Effective Church Communications

Resurrection Cookies, a Free recipe that will teach children and parents about Easter, and it’s something you can do at home now

13 February, 2022 By Yvon Prehn Leave a Comment

Res Cookie Bunny Verstion — Resurrection Cookies are a wonderful way to remind both children and parents of the real meaning of Easter--the Resurrection of Jesus. Plus it's a fun and yummy project!

For a great strategy to teach children about Easter, involve parents, and provide an outreach tool, NOTHING beats Resurrection Cookies.

When you make the cookies, you visually illustrate Jesus suffering, burial, death and resurrection. Because you are doing it with cookies, it is much less intimidating for people who don't go to church to be involved with it.

In other years you can do this with friends and neighbors. This year with everyone staying home it is a wonderful activity for a family.

Below are pictures of a variety of designs for the Recipe. To see larger images of the pages, click on the first image and a larger slide show will come up. The file below them has both PDFs and MS Publisher files for you to download.

Various designs for Resurrection Cookies:

To download the Resurrection Cookie File, click the following link: Church Bunny Resurrection Cookie Files

Later in this article is the text for the handouts, including the introduction, recipe, and Bible verses if you choose to create your own verses of the handouts or if you want to put the material on your website or in a church newsletter. You have my permission to use it freely. The text is the same for all of them—choose a style that suits you best or use the text below to create your own version. [Read more...]

Spam is spam if it is good for you or not, you need to tell people WHY a Bible study resource is good for them and HOW to use it, not just that it is available

2 February, 2022 By Yvon Prehn Leave a Comment

Church Notices as SPAM — Spam is spam whether you think it is good for your congregation or not. You must tell them WHY it is valuable and HOW to use any resource or it's simply spam.

How would you respond to messages like this:

Here are lots of vegetables—free vegetables—eat all you want!

The vegetables are here for the picking, be sure to take as many as you can carry.

These are vegetables kids really like! Help yourself!

Most likely your response wouldn't be overwhelming. You know how to get vegetables; maybe you even have a neighbor with a garden that gives you extras.

After a while, even the offer of free vegetables can be tiresome, and then it becomes an irritation.

Bible Study Resources are no different

Most people know they should study the Bible or read it, but simply badgering them about a free resource without telling them why they should use it or what they will get out of it, may not produce the response you want.

I'm writing this blog because of some feedback I got from an Effective Church Communication reader. Here is what she asked (and though I don't tell you enough, if you have questions or experiences like this, you can contact me at yvonprehn@gmail.com--I won't publish your name and I usually change some of the details, to not embarrass the efforts we all make--most questions I get apply to many of us, so I turn them into blogs like this and we all benefit). Here is the situation:

Yvon,
I don't know what to do. My church signed up for a service (without asking the congregation if they wanted or needed it) that produces hundreds of free videos on various Bible topics. Then they notified us of it. I went to the site and had to give my information to just look around.

It looked OK, but much of what was appealing was already available on YouTube or the websites of the various ministries.

I thought that was the end of it, but oh no. Then the emails started, recommending this or that. Today I got a postcard from them.

All of them just tell me what is available--lists of names, titles of videos. No more information about them and no reasons why I should care, other than they are good for me.

I don't have kids, but apparently a lot of people on the list do because I've gotten lots of recommendations for videos for kids.

I'm getting really irritated and feel bad about it. If I tell them to take me off the list, will they tell my church and think I don't care about the Bible?

What should I do?

[Read more...]

FREE Door Hangers for Valentine’s Day Outreach, plus why they work so well for outreach including 5 reasons you may not have thought of before!

31 January, 2022 By Yvon Prehn Leave a Comment

Valentines Door Hanger Templates — Door hangers are an effective and low-cost way to reach your community with a reminder of God's love.

Door Hangers continue to prove themselves as a low-cost and effective way to increase awareness of your church and invite your neighborhood. Below are TEMPLATES for Valentine's Day that remind people that God loves them. The Templates have room for you to personalize them for your church. In addition, on the back of the door hanger you can include more information about your church and/or invitations to specific events.

Following the images is a downloadable ZIP file that contains PDFs of the images and editable MS Publisher files.

After the images are excerpts from the article "Five Secrets to Door Hanger Marketing" that will give you added incentive to create this form of communication for your community. It will give you some useful ideas on how to use this inexpensive tool.

Combine distributing the door hangers with a Prayer Walk for your community

Distribute them in teams of two and pray specifically for the people in the homes, the neighborhoods, that God would touch hearts and make them open and willing to connect with your church and hear the good news about Jesus. Door hangers are a tangible way to advertise and walking the community to distribute them and pray is a much more personal and involved way to do outreach than impersonal Facebook or other digital advertising. I'm not saying local Facebook or other digital advertising is bad, but our outreach needs to get out from behind the computer periodically for maximum impact.

Door Hangers to personalize for your church for Valentine's Outreach

To download the ZIP file of the door hangers, click the following link: MS Pub Valentines Door Hangers [Read more...]

Communications for a good continuing relationship with your volunteers—please don’t suddenly become Mr. Grumpy

30 January, 2022 By Yvon Prehn 2 Comments

Don't switch from Mr. Nice Guy to Mr. Grumpy to your volunteers. — Don't switch from Mr. Nice Guy to Mr. Grumpy to your volunteers or you won't have many for long.

Update note: I'm reminding people of this article along with material on how to recognize your church communicators around Valentines' Day because good communication with volunteers is essential all year round. PLEASE especially take note of the advice here to communicate with people according to THEIR preferred communication channel. People are very picky about this today. Some will only talk on the phone; some never answer the phone and you must send them a text; some hate texting, but constantly check email. It is a huge challenge (and a lot of work) for anyone trying to reach all their volunteers, but it is essential work that needs to be done if we are to serve those we work with.

Back to the article on communicating with volunteers

Every church is desperate for volunteers. It's not only important to effectively recruit them, but after they are recruited, it is equally important to work hard to keep them. Unfortunately, the difference between how we treat volunteers when we are recruiting them and after they volunteer is sometimes similar to the difference with some couples between courtship and marriage.

Before the wedding the groom is all flowers and candy; after the wedding, he becomes Mr. Grumpy.

Don’t become Mr. or Mrs. Grumpy to your volunteers. Be as kind, caring, and thankful to them when they have been around for 6 months as you are the first week. Not only is this the proper response for a disciple of Jesus, but volunteers can easily quit if you make it difficult or unpleasant to serve. You can express that thankfulness to them through a variety of church communication projects such as:

Reminders of meetings or volunteer responsibilities

You may be reluctant to do this thinking that you are unnecessarily bothering people, but we need to remember that unlike many of us, the lives of most of our volunteers do not revolve around the church. People may volunteer with the best of intentions, but if they did not write down all the details after signing up in the church lobby or online to do something, it's easy to forget all about it.

[Read more...]