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.

Flyer to encourage church communications: You are one of the Great Ones!

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The Great Ones Flyer, image 1
This is an encouraging devotion for church communications. It is a free, ready-to-print PDF.

Church communicators work very hard at one of the most important tasks in the church and the purpose of this piece is to encourage them.

The flyer to the left is free for everyone to download and print, either to remind yourself of the incredible importance of your work or to encourage another church communicator. It is a copy of the devotion, "You are one of the Great Ones and far more important than you may realize" CLICK HERE if you want read the devotion before you download it.

It is a black and white PDF and would look very nice printed on colored or parchment-looking paper. [Read more...]

Friday Miscellancy #2: FREE Bible Images, How to create a Video Bible Lesson, How to text without a phone

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FREE Bible Images, a video review

This is a different kind of free image site. They have both illustrations and photos. They are different from other sites of free images that are mostly individual, unrelated images, in that they are in sets of images intended to be used as sets for Bible teaching.
As a Bible teacher, I really this because in the past I've had to search through many sites and images to get ones to go together to teach a topic. With this site they are already collected and ready to use. If anything, I've found they have more than enough needed.
In addition, though the pictures and images are historically and geographically accurate, they do not have any text or scripts other than the Bible reference so that there  is no cultural or language bias.
CLICK HERE to go to a video review of the site.

How to create a video Bible lesson with www.freebibleimages.org

Free Bible Images is a very interesting company that provides quality photos and images for teaching Bible stories. (CLICK HERE to see the video review of it). One way to use them is through animoto, which gives you a way to create videos. I really enjoy using animoto to create short teaching and thought-provoking videos. Below is the video I created about the topic of if God cares when we mess up, using one of their photo sets about the prodigal son. This video took me much less time than similar ones I created in the past because all the images were available instead of me having to find them, modify them and put them in order.
CLICK HERE to go to the very short (under two-minute) video I created with them.

Want to text your congregation, but don't know how to text?

As the Apostle Paul told us, we need to learn to be "all things to all people that we might win some," and today that often means making use of new communication technologies. Texting is one of the most popular ways to communicate today, but few church offices make effective use of it.
I just discovered a company, (actually they discovered me, more about that later) call-em-all that will text for you with a system that allows you to create text messages on your computer and then broadcast them to the people who on your list. They also have broadcast phone systems that you can do from your computer or a toll-free number.CLICK HERE to find out more.

Your people, your church greeters--a very important communication tool

Sometimes we work so hard on our printed and digital connections we forget about the most important one of all--our people. Chris Walker, aka, the Evangelism Coach has a great article here about people who were so upset with the rudeness of church greeters, they wrote it down on a response card. Studies show that for every complaint someone actually takes the time to write about, there are many more upset people, who don't take the time to write.
CLICK HERE for more.

Why you don't need to share your personal life on Facebook

We try new media tools because of the Biblical mandate to "be all things to all people to win some." But just because we try different tools to communicate our ministry, doesn't mean these tools can or should be used in the same way by everyone. If you are in a ministry that requires 24/7 social media interaction, and you love it—what follows is not for you. It's for people who may be very tech savvy, yet feel vaguely guilty and inadequate, for not sharing their personal lives to the digital world.
Here are 5 reasons why you don't have to feel guilty if you want to use Facebook and social media primarily for professional ministry news and updates and not for personal sharing:
CLICK HERE to go to the blog.

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CLICK HERE to sign up and you'll get a copy as soon as it's done on Friday. You can unsubscribe any time and of course your email won't be shared.

CaringBridge, the best way to communicate in personal crisis, has now added SupportPlanner

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CaringBridge (www.caringbridge.org)  is an essential tool for every church communicator as a way to keep people updated about tragedies, needs, and ongoing illness in the lives of your members. It is a free resource where members can set up a site to keep people informed about these events. The family member only has to enter information once and all interested friends and prayer warriors can go there for updates and can send messages and encouragements. They recently added SupportPlanner,  which they describe in this way:

Our SupportPlanner is a calendar that helps family and friends coordinate care and organize helpful tasks, such as bringing a meal, taking care of pets and other needs.

Many church communicators coordinate these important tasks and this free tool will help you do them effectively.

Before Facebook there was CaringBridge

USA TODAY recently ran a story about it:

Fifteen years ago, before there was a Facebook, Twitter or even MySpace, Sona Mehring turned to social networking to get the word out about the challenging health condition of a close friend's new baby.

Brighid Swanson was born almost three months early to JoAnn Hardeggar and Darrin Swanson. Mehring, then a website designer in Eagan, Minn., decided to create a site to post progress reports about the baby.

During the baby's brief life — she died after nine days — "I had this incredible experience of being able to bring these caring social networks together for my friend and the baby," Mehring says.

Today, Brighid's legacy lives on in CaringBridge, the not-for-profit site Mehring launched in 1997 so others can easily create private Web pages during a medical crisis.

