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; we can help.

Essential website housekeeping and updating for Fall

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Cleaning up your website
You wouldn't go for years without cleaning your car or your house. Be sure your digital church life is as tidy as your physical church.

Just like we often clean the house before a special event, we also want our digital church home to be tidy. With your website and social media, going into fall is a good time to make certain that essential house-keeping tasks are taken care of for your website. Though not as exciting as creating special materials for special events, these tasks are essential for a church to have the most basic credibility. Some of these  for social media overall include:

Updated and complete bios of your staff

People want to know who your leaders are their background, education, why they do what they do. In an age when almost all business leaders have Facebook pages, blogs, Twitter accounts and almost everything else you can imagine for maximum exposure, for your church leaders to not have at least an updated and complete bio on your website does not communicate a positive image of your staff.

Updated links to staff blogs, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter accounts.

Visitors today expect to get to know church leaders through social media. If the church leader is not able to do this for him or herself, as is often the case when the leader is a baby-boomer who went to seminary before the days of the personal computer, assign a "web buddy" or editor, or co-writer to update or create this content. This is a wonderful expression of how we can serve and support one another in the church. It is important to be honest about this. This is also a good time to drop links if the staff person isn't using them.

Church Facebook pages should be more than photo albums

Yes, it's very nice to have pictures of your latest fun event, but if you don't also have some commentary about what's going on, why you do what you do, and have comments that make it clear the material is for people outside the church, your church Facebook page will look like an insider photo album only for the people already attending. In the same way that you need captions for pictures for them to make sense to anyone besides the person who takes them, you need captions on the Facebook images you share.

Your website also needs some house-keeping and following are some suggestions for that:

[Read more...]

More than prayers, an idea to help hurricane victims

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Help church communicators.
No matter where you are you can reach out and help church communicators, here's how.

I know all of us are praying for the victims of the hurricanes and I know we will continue to do that through the long recovery process. In addition to that, I recently remembered a very practical idea church communicators did after Katrina.

They helped do the church communications for churches who had lost their offices or the ability to create communications.

A church at a remote location would create the bulletin, flyer, newsletter, postcard, whatever was needed and then would send it to wherever the church wanted it printed.

This plan was organized in a number of ways, either informally through social media or in a more structured way through their denominations.

If you have other ideas or are trying  this, let us know through the comment section here.

But most of all continue to pray.

Raise money for your church communications program with designated giving

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Designated giving advice
It can be a confusing puzzle to raise money for your communication ministry. Designated giving might be an answer.

A continuous challenge for any church communication ministry is having enough money for equipment, software, and training needed to run a truly effective church communications ministry. Though one of the most important ministries in the church and the one on which the success of most other ministries depend, it often isn't a priority when it comes time to set the overall church budget.

But new equipment and training is needed—so what to do?

Designated giving may be the answer

Designated giving is, in short, where church members can decide they want to give money (above their regular tithe of course) for a special project.  This is a greatly simplified explanation and later I'll give you a link to a longer, more complete one, but this is enough for the foundational idea that designated gifts are definitely an area worth pursuing. [Read more...]

Corrected Civility Code available for you….my bad

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In a very courteous email (really, the writer was so kind) an ECC Member emailed me to let me know I'd left a word out of the Civility Code I shared. It is in the last line, I left out the word "to" in the phrase, "to walk worthy."

I truly do appreciate it when someone catches my mistakes.

I corrected the sheet and the zip file containing the new one is available by clicking here: Civility Code

Thank you again Diane, and may we all truly "walk worthy" as we serve our Lord in Church Communications.

A free “Civility Code” inspired by the Global Leadership Summit

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A Civility Code, free download
The darkness of public discourse in our world today is a wonderful opportunity for the church to be salt and light. This Civility Code might help.

There is an obvious lack of civility in our world today and this is an opportunity for the church to be salt and light, not only to those outside the church, but to each other. I've got something for you that will help. First a little background.....

My husband and I recently attended the Global Leadership Summit put on by Willow Creek Church and at the keynote address, one of the topics addressed by Bill Hybels was the lack of civility in our world today and he suggested that churches consider creating a "Civility Code." I took some of his notes as inspiration and created one for you.

CLICK HERE or on the image to download a copy of a PDF of my example.

For a ZIP file that has a PDF, a jpg image of the Civility Code, and an editable MS Publisher file, click the following link: Civility Code

For more about the talk that inspired this and the conference, go to my new blog: www.yvonprehn.com and check out the series of posts on the Global Leadership Conference. More about this new site coming, but if you want to get notices on the entries put on that site, you have to sign up for the separate newsletter there.