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.

10 essentials to prepare your church website for Easter

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Unchurched people will check out your website.
Unchurched people will check out your website if they get an invitation to your Easter service. And it won't be to listen to your praise music or admire your inspiring graphics. Here are some things to consider.

With the importance of digital information to people today, it is incredibly important that your website be ready for Easter or any special event. Before they meet your welcoming people, have fun at children's events or hear your challenging sermon, chances are they will go to your website. In large measure, whether they visit your physical church or not, may in large measure depend on what they find on your site.

Unchurched people visit church websites for the same reason they visit the website of any secular company—they are checking you out. They see an advertisement (your Easter invitation) and then go to the website to find out the details: who you are, what you are selling, how easy is it to find out information and get answers, if you are worth a live visit.

Potential customers form an opinion about a company by their experience on the website. If a company has not updated its website in months, if links don’t work, if the website is filled with splashy images but little real information, if all the terms are insider jargon (whether it's about a product or a church), if emails are not responded to quickly, a potential customer most like won’t care about learning any more about the company, let alone visiting.

Keep in mind that the visitor you sent an Easter mailing to doesn't know how nice your people are or how powerful the preaching is, or how the music will inspire them until they come to your church. Your website is what often stands between your invitation and their response.

Here are 10 suggestions to make your website one that will result in a visit to your church

1. Answer the "what's in it for me?" for your visitor

Sometimes it merely takes rewording to make the events you're doing appeal to visitors. For example instead of an insider announcement such as "traditional Kid's Kove Easter Morning" say sometime like:  "Join us for our Giant Easter Egg Hunt,  Muffins &  Juice for All Children of our community! Parents are invited to free coffee  and donuts while the kids have fun."

Make it clear that your events aren't just for members only and there is no obligation to attend.

2.  Provide clear explanations of the simple details of what you do—especially for special events

Make the service times, parking directions, child care and programs all easy to find. This is especially important for an event like Easter where you may have totally different service times than your regular ones. If you aren't clear and you don't change your usual times on your website, it can be very confusing.

Answer the question of what to wear if it matters at your church or even if it's like churches in S. California where anything other than a wet swim suit if pretty much OK. A bit dressed up or totally comfortable—let people know. [Read more...]

How invisible church jargon can sabotage your website

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Dangers of Church Jargon
We might think we are communicating clearly on our church website, but are we?

Jargon, those insider terms that are only meaningful to members of an "in" group, in this case, those of us in the church can be deadly in terms of our success in communicating with the world outside the church. It's easy forget what a powerful tool the web is for reaching our world, or that many people who visit your church for the first time do so because of your website. With the importance of the website in outreach, even in how we use jargon and fine-tuning it out can make an importance difference.

With that in mind, I just finished a brief overview of websites and following are a few notes on some instances of jargon that stood out to me. We know church jargon can be deadly in the other communications we create in the church, but somehow I think it's easy to miss jargon on the website because the medium itself is newer. Though the websites I looked at all had overall great images and content, the desire to be brief in the number of primary menu items used on the home page, made the jargon in them glaring to me. But if this is the first place a visitor looks and if the primary menu items contain one or more examples of church jargon, this may confuse or stop a visitor.

What's tricky here is that it’s almost impossible to catch this yourself