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.

Great information kiosk—wish more churches had one like it!

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Revolving Church Info KioskMany churches do incredible things to communicate and I saw a fantastic one a few days ago I couldn't wait to share with you--this is a church information kiosk at New Life Community Church In Pismo Beach, CA. My husband and I attended the Global Leadership Summit at that site. To the left is what it looks like.

You'll be able to see right away what a great set-up it is because it is a revolving rack with the different topics on each side:

The racks on each side are attached with velcro so they can be moved or positioned as needed.

Not only that, but where it was was great

[Read more...]

Can your congregation read your newsletter on their mobile phone?

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Make your newsletter mobile phone compatible.
We rely on our mobile phones for so much of our communications today--be sure your website works on them.

You may have noticed that this newsletter came in a new format –and this was much more than a simple design decision. It was a change from a simple layout using a newsletter template to a text-only format and it was from a non-responsive to a responsive format.

I actually feel pretty dumb it took me so long to do this about this because I firmly believe in the present and growing importance of mobile phone communications.

I'm far from the only one who thinks this. According to a recent article in Litmus.com, a site that tracks email effectiveness:

It’s official: mobile now accounts for the majority of email opens, with a 51% share. That’s an increase of three percentage points since the previous record of 48% from September and October. Desktop opens now make up 31% of opens, while webmail has dipped to 18%.

https://litmus.com/blog/mobile-opens-hit-51-percent-android-claims-number-3-spot

In spite of knowing the importance of mobile and working very hard to make my website compatible with mobile phones and tablets, and making it a responsive site, I forgot all about making one very important part of my communication ministry compatible with mobile phones: my newsletter.

Ways to make a newsletter easier to read on your mobile phone

Below I'll share with you what I'm doing to make the newsletter easy to read on a mobile phone. This includes some of the changes I made before this last week.

  • I decided to have my newsletter be a blog broadcast of the latest articles on my website.  What this means is that the newsletter program I use (AWeber) sends the newsletter out automatically.
  • I use AWeber as my newsletter creator because it does blog broadcasts better than the other programs I tried.
  • AWeber has recently created templates for mobile phone newsletters, but to use them, you have to create your newsletter using them. Here is the article about them: http://www.aweber.com/blog/email-marketing/mobile-responsive-email-templates.htm
  • Because I use the automatic blog broadcast, that doesn't work for me.
  • Currently even the templates for the blog broadcast aren't mobile compatible. This is where I made a mistake—when I switched to the blog broadcast, I tested the blog broadcast template I chose on my computer, not my mobile phone. This week I was reading an article about making sure your newsletters are compatible on your mobile phone and I realized I hadn't tested mine on it.
  • When I did, as they say, "my bad!" –I realized how hard it was to read. The template was not responsive. It was a shrunken version of a computer screen-complatible newsletter. It was hard to read and none of us have time to pinch and move the screen around.
  • I went back to AWeber and after trying other templates and modifying them, I realized that the text-only format was the only one that would work.
  • That was fine with me because on a mobile phone, we don't really need graphics for a quick newsletter skimming of topics that go back to your website for longer articles for the complete article. The purpose of most newsletters is information--not to share great artwork and this format does that well.

If you are reading this on your mobile phone, you see the result. If you don't have a mobile phone--borrow one and check it out.

The bottom line is that making our newsletters easier to read on a mobile phone is simply one more tool to help us better share the messages on our websites and ministries that will help people find Jesus and grow to maturity in Him.

It’s not about your creativity, it’s about serving your congregation with your church bulletin

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Letters need to be organized to communicate.
Letters don't mean anything until your organize them into clear, consistent communications.

Though the church communicator emailing me was asking about another topic, in passing she mentioned that she was going to be taking over the production of the church bulletin and was looking forward to changing it every week so she could express her creativity through it.

Her excitement about the new project and a wish to be creative was commendable, but it isn't a good idea to change the format of the church bulletin (or any other church communication) on a weekly or any other frequent basis and here's why:

People don't read the bulletin because they are looking for creative inspiration, they read it for information.

People access information by means of the structure you give them in your communications. The structure of your bulletin consists of the layout, the type and illustrations that you use, plus how you organize material into sections.

You want to come up with a clear system of how you use these structural tools so that people will not be conscious of the building blocks of your system, but will be able to easily access the information.

Type is one of the most important building blocks. On your church newsletter or bulletin, if someone says, "that was an interesting typeface," it isn't a compliment.

Did you notice the typeface on any blog you read regularly, on Facebook, or your local newspaper? You don't because you should always see through the typeface to the content. If people notice the typeface it can be a distraction to your message. [Read more...]

Why and how to create a newsletter for Seniors

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Senior communication
Seniors are a vital part of your church--give them communications that challenge them!

Answering the questions you are asking is one of my primary purposes in creating the content for this website and the article here and the video linked to it were prompted both by the question below that deals strictly with newsletters for seniors and several questions I've had lately about typography.

The Question:

What is the best way to send at least a monthly newsletter out to an older congregation when some don't think it is worth the expense, and others complain that we are not communicating with all our members, but only those that show up in a given week? Not everyone uses email, or texts because of the age of the congregation.

There are really several questions intertwined here, which is what makes it difficult to answer. The first part is somewhat simple and straight forward. The second part is a little more challenging.

Let me reword each part slightly to be able to handle them clearly.

Part # 1 of the question:  What is the best way to send out a monthly newsletter to an older congregation when not all of them use email or text?

This part is easy to answer, though it can be challenging to carry out, because there is no one best way. We live in a time of both/and, not either/or in all of our communications. Though it would make our church communication lives so much easier if we could create communications for any one group, one way, it doesn't work that way anymore.

To communicate effectively to an older congregation with a newsletter (which is an excellent communication tool) the best way to do it is to do one version in print and then another online. Again, that is probably not what most people want to hear, because it seems like extra work, but if you do it in the way suggested below it doesn't need to be difficult. Here are some tips on that: [Read more...]