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.

Faux code that correctly describes all we should do in digital outreach

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Internet evangelism
Many of us spend lots of time each day communicating digitally. Here are some challenges for how to do it as an effective evangelist.

Tony Whittaker, the founder of Internet Evangelism Day (http://www.internetevangelismday.com) recently sent me this faux code that is a great description of all we should do in digital outreach.

Even if you aren't into computer code, I think the message is clear on what our attitude should be in our Internet outreach. Please read it and then below it, I have some current, practical application challenges.

Finally, if you have ways you currently share your faith online, please share them in the comment section following.

<need digital-evangelists

('writing' = jargon-free;

'tone' = outsider-friendly;

'target' = prioritize-non-seekers; '

condemnation' = off;

'love' = on;  '

preachiness' = off;  '

churchiness' = off; '

cultural-sensitivity' = high;

'contextualization' = high;  '

storytelling-mode' = on;

'empathy' = high;

'popular-culture-parallels' = use;

'felt-needs' = understand;  'sense-of-entitlement'= off;

'politics' = off;

'humor' = use;

'social-media-interaction' = use;

'languages' = multiple;

'location' = worldwide;

'platform-optimization'

= mobile,tablet,pc)>

Current application idea

I was recently talking to a Christian friend who spends a lot of time on Facebook and she was honestly surprised when I mentioned that she could be using those interactions to share her faith.

It's good for all of us to be reminded that the internet provides us with extraordinary opportunities to be salt and light to our world. Particularly in a day when so much online discourse is vile and contentious, we can be gracious, kind, and truthful in all we communicate—in other words to practice the characteristics Tony encouraged us to in the code above.

If you or your church are doing things to actively share your faith or be a witness for Jesus in the online world, (other than church social media announcements or even if you do something special there) please share it in the comments here. It'a an area we all need ideas and encouragement in.

Why church communicators need to be on the church leadership team

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Teamwork is needed in church communications
God put us in a body for a reason and church communicators and leadership need each other to fulfill the goals of the church.

Many of you may now be part of the leadership team of the church, but for those who may not be and for those who are timid in their job, following are some reasons why it is important you are part of this team.

Church Communications are what make ministry reality in the lives of the congregation and community

The church leadership team can come up with a great plan to get everyone in the church into small groups. They can come up with a fantastic slogan, a great curriculum, all the members of the leadership team may be personally committed to small group interaction for discipleship growth.

How does that become real in the lives of the members of the congregation?

It becomes real through communications—through the lists of small groups, the website entries, the brochures, the maps that tell people how to get to where they need to go, the social media and church apps that remind and report.

In many ways church communicators are entrusted with continuing the reality of the verse, "and the Word was made flesh and made his dwelling among us" (Jn. 1:14) by taking the ministries of the church and turning them into the tangible communications that enable the congregation and community to become part of the ministries of the church.

Church Communicators can give strategic advice to church leadership teams

One of my goals in Effective Church Communications is to give you the BIG picture of church communications and to help you see how vital they are in helping your church fully fulfill the Great

Commission. I've developed the Five Steps of Effective Church Communications and Marketing to help church communicators and in turn their churches see how all the communications we do should be going towards the goal of fully fulfilling the Great Commission, which means to help people either come to know Jesus as Savior or grow to maturity in Him.

Individual communications might be tiny steps in the overall mission of the church and in being obedient to the Great Commission, but church communicators can help the staff see that you aren't just "creating another Sunday bulletin" but that you are creating an essential link that will help INFORM and INCLUDE people in the church.

Please take time to CLICK HERE to go to an article that explains the FIVE STEPS in more detail and help your church staff understand the importance of each communication piece.

Church Communicators can provide a reality check

In a previous article, It may not be your fault that nobody shows up for a ministry event that you advertised heavily, I talked about the reasons why no matter how great your communication piece might be in terms of writing, design, frequency, and multi-media outreach, people simply might not respond.

The reasons they don't are often because of decisions by the leadership team. The purpose in saying that isn't to assign blame or point fingers, but to encourage church leadership to have church communicators as part of the decision-making team about what and how to promote events to the congregation.

We all have blind spots, we all see things other don't and by expanding the spiritual gifts and viewpoints involved in making decisions about church communications, we will have fewer failures that could have been avoided by an additional viewpoint.

Also, church communicators can provide reality checks on scheduling and costs of communication ideas. The church leadership team may come back from a church conference with a great idea of what worked in a church of 10,000 and want the home church of 150 people to implement it immediately. That rarely works and the church communicators often are the ones who are realistic about what the church can and can't do AND can often provide ideas and options for how the great idea might be adapted or modified for their church.

In scheduling church communicators can help the staff understand that if they want a devotional booklet written, designed, laid out, and printed before Lent or Advent, that the church communication team needs more than a week to work on it. It's not fair for church staffs to make major decisions involving big communication projects or holiday outreach campaigns without having input from church communicators from the start.

It's a biblical model

We are called into a body and with the Lord as leader, when church staff and church communicators can work together respectfully and productively the Lord is honored and the church will be more successful in reaching the world and growing disciples in the church.

 

It may not be your fault that nobody shows up for a ministry event that you advertised heavily

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Weight of communications responsibility
Sometimes church communicators feel like the entire weight of the success of a communication is on them, but often it involves reasons outside their control.

Sometimes church communication ministries don't realize the extraordinary responsibilities they have to communicate the message of salvation and the challenges of discipleship to their communities and congregations, but more often church communicators feel a tremendous weight of responsibility.

If an important event or training program doesn't get the response you anticipated, it is easy to blame yourself. You might feel your communications weren't catchy enough or your graphics not gripping or your text not as enticing as it should be.

