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.

Little details are the most important part of your communications

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PDF of an article on the importance of the little details in your church communications
PDF of an article on the importance of the little details in your church communications

The little things are the most important part of your communications because they are the links that actually connect people with the events and ministries of your church.

They are also the most boring, tedious, and difficult parts to include in a communication piece whether it is on paper or online. We'd much rather work on fun illustrations or polishing our catchy marketing slogans or brilliant headlines. As important as these parts of communication creation are, you can have the most brilliant headline and the most appealing images ever, but if people don't know when something starts, how to get there, and if child care is provided—chances are they won't show up.

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And don't expect anybody today to "call the church office for more information." Folks don't take the time to do it and even if they do after being shuttled around through voice mail, they may leave not thinking nice things about the church and certainly not planning to come to an event that might have changed their eternity.

Include the little details in your communications, it can have an impact well worth the hard work it takes to get the details gathered up and put into your communications.

To download the PDF, click here or on the image.

Also look at the article and PDF on REPORTER FORMS. It will give you a practical way to collect all the information you need.

note: this PDF is from Yvon Prehn's archives and is the only format of this article available presently. Not the greatest quality to be sure, but shared with the belief that the content is useful.

Reporter form, a great tool to enable you to get all the information you need for your communications

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Reporter form, a great tool to enable you to get all the information you need for your communications
Reporter form, a great tool to enable you to get all the information you need for your communications

As a church communication creator, the value of the information that you put out in print, on the web, in your bulletins, newsletters, and other communications is only as good as of completeness of the communication information you are given.

To help you get the complete information, a form like this can be a life-saver. Often people don't give you the information they need because they forget or don't realize how important it is (and sometimes they are just onery, but this form can't help with that).

This form gives them a checklist to fill out and then you can take the information to create the communications you need. Instead of asking people to write things of a specific length or style, you have the facts and you can do up what you need. It might seem at first that this takes longer, but it doesn't and you have far fewer misunderstandings and problems over what might have been left out if you do it this way.

Also, sometimes it is easier to call people and interview them for the necessary information and a form like this enables you to have something to fill out while you are on the call.

Click here to download the PDF.

note: this PDF is from Yvon Prehn's archives and is the only format of this article available presently. Not the greatest quality to be sure, but shared with the belief that the content is useful.

Captions define what we see, never publish a photo without them

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Captions define what we see, never publish a photo without them
Captions define what we see, never publish a photo without them

We've all heard the saying: "A picture is worth a thousand words."

That is one of the dumbest statements ever because without a complete and clear caption, the question is, "which thousand?" No picture is self-explanatory. We have to tell people what to see in a photograph.

This PDF illustrates how a variety of captions can give completely different meanings to a picture.

Keep the lessons here in mind not only when you create print communications, but when you create PowerPoint and web pieces where you use a lot of images. You can never be sure that your images will mean the same thing to your audience as they do to you.

Sometimes (especially on websites with lots of little pictures) the images don't add clarity, but sometimes distraction and confusion. The addition of unnecessary little images to websites reminds me of the early days of desktop publishing when people were so excited to be able to use clipart that they often added lots of little clipart images to every church publication whether they were needed or not.

So many of the websites and blogs where people seem compelled to add an image (and many templates come with "thumbnail placeholders") results in many images that have little to do with the content of the text and sometimes result in a "what does that have to do with anything?" distraction for the reader. Your readers are not little children to have to be entertained by pictures if you have content worth reading.

Click here or on the image to download the PDF.

note: this PDF is from Yvon Prehn's archives and is the only format of this article available presently. Not the greatest quality to be sure, but shared with the belief that the content is useful.