or what typeface to use.

Effective Church Communications has created hundreds of Templates for you that will not only save you time, but that will help you accomplish the ministry goals of helping people come to know Jesus as Savior and grow to maturity in your Christian faith.

The video here explains how and why our templates can be useful to you and gives you an overview and examples of how we put our ministry strategy into practice for Christmas.

You can download all the Christmas Templates HERE.

Here are just a few samples of what's on that page. [Read more...]

New FREE set of Connection Card Templates available

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One of a set of Free Downloable Connection Cards
This is just one of a set of free, downloadable Connection Cards for your church.

Connection cards are a humble, but one of the most powerful communications your church can produce. With them, you can, of course, respond to visitors and in so doing grow your church, but when you include an invitation to share a prayer request, these cards are also a powerful way to pastor your people.

Below is a set of simple connection cards in two sizes. Yes, you can make them much more complicated and there might be times you want to do that, but similar to how marketers have found that people sign up for email lists more when they are only asked for the most essential information (name and email) than when they need to answer more questions. Below is a free set of forms for simple connection cards. Below them, a link to a FREE KINDLE download of my book on Connection Cards.

To download the Free Template file that includes ready-to-print PDFs and editable MS Publisher files, CLICK the following link:  2 Sizes Basic Connection Cards

 

Free Kindle Download for Church Connection Card book (and it can be on your computer)

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Church Connection Cards
Connection Cards are an essential step to connecting with visitors, growing your church and pastoring your people. This book is invaluable to help you do that.

I'm in the process of updating a number of the Effective Church Communication books, but while I'm doing that I want you to have access to the useful materials in them.

One of the most helpful books (according to reader feedback) and by far my best seller has been this book on Connection Cards. The current print version does not have good resolution of images, but since I can give you images and templates on this website (CLICK HERE for some Connection Card Templates), the basic content is what is most helpful.

I put that into a FREE KINDLE download--go to the amazon page HERE to get it.

Don't have a Kindle? You can read it with an app for your computer—below are directions on how to get it.

Check out the directions below to download the Kindle app for your computer

VERY IMPORTANT TIP: Get the app for your computer for a great aid in preparing lessons or reading any Kindle book.

When I am preparing a Sunday School lesson or Bible blog (for my www.bible805.com) I like to consult and quote Bible reference books. I have a number of them in the Kindle version. What is handy is when you have it on your computer you can cut and paste into MS Word files—so much easier than typing long quotes.

Triage, a model for responding to connection cards

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Triage your connection cards
In a medical emergency, the first responders immediately triage victims to see who needs immediate care. That's a great examples to follow on processing connection cards.

Ed. intro: When you host a special event or seasonal celebration, you'll have lots of visitors and you'll be collecting lots of visitor cards from them. But you've got to do more than just collect them if you want them to make a difference in your church. You'll learn what to do from this excerpt from the book: Connection Cards, connect with visitors, grow your church, pastor your people

It is critically important to respond to the connection cards received each Sunday and all special occasions, but not every card needs the same timeliness or intensity of response, but how do you decide what needs what? The concept of triage can help.

First, here is the history and definition of TRIAGE from Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia:

TRIAGE
The term [triage] comes from battlefield or natural disaster situations. When the wounded are brought in there are three categories in which the wounded are immediately placed:

Red / Immediate
They require immediate surgery or other life-saving intervention, and have first priority for surgical teams or transport to advanced facilities; they “cannot wait” but are likely to survive with immediate treatment.

Yellow / Observation
Their condition is stable for the moment but requires watching by trained persons and frequent re-triage, will need hospital care (and would receive immediate priority care under “normal” circumstances).

Green / Wait (walking wounded)
They will require a doctor’s care in several hours or days but not immediately, may wait for a number of hours or be told to go home and come back the next day (broken bones without compound fractures, many soft tissue injuries).

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triage

How to apply triage to connection cards

Though you aren’t dealing with actual battlefield situations, this model is useful in responding to the connection cards you will receive from those fighting spiritual battles each week. Following are suggestions for how to apply the three levels of triage in how you respond to the people turning in connection cards: [Read more...]