Basic skills training, strategy, biblical challenges, and free templates from Yvon Prehn for church communicators.

Effective Church Communications

Timeless training from Yvon Prehn on church communication strategy, skills, and seasonal outreach.

Video: about ECC TEMPLATES and an overview of FREE CHRISTMAS TEMPLATES

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Christmas is incredibly busy and Templates, when you want to do something quickly without having to take time to agonize over design or legal images or what typeface to use, can be a great time saver.

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 growing 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.Continue Reading

Summer Connection and Door Prize Drawing Cards, free MS Publisher Templates

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Free Summer Connection Cards
These cards are a great way to get information from summer guests so you can invite them back to activities year round!

Many of your churches are holding community outreach events in the summer. You have a great expectations for them, but often you don't see much church growth after them because you don't work to intentionally connect with the guests who come. This is VERY EASY to do if you offer a great door prize and have people sign up for it.

Below is a set of combined connection and door-prize drawing cards you can download, run off and use. In the download is a set of Free MS Publisher Templates, ready-to-print PDFs, and images.

Click the following link to download a ZIP file of the cards: Summer Connect & Door Prize Drawing Cards

PLEASE read this article on the incredible difference cards like this made for the summer outreach of one church: Why it isn't enough to be a community-friendly, free event-providing church

Triage, a model for responding to connection cards

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Triage your connection cards
In a medical emergency, the first responders immediately triage victims to see who needs immediate care. That's a great examples to follow on processing connection cards.

Ed. intro: When you host a special event or seasonal celebration, you'll have lots of visitors and you'll be collecting lots of visitor cards from them. But you've got to do more than just collect them if you want them to make a difference in your church. You'll learn what to do from this excerpt from the book: Connection Cards, connect with visitors, grow your church, pastor your people

It is critically important to respond to the connection cards received each Sunday and all special occasions, but not every card needs the same timeliness or intensity of response, but how do you decide what needs what? The concept of triage can help.

First, here is the history and definition of TRIAGE from Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia:

TRIAGE
The term [triage] comes from battlefield or natural disaster situations. When the wounded are brought in there are three categories in which the wounded are immediately placed:

Red / Immediate
They require immediate surgery or other life-saving intervention, and have first priority for surgical teams or transport to advanced facilities; they “cannot wait” but are likely to survive with immediate treatment.

Yellow / Observation
Their condition is stable for the moment but requires watching by trained persons and frequent re-triage, will need hospital care (and would receive immediate priority care under “normal” circumstances).

Green / Wait (walking wounded)
They will require a doctor’s care in several hours or days but not immediately, may wait for a number of hours or be told to go home and come back the next day (broken bones without compound fractures, many soft tissue injuries).

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triage

How to apply triage to connection cards

Though you aren’t dealing with actual battlefield situations, this model is useful in responding to the connection cards you will receive from those fighting spiritual battles each week. Following are suggestions for how to apply the three levels of triage in how you respond to the people turning in connection cards:Continue Reading

How to get visitors at special events to give you their contact information and how to respond when they do

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Sign in Card for Fall Event
Use a card like this if you want people to return to your church after special events.

When your church hosts special events this should be the start of a relationship, not simply a one-time visit. But to make that happen you need to get your visitors contact information. Following is a process you can use to get that information, samples of communications that will do it and follow-up cards after the events. There is a generic one and also examples for fall outreach and one for Christmas.

The big question is—how to make that happen?

One of the best ways we've found to do that is to have a drawing for a special prize related to your event and ask people to register for it. You can be very upfront that you will be using the information to contact them and that, if at any time they want to be removed from your mailing list, it isn't a problem. You don't want to hide your purpose and most people don't mind when you let them know the details upfront.Continue Reading

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