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.

From a Father’s Heart, a touching and useful tool for evangelism

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As part of our Great Idea Swap, Mary, from Cambridge, Ontario sent in this note:

We give as a gift to visitors a text page and an audio CD of “The Father’s Love Letter,”  along with just a note of welcome and a magnet of the logo of our church. Here is the website for "The Father's Love Letter."

http://fathersloveletter.com/text.html

They also receive a ‘Welcome Folder’ with information about our programs, our Vision, our history and statement of
beliefs.

Please go to the website to read or listen to this piece. It comes in a variety of formats including a one page PDF, a bulletin insert and a variety of other layouts. The audio is beautifully recorded and you can download the mp3 file or listen to it online. I do recommend having a box of tissues handy if you read it—I cried as I was so touched by hearing those words from the Bible in a new way that deeply expresses God's love and invites others to become part of His family.

A website content sharing tool, FREE & easy to use

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Effective use of the web is all about interconnections. We read something of value and we want our friends to know about it. We blog and we want to let our Twitter followers know we did it or post it on our Facebook page. We'd like our Facebook to automatically link to our blog or Tumblr or whatever else tool we are using.

All great ideas, but the actual linking and referring can be a real pain in the neck. We want to do it, but to close out one  tool, open and add the content to another one, takes far too much time in our busy lives. Below I'll tell you about a tool I'm using on this site and how it can benefit you first of all to share content here that you find useful and then how to use it on your own website.

The tool that I am using comes from http://www.shareaholic.com/

It is free and very easy to use and set up. I've also found it easier to use to share content than any other tool I've found.

How to share content from this site

You may have noticed a new graphic at the end of articles:

All you have to do to share some content that you have found useful to you and that you would like to share is to click on one of the little icons--for Twitter, Facebook, email, Linkdin, Blogger, Tumblr, Digg, Delicious, or Squidoo and, without having to close the website, open another site and sign in, you'll be at the site you want to add the sharing information to. Super easy.

You have many other services you can link to--you get to decide for your own use of the service. I selected ones I either use or know that people who view this site use.

A new sharing service for website creators

For website creators, there are a lot of sharing services out there and some are already built into the WordPress free websites. I've tried other ones, but for a website that you host yourself, the one I am about to tell you about works better than any I've used in the past. Here again is the site:

http://www.shareaholic.com/

Share the joy of learning how to create effective church communications

Many church communicators have no idea of the resources available on this tie and I would very much appreciate it if you'd let them know about it. But I also know that can be an extra amount of work that you do not have time to do. To make that easier for you is one of the primary reasons I got this tool, but when I found out how easy it was to use and how much I liked using it myself, I couldn't wait to share it.

Go ahead and try it on any of the articles you read on this site—sharing greatly benefits all church communicators!

Is video the best way to market your church?

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The title of this article is a trick question. There is no BEST way to market anything to everyone. However, video is obviously an extremely powerful medium as the current advertising campaign by the Mormon Church illustrates. Some comments about that project, some suggestions for creating your own videos, plus some suggestions on how you can combine video with other communication resources follow for an effective multi-channel outreach.

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An extraordinary example of video sharing

Most likely you’ve seen some of the “I am a Mormon” videos on television or on the web. If you haven’t, I encourage you to look at them at www.mormon.org. I must admit to a bit of trepidation in referring you to the site because it is very powerful in advancing the Mormon religion.

My trepidation comes from the fact that I am not a Mormon and that I do not believe it is a Christian faith that correctly represents my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ (for excellent apologetic resources about the Mormon Church, go to www.equip.org).

That being said, you cannot help but greatly admire the overall campaign and the extraordinary production quality of the videos and the site. They have taken a large cross-section of people and through video and text have them tell their story. The stories are from women, single fathers, people of various races. The cynic in me notes the somewhat excessive attempt to break from the stereotype of Mormons as primarily white males, but cynical or not, the message comes across that all sorts of people, people like you and me, are Mormon.

The videos are short and though they focus on people telling their story, each story is a very carefully edited view of life that emphasizes Mormon values without much detailed information about theology. In short, they have perfectly captured the spirit of the age where relationships are primary and asking deep questions is pushed aside for warm feelings and the appeal of being part of a caring, loving group such as this.

This is not the time or place to critique in depth their theology, but as an example of extraordinarily well-done videos to advertise a church, they are brilliant.

A great resource for how to create your own videos

Few churches have the resources to create videos of this quality—though some do and of course this magazine has a sister publication that is filled with great information all about video ministry. Be sure to sign up for it if you don’t get it at: http://www.christianvideomag.com.

A resource that I personally cannot recommend enough is www.webvideouniverity.com. There are lots of video training programs out there that, in my opinion, were too over the top to be really useful to the average person (not video ministry unit in a large church), who simply wanted to do some videos for teaching and ministry.

The person who runs the site, Dave Kaminski is an excellent, teacher who knows his topic extremely well and can explain it effortlessly. I personally highly recommend that you sign up for his video tip of the week and you can do that on his site, www.webvideouniversity.com. He offers an excellent, professional training course, plus training on specific topic including How to do Screencasts and How to use your flip-style camera to create videos. Please remember my ministry does not participate in affiliate programs or take advertising—I recommend what I genuinely like. To read a more detailed article on how his training helped me, go to this link:

https://www.effectivechurchcom.com/2011/01/powerpoint-to-screencasting-how-to-improve-your-church-communication-on-the-big-screen/

How to combine video with other communication resources

Once you have created videos, you need to let people know they are available. You can do this in a variety of ways.