Maybe those reasons had something to do with it, but probably not. Sometimes the reason people don't show up has little to do with what you communicated. Following are some true examples of times this happened, of course with some details changed so as not to embarrass any member of the Body of Christ.

Unknown scheduling conflict

You may find out the real reason no one comes to an event you advertised is the same as it was when one church launched a Sunday morning class for young parents. They wanted to target this group (what church doesn't), but on the day it launched 2 grandparents and no young parents came to the class. When a few informal calls were made to the target audience of young parents in the church and they were asked why they didn’t come to the class, the answer was that because the new class was at the time of the main service and the children didn’t leave for the children’s program until after the children’s sermon, which was 10-15 minutes into the time the class started. The parents weren’t going to leave their kids in the service alone to go to the class—no matter how well it was advertised and promoted. [Read more...]

Results of the NEWSLETTER Poll

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Yvon Prehn, creator of Effective Church Communications Ministry and website

A big hug and thank you to all of you who responded to the poll asking you which days of the week you wanted to receive the twice a week newsletters from the Effective Church Communications Ministry.

The very clear preference results of the survey are MONDAY and THURSDAY! So that is what we will do!
Your comments were also extremely helpful and the things you asked for gave me great ideas, some of which I will be implementing right away for content. I did not expect the many kind, wonderful, encouraging things many of you said in the final comments and I can't tell you how much joy and strength that gave me.

A new newsletter format is coming

Maybe this week, but by next week for sure I'm going to be changing the format of the newsletter. I have been using AWeber because it allowed me to send out the automatic emails when I created new material for the site.
But I never really liked the program--lots of glitches and problems and plugin conflicts, after looking at various programs I'm going back to Constant Contact, the newsletter system I started out with. I like the things I can do with it a lot and I'm excited to share them with you. Please click on "show images" when you get the new one.
Thanks again for your input on the newsletter and I praise God for all of you!
May He give you joy and strength as you serve Him today!
Yvon

Response to an overwhelmed church communicator

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For a new and overwhelmed church communicator, here is some advice that might help.

In response to the recent poll I sent out, here is what one person said in the comments section:

New to this role, unpaid volunteer for a small church. It all feels overwhelming.

That comment, totally touched my heart and I wanted to share a few things in response. Though helping people in this situation is one of the goals of the ECC Ministry, I hope the following advice is helpful.

Being overwhelmed is a totally appropriate response

You are tasked with making clear the words of eternal life to your congregation and community. Heaven will be different; the eternal destinies of people will be altered by your work. With that reality in mind, here are some things to do that might help.

The first thing to do

When (in 1 Samuel 30) David was under intense pressure and "greatly distressed" the passage goes on to say that he "encouraged himself in the Lord his God [KJV] found strength in the Lord his God. [NIV]" You can do the same. No matter what your tasks; no matter how little training or preparation you have for the job, the Lord is there to help you. Trust him and pray for every aspect of your work.

James 1:5 says that God will give you wisdom when you ask for it. Ask continuously and He will give insight and direction.

The first things NOT to do

Don't overly worry about how things look or your social media wizardry. People do not respond to the messages of your church because of your graphic design brilliance or the wit of your tweets. Of course we want things to look as good as they can and we want to use every channel possible, but don't focus on secondary issues at first.

Three things that are vitally important in all your communications

If your communications have these three characteristics, you'll be effective in communicating the needed messages of your church. The 3 vital characteristics are

Be CLEAR

Explain what you are talking about so ANYONE new to the church will understand (and many who have been coming a long time, but never learned what's going on). Don't use cute names, acknyomns, abreviations that only people who have attended the church for many years understand. Tell people precisely what is happening and why they should bother to be involved or care. Don't publish a picture ANYWHERE (social media or print publication) without a caption. You are in a unique and wonderful place just starting out in communications in that things people may have taken totally for granted that others understand, you can spot them more easily. Speak up; ask; clarify for the sake of your audience.

Be COMPLETE

The most deadly assumption you can make in church communications is "oh everyone knows." They don't. They don't know what time a group regularly meets. They don't know that childcare is always provided or never provided, they don't know that you have to be a church member to volunteer for certain jobs, they don't know how long youth group, or the mission committee or any other group meets.

YOU MUST provide all these connecting details in your communications and if you don't have room to put them in, be sure you have a link to your website that gives them in detail.

You can have the most stunning image, brilliant text, and fascinating slogan, but if people are unclear about the date or time and can't easily find out more, they won't attend.

There is a saying that "the devil is in the details." I would propose a more accurate statement would be that "the devil is in our communications when we leave out details."

These vital, connecting details may be hard to track down—they may be one of the most frustrating parts of your job, but they are extremely important.

Be CURRENT

Without this last characteristic—many vital communication tasks are either undone or only partly successful. This primarily has to do with your website and the fact that you must work EXTREMELY HARD to keep it updated. Your website is the anchor of your church communications and to emphasize some of the points above, it really doesn't matter how it looks (again, yes it's nice, but not the most critical thing)—what matters is that when people come to it, visitors and members that they find the COMPLETE information they want; that it is CLEAR and that it is CURRENT.

If you do that—you will be a rock star communicator because very few church websites are as current as they should be. Finding programs listed that are months or years old, no details on events happening this week, or in a short amount of time, no links to where to find out more—again, looks matter little if these details aren't there. If they are there people will attend the events and either come to know Jesus as Savior or grow in their relationship to him. That is what makes you an effective church communicator.

This is just a start, but I trust a useful one

There is so much to learn as a church communicator, but it is wonderful, exciting, and never boring work! The Effective Church Communications ministry is here to help and our Church Communicator's Training School has an ever-growing list of courses that will help you.

Know that though I can't see your face—I am praying for you and all the church communicators involved with ECC that the Lord will give you strength, wisdom, and joy as you do your work to share the words of eternal life.