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 a Biblical Perspective to help churches create communications that fully fulfill the Great Commission. Our tools constantly change; our task doesn’t; Effective Church Communications can help.

Advice on creating a Facebook Page for your church and the fantastic way it can reach people

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Jane McGookey, Communication Coordinator for the Presbytery of Lake Michigan, the owner of Key-Web, Communication for Congregations and an ECC Member shared this extremely helpful video with us. In just a few minutes she explains how to create a Facebook page for your church and even more importantly, how a page benefits your church. She shows you how you can potentially reach hundreds of people with your content--and it's all FREE!

For more from Jane, check out her website:
http://www.key-web.net/

How to create a Word Cloud for the cover of your Facebook page

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Facebook has added a "cover" option for your page. You could put on a picture of the church, but why not make a Word Cloud of it?

Its a fun thing to do, unique and very easy. Here is the WordCloud I created for my Facebook page and the video below shows how to create one for yours.

Please check out our Facebook page at: http://www.facebook.com/EffectiveChurchCommunication, it's another way to get updates about material on the ECC site--also love your comments and suggestions!

Word cloud header, you can create your own, video shows you how

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

Q & A: Where can you find Free PowerPoint resources, artwork and templates?

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Question:

"Our church has recently added a video screen to our sanctuary. We are in the beginning stages on learning how to use it for announcements and other parts of our church service. We have found some resources for slide backgrounds, videos and countdowns. Most of the video and countdown sites have a fee to use these. We are a small church and just wondering where the best sites are for these things, and possibly free usage sites also. Any suggestions?"

Answer:

Though there are many excellent companies that create PowerPoint presentations for churches, many do charge a hefty fee for their materials. As someone who creates resources for churches, I know everyone needs to make a living, but at the same time, I as someone who is married to a bi-vocational pastor and whose work at the church is done for no compensation, I do know that church resources can be very tight, while ministry demands can be challenging.

I did a good bit of research on this and found the following websites have some excellent FREE resources! Rather than simply telling you about them, I did 3 video reviews, so you can actually see the sites. Following are video reviews of the sites I found most useful with preliminary comments and direct links to them.

PLEASE respond in the comments section if you have other sites that you use either free or paid for. Any extra comments would be very helpful. Thanks so much!

Free PowerPoint Templates from Christian sources

Heartlight.org
http://www.heartlight.org/powerpoint/2262.html
This site is just WONDERFUL! Lots of free materials, really good quality, and I found the overall attitude of the site encouraging and uplifting. Not only PowerPoint, but lots of other materials you'll find very useful for church communications.

Ebibleteacher.com
http://www.ebibleteacher.com/
I didn't find this as useful for worship-type PowerPoint as some, but I really like their teaching materials. Good graphics and maps section and OK background images. I use a lot of maps and historical images in my Bible teaching to remind people that the Christian faith is rooted in real history that took place in real places.

Hyperpixels Media
http://www.hyperpixelsmedia.com/motion-background-loops/fire-flow
I really liked the materials here. This site has mostly materials that cost, but they also have some free materials, that change and that are wonderful. Their quality is excellent and their prices are very reasonable. This does cost, but their video: A Man's Thesaurus had me laughing out-loud. Check it out when you need a bit of humor.

Free PowerPoint Templates for Churches Video Review

Free PowerPoint templates from Secular Sources

PowerPoint Styles.com
http://www.powerpointstyles.com
This is a weird site—but useful weird. Be sure to look at the video before you go to it. It has some GREAT material and it's all FREE, but what is weird about it is all the junk ads, software download boxes and other stuff that clutter up the site. But if you take a few minutes with it, you'll be rewarded with some really great PowerPoint Templates.

Microsoft.com
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/templates/results.aspx?qu=presentations
The link above goes directly to the free PowerPoint templates from Microsoft. As you'll see the best ones they offer don't come from Microsoft themselves, but from companies that give free resources to them. It is a little tricky to find and access these resources, but the video that follows shows you how.

Free Templates and Clipart for Churches from Secular Sources

Free Power Point Training Resource

Indezine.com
http://www.indezine.com/
This is a very interesting site—it does have lots of free templates for PowerPoint and the video below shows you how to access them, but it also has lots of educational information on all sorts of topics related to PowerPoint, such as an extensive tutorial about presenting on the iPad. There are lots of links to books and other resources related to PowerPoint and links to downloads of software trials. Their religious templates feature ones for non-Christian religions, which could be very useful for world religion classes. Bookmark this site as the offering and education materials change often.

Free PowerPoint Templates and Training, a video review of Indezine

Father’s Day Post cards, a great set, ready-to-use

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Here is a set of postcards for Father's Day, that can also be used as stand-alone images in PowerPoint, websites, newsletters or however else you want to use them. These publications and images come in a ZIP file you can download in these formats:

  • A PDF of postcard size publications that is ready-to-print as is, but that you can also personalize on the back side with your church information.
  • An editable MS Publisher file of the images that you can modify however you choose.
  • A graphic image in either png or jpg format that you can use any way you want, in newsletters, on the web, however, you'd like.
Word Cloud image 3
These images for Fathers Day can be used for postcards, inserts into bulletins and invitations to celebrate Father's Day.

The images above illustrate only some of what is available for Father's day. All of the files on this page are FREE for ECC MEMBERS, some of the other files will be available for everyone. Members can download the ZIP FILE, at the end of this. If you are not a Members of Effective Church Communications, CLICK HERE for membership information --it is only $9.99 a month for many free resources and training available 24/7.

The images and postcards were created with Word Clouds, created with http://www.tagxedo.com.

These are illustrations only, the zip file containing all the files, PDFs, etc., is available at a link below the images.

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD the ZIP file containing the PDFs, graphic images, and editable MS Publisher files.