Effective Church Communications

The Effective Church Communication ministry from Yvon Prehn provides inspiration, training, and resources to help your church create communications that fully fulfill the Great Commission. It focuses on Bible-based and timeless principles and strategies that work no matter what digital or print channel you use to create your communications. The site has links to many free TEMPLATES and other resources, plus links to free TRAINING VIDEOS, and a RESOURCE LIBRARY for church communicators. 

The Effective Church Communication ministry from Yvon Prehn provides inspiration, training, and resources to help your church create communications that fully fulfill the Great Commission. It focuses on Bible-based and timeless principles and strategies that work no matter what digital or print channel you use to create your communications. The site has links to many free TEMPLATES and other resources, plus links to free TRAINING VIDEOS, and a RESOURCE LIBRARY for church communicators.

After GIVING TUESDAY—my gift to YOU—dozens of FREE CHRISTMAS Templates!!!!! No strings attached…..really FREE

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Effective Church Communications has gifts for you!
Effective Church Communications has gifts for you--totally free templates for all occassions.

I do love the idea of Giving Tuesday but I must admit many of the ministry requests for giving in the midst of the crush of buying demands for Black Friday often felt like one more case of financial badgering.

I understand the need to raise funds whenever possible. When I was senior editor at both Compassion International and Young Life, I wrote many of those fund-raising appeals myself.

I thought about doing a plea for support for the Effective Church Communications Ministry. But I just couldn't add one more to an already lengthy list of the appeals you received from ministries doing truly important kingdom work. Then I realized......

This is an opportunity for me to GIVE to YOU!

It isn't anything new really, just a reminder of the many TEMPLATES and especially the Christmas ones I have for all of you for FREE!

Here are some of the ones I have and there are many, many more the links to all are at the bottom of this article:

[Read more...]

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...]

Share Jesus this Christmas with a FREE Christmas Story—as a flyer, Christmas letter, social media, however you want

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Free story that shares Jesus at Christmas
An easy way to share our most important message at Christmas about Jesus. Click the image to download the Zip file and SHARE!

This story has been used by thousands of churches through the years and I created 4 new designs for you this year, that you can download as PDFs, plus a MS Word file, and use in any way you want to share the Gospel of Jesus at Christmas. You can use them in these ways:

  • Personalize from your church with invitations to specific events on the back or links to more information about what it means to follow Jesus.
  • Print and give as a gift to members to share in Christmas letters, give to friends, encourage them to use them.
  • Upload to your church or ministry website and freely share the link and encourage members to download and share either in print or in their own social media.
  • Use in your social media, newsletters, and anything that the church sends out.

Below are images of the PDFs and below that is a ZIP file that has the PDFs and the MS Word file. The text copy is also below the images if you want to copy and use it from there. Click on the images to see a larger version.

To download a PDF of the images above, plus an MS Word file of the content CLICK the following link: https://www.effectivechurchcom.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Christmas-Flyer-to-Share-Jesus.zip

To go to additional FREE Christmas Templates and past versions of this Christmas Letter: CLICK HERE

Here is a short motivational video--share it from YouTube to motivate others to use the flyer:

To download a PDF of the story to share Jesus, shown above, plus an MS Word file of the content CLICK the following link: https://www.effectivechurchcom.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Christmas-Flyer-to-Share-Jesus.zip
[Read more...]

Scam Alert for Geek Squad Users (or even if you aren’t)a video for you

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Scam alert for Best Buys Geek Squad
A quick warning video about a scam alert and the power of typography (check it out to see what I mean!)

The Geek Squad from Best Buy can be a useful resource for churches and one I especially rely on when getting a new computer and switching over programs. [ PLEASE REMEMBER Effective Church Communications does not take any advertising or do affiliate deals—this is just my opinion of the Geek Squad or anything else I talk about].

And so I was understandably upset briefly when I got an email saying that my membership in it was due and had doubled in price. The cost of so many things has gone up considerably, so I was momentarily panicked but then I noticed (seriously) the sloppy typography of the Geek squad logo in the email and it just looked off. I compared it with the real one (on my real Geek Squad contract) and yes, it was fake.

I called the company and they said that unfortunately the web is being flooded with these at present. They said to ignore it and forward the email to abuse@bestbuy.com.

There are lots of detailed warnings online for it and you can CLICK HERE to go to the one from the FTC.

However, I did a little short video to warn you and others (Please pass it on), plus a tiny typography lesson from it—that I'm sure many of you caught the minute you saw the fake email.

Cautions on writing, creating, sharing personally revealing stories AKA testimonies, the possible negative results, and what to do instead

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We all want to share stories, yet we must always be respectful of the person whose story we want to tell and above all, we need to keep primary God's story and God's Word.

Storytelling is very popular currently. Just today I got yet another promotion of a “Learn How to Tell Stories” webinar.

Though storytelling is perennially popular, our Bible is made up of stories, after all, we must also be aware of some cautions when we tell stories—and that’s what this podcast and blog is all about…. The podcast is below and the blog on the same topic follows.

With the current trend of excessive sharing influenced by current media and the public revelations of indiscretions of previous Christian leaders, it seems there is nothing that is off-limits in public discourse.

There truly is no longer shame in what is shared.

The secular news media is one area; the church is another and it's important to set limits for what we share in the church in our written and digital communications and spoken public and digital sharing. This includes written and spoken testimonies and regardless of our reasons for wanting to share them, please consider the following cautions as we do them.

Please consider the following suggestions as both the ignorance of possible consequences of oversharing and the abuse of it can have lasting, though often not intended consequences for the people in our church.

We can never separate the content from the person

Allow me to first share my background on this issue as it comes from years of writing about people in difficult situations when I wrote about people for a number of Christian ministries in Colorado Springs and also was a religion reporter for the Colorado Springs Sun.

When I was a senior editor and writer with Compassion International and progressed to teaching writing and publication creation to other ministries, one thing I was adamant about was that we never, ever show people who were recipients of our ministry from a victim position either in what we wrote about them or how we photographed them.

No pictures of children with flies on their faces, no women beaten and bruised, and no men slumped in a pile of rags. Regardless of their previous need, I felt we should always treat people with honor. [Read more...]