Effective Church Communications
Effective Church Communications provides Timeless Strategy and Biblical Inspiration to help churches create communications that fully fulfill the Great Commission
Below are screen shorts of the VIDEO OVERVIEW of print communications from Effective Church Communications. They include Motivational Bulletin inserts, invitations, sign-in cards, evangelistic material to give out at the event, and follow-up materials.
If you'd like a closer look at them, CLICK HERE to go to the Halloween Materials Overview Video.
To download the ZIP files that have all of these, scroll to the end of this article. [Read more...]
Welcome to the Effective Church Communications Site!
We are in the process of putting up and revising LOTS of material and resources for Easter on this site. Revised articles, a training video on how to get people to come back after Easter, and many other materials will be up soon. To get notification of all of it, please sign up for our newsletter.
Just click on the following link to do that: https://forms.aweber.com/form/60/1580351860.htm
For articles of all kinds about Easter, CLICK HERE: https://www.effectivechurchcom.com/category/seasonal/easter/
For TEMPLATES of a variety of Easter Communications, CLICK HERE: https://www.effectivechurchcom.com/templates/easter-templates/
At this holiday time of year, we work so hard to put on Christmas events and we want as many people as possible to attend.In addition to all you do at the church, if you can get free media advertising, this can be a way to reach people who are unfamiliar with your church.
To help you do that, reach your community, and get them to your events, ECC Member, Sandra Coulson, a newspaper reporter and copy editor has shared a Publicity Workshop presentation that she presented to her church. The advice in it is clear, simple, easy-to-follow and tremendously useful.
The ZIP FILE at the end of the article has her PowerPoint presentation and PowerPoint notes. Below is her cover email that explains what she did.
I can't thank her enough for sending it. If you have training materials like this that you would like to freely pass on, please email me with them at yvon@effectivechurchcom.com.
Hi Yvon,
We recently tried a publicity workshop for leaders of groups at my church and it seemed to help many of them with an area in which they were struggling.
Some background: I’ve worked as a newspaper reporter and copy editor for 30 years. Although I sit on the other side of the fence, I understand the general approach that publicists use to attract attention to their cause. I also noticed that some of the posters, flyers and public service announcements that groups at my church were putting out were missing the mark. (At my church, each group often does their own publicity.) So I volunteered to put together a short, simple presentation on the basic of publicizing events.
I sent out invitations (mainly by e-mail) to all group leaders. Since I work nights at the newspaper, the easiest time to organize it was right after church on Sunday morning. The alternative was a session on Saturday, but I figured most of us would be there on Sunday, so I chose that day. I made up a PowerPoint presentation and an A-V Team member kindly stayed after church to run it for me. I prepared a handout with the PowerPoint slides and a list of all the media outlets I could think of in our city where events could be promoted: dailies, weeklies, magazines, newsletters, radio stations, TV stations, neighbourhood bulletin boards (the old-fashioned, non-electronic kind), websites, Twitter hashtags. (I didn’t provide all the details on how to contact each outlet because that seems to change quite often, but at least having a name gets them started.)
I think every group was represented either by the leader or a substitute the leader sent along, so I must have touched a need. Another church across the city heard about the presentation and asked for the material to use there. My presentation took only 20 minutes and there was a bit of discussion afterward, mainly with group leaders sharing with each other additional media outlets that I hadn’t thought of or whether some seemed more effective than others. Since then, some of them have continued to e-mail me with new ones they come across (mainly websites) and I have forwarded those to others who attended the workshop, so our list continues to grow with options for them to choose from.
I’ve attached the PowerPoint presentation. I thought it might be of some use to Effective Church Communications.
Sandra Coulson
Church of the Ascension
London, Ontario
I'm making this file free for everyone for the next few weeks and then it will be available for ECC Members only.
Once you download the ZIP file, save it to your computer and then click to open.
Print is still one of the most powerful ways to communicate because if you do up a print piece, such as a postcard and it is placed on the refrigerator--you can't help but see it many times!
The US Postal Service reminded us of that in a little video they did, and a clip of that is in the very short video that follows. At the end of the video is a link that will take you to the template page shown.
To see the video full-screen, click on the little square at the lower, right-hand corner. Enjoy!
As often happens, marketing is currently taking a bashing in some ministry magazines and blogs. Though I am one of the first people to decry the evils of untrue church marketing—in my mind epitomized by the commercial website headers of mostly white, all thin, happy folks—when few folks at the churches I know look anything like that—especially when you look at the church universal and the tragedy of hunger domestically and worldwide...but I digress.
As I was saying, though marketing can be used in untrue, unworthy of the gospel ways, to bash "marketing" with a broad brush as evil is like saying because Jim Jones of Jonestown massacre was a preacher that all preaching is evil.
Intro note: The following material is from the book, Ministry Marketing Made Easy, by Yvon Prehn. A PDF of this material is available as a download, by CLICKING HERE and at the end of the article. You have permission to make as many copies as you need for your staff, congregation, or volunteers.
Some church people are genuinely concerned about marketing and wonder about the appropriateness of marketing in the church. This is a valid concern and an important one to address. This chapter presents a biblical view of respectful marketing and provides biblical and practical examples of appropriate uses of marketing in the church.
I strongly recommend you take time to go over this chapter as a staff and with the leadership of your church. If you don't and people in your church have concerns that are not answered, you can be certain they will come out and often, not in pleasant ways.
You want everyone (as much as is possible) in the church to be of one heart in your communication and marketing efforts. Yes, it takes time to explain why you are doing what you are doing, but the oneness of heart that should be the result is worth it.
Marketing misconceptions defined and defused [Read more...]