Social networking is an obvious one. You can upload videos to the numerous video sharing sites available, but if, like the Mormon videos, you may want to drive people back to your primary site, don’t upload all of them to YouTube or Vimeo or whatever else you use. Upload only a few teaser ones with links to your primary site.

Putting up links to short teaser videos, announcements of them, and links to a complete video site are obvious content choices for your church’s Facebook, Twitter and similar sites. We have recently assigned a person in our adult education class at church to be our “internet evangelist.” Her job is to continuously update our Facebook and Twitter accounts, plus interact and link with the main church site and the various members Facebook pages.

Don’t forget the power of paper

If you’ve done some things online that you and your people love, follow the lead of many national advertising companies and use print to inform people that the online material exists and to link them to it. Check out your snail mail this week and note how many advertisements, especially in the form of postcards, are created to get you to a website.

You can either do a postcard mailing from your church or you can create postcards in church office, and make up enough of them for every person in the congregation to have 3 of them. Put them in the church bulletin and then on Sunday morning, have the Pastor ask everyone to give or mail them out to friends or neighbors who might like to look at your videos.

We’ve found business cards with a condensed message are a great way to get people to our church and ministry websites. Make up a large number of them for the members of your congregation, give them out and encourage people to pass them on to friends. In the midst of life, we have lots of conversations and if your people are excited about some videos you have produced online, maybe even if they are part of it, they will want to tell their friends about it. Always having a business card with you that has the URL is a great way to share and connect with friends.

The pastoral uses of paper

Creating print items for your people to give out accomplishes lots more than simply adding another communication channel. You are also involving your people in outreach in an active, hands-on way.

Outreach is the task of everyone in the church—not just of those whose job it is to create professional communications while the people in the pew sit quietly and wait for new people to come. When you have invitation cards or postcards and everyone is involved in handing them out, they will most likely talk to the person to whom they are giving the card and nothing beats a personal recommendation for great marketing, whether it is for coffee or churches.

When the church is growing because people are involved in inviting, it also helps them be more welcoming when newcomers arrive—they are expected and prayed for.

Yes, it is more work to create the print communications and involve your people in using them, but remember when Jesus gave the Great Commission, he didn't pull aside a select group of marketers or pastors to go and share the gospel message. He gave the challenge to everyone listening. Sharing, marketing your church is everyone's job.

Bottom line

Video may not be the most powerful way to advertise your church, but if you create them yourself with honest, true content and use combine your use of video with other channels of communication; you will have a tool in the never-ending challenge of ministry to powerfully communicate your message.

Powerpoint, Screencasting & Video: how to improve your church communication on the big screen

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One of the things I love best about this ministry is that I get to research resources for church communicators and then pass on great ones to you. I do this in a way that is perhaps a little bit different than some reviewers or bloggers in that:

  • I only pass on what I genuinely like. I pay for all the materials I review, I don't get free review copies.
  • I don't take any kind of affiliate or referral compensation, to keep my referrals honest (I have a selfish heart and I couldn't trust myself if I did).
  • I use what I like in real ministry settings. My husband is a bi-vocational pastor and we are responsible for two significant teaching ministries at our church. I do all the communications for them as well as a large part of the Bible teaching. If the products I try don't work in those settings, I don't pass them on.

With those disclaimers in mind, I'd like to share a resource that I have found extremely helpful:

Web Video University

This site is run by Dave Kaminski, one of the best online teachers I've observed. He knows his material really well and does a great job explaining and illustrating it.

To check him out, don't go directly to the website www.webvideouniversity.com, because it looks like just another sales pitch for making money with internet video. In ministry we have very different reasons for doing video and though his sales page wasn't tacky or as tedious as some, it didn't tell me what I needed to know. In fact, it was this page that kept me ignoring his site for months. My opinion changed however when I signed up for the free weekly video tip. A collection of these is at the link below and I STRONGLY recommend that you check this out:

http://webvideouniversity.com/podcast/

Once I started getting his weekly video podcasts and checked out the podcast site, I was impressed.More than impressed, I realized that Mr. Kaminski had a depth of knowledge that would be useful for the things I wanted to learn to do.

I had been looking for a way to improve my webinars and was very interested in learning how to do both Screencasts and videos with a flip camera. Screencasts are a sort of PowerPoint on steroids that you can then turn into webinars or videos. Though I've used PowerPoint, literally since it was invented and have taken a number of classes on it--I knew I was not making the most of it and using animations to make things move, expand, appear, etc. was not something I ever felt I made the most of. It seems like a lot of videos these days consist primarily of moving words. Though there are a number of ways to do this, a screencast using PowerPoint is probably one of the easiest. After watching his video training series Screencasting, —it has changed the entire way I approach teaching with PowerPoint and in the coming months you'll see the results of that on this site.

I have recently signed up for the course on creating videos with the flip camera and the overall video course--lots to learn, but I have been extremely impressed by the site and resources so far and wanted to share them with you.

Never let your videos stand alone

Video is a fantastic resource, but it is not the only resource you should you use to communicate your message or market your church. Please read this article: "Is video the best way to market your church" (Click on title or HERE to go to it0 for some advice on some excellent examples of church marketing videos as well as advice on the print and other communications you need to create to make the most of your videos.