HERE is the rest of the article: http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/story/2012-06-07/caringbridge/55436942/1#.T9DFB1Ziwug.twitter

Why training church communicators takes so much time and effort and the 10,000 hour rule

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In the video that follows, Malcolm Gladwell talks about his 10,000 hour rule. This rule, based on extensive research, is that it takes about 10,000 hours to achieve mastery in a field. To make that number more manageable, it means that you need to work on something 40 hours a week for 250 weeks, or slightly less than 5 years to become really good at it. Take a quick look at the video and then I'll share how this applies to church communicators:

How this applies to church communications

Don't get lost in the details of this idea. I've ordered his book, Outliers, to look at his thesis in more detail and will blog about it more later, but the point is, you don't get good at anything quickly. We know that's true in many areas of life--you don't become a great preacher with your first sermon, a great cook the day you buy a cookbook, a great apologist the first time someone asks why you think the Bible is true.

Why is it then, we expect people in the church who have no advertising, marketing, design, layout, typography or technical training to become instant masters at website design, church bulletin layout, and newsletter writing?  From the earliest days of the computer revolution when a church secretary would often come into the church office and find her typewriter replaced by a computer (this really happened more times than I could count). She would then be informed, with great excitement, by whoever did this, that by next week she would get to create the church bulletin and newsletter with it! With the extraordinary tenaciousness innate in church secretaries along with many tears and prayers, she would often get it done. She would go on to learn the computer and the software, usually with no formal training at all and on her own time.

That lack of respect for the person and ignorance of the training needed to do complex communication tasks has continued wherein church secretaries and communications people are told to create a website or various forms social media for the church. It usually happens, but often not easily or well.

The true Biblical Church of Jesus Christ, who lived, died, rose again and is coming back is not doing very well communicating our message (when we look at declining numbers and the public perceptions of the church) when we have the most extraordinary tools available in the history of humanity.

The key is, we haven't taken the time to learn to use them really well. That reality is what motivated me to start the ministry of Effective Church Communications and that's what keeps it going today. Here are some of what I have to help you get the 10,000 needed hours of training.

  • There are many resources available at: https://www.effectivechurchcom.com to train church communicators.
  • PLEASE check out the site--there is a LOT on it, but there needs to be.
  • If you are a church communicator, sign up for the newsletter, check out the site often to learn the continuously added and updated lessons.
  • If you are a church leader who is responsible for church communicators, buy them an ECC Membership and GIVE THEM TIME TO USE IT (yes, all caps and shouting to make the point). You must give your people time to learn communications.
  • Please also check out my books on church communications--this is an ever-growing resource that will help you learn about the importance of Effective Church Communications and what you need to do in your church to create them. The materials are available in all digital formats and in print. Check out, just click on site title:
  • Smashwords--the source for all digital formats, free materials and special editions here. Just scroll down the page to get to the books--I wish they didn't have my bio first, but I had no control over page layout.
  • Amazon.com--the source for Kindle and print versions.

10,000 is a lot of time to learn something. We have been entrusted with the Words of Eternal Life--that task is worthy of them.

5 things that don’t work and 5 that do to start a Men’s Ministry at Father’s Day or anytime

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Like Father Like Son True story here: a growing church of 1800 (from 300 only three years earlier) decided to start a Men's Ministry with a Bible Study for men. Lots of prayer and encouragement from the pulpit, plus a splashy PowerPoint show, encouraged men to come. The night of the study the staff set up 200 chairs in anticipation. Three men showed up.

What went wrong? Following are five staff assumptions about their advertising approach to this even and why they didn't work.

#1 The staff assumed men would do what the Power Point® told them to do.

The colorful, eye-catching PowerPoint® slide show ended with a call to "sign up in the church lobby." What they wanted to be a call to action was in reality the kiss of death to any event sign-up.

After church is over, does any man to say to his wife (please forgive any implied sexism in this illustration), “Honey, would you please wait for me in the car while I find out where to go sign up for the men’s Bible study?”  It doesn’t happen. I know my own husband’s most pressing thought after church is–where are we going for lunch? Following the thought of food is football, basketball, or hockey, depending on the time of year. Most men I know, godly guys that they are, are similar in their after-church priorities. Trying to find a table in the church lobby to find out information about something that you may or may not be interested in simply is not a priority, even if by chance a man remembers he was told to do that.

Any time you require people to take a second step (call the church office for more information, sign up in the lobby, etc.) to find out essential details that they need to show up for any event, you will drastically cut down attendance.

#2 The staff assumed that men would remember the connecting details from the PowerPoint® announcement presented every Sunday.

Most men don’t. PowerPoint® is great for song lyrics, to set a specific mood for worship, or for graphics to reinforce a story or theme, but few men (women or teenagers) sit in worship, pencil in hand, ready to take notes off of a PowerPoint® presentation. A bulletin insert, ready to post on the refrigerator with all the details on it, would have been much more useful. Wives and girlfriends post it and remind the significant men in their lives about it. Yes, it might seem retro, old-fashioned, a bother to produce, but it works.

#3 The staff assumed that having the pastor encourage the men to come to the event meant something to the men and would make them want to come.

It usually doesn’t. Pastoral leadership doesn’t have the influence it once did. We live in an irreverent age, an age that doesn’t admire authority. A personal invitation can be powerful, but pleas from the pulpit to attend events that aren’t particularly appealing to uninvolved church members, men or women, are seldom heard, let alone acted upon. [Read more...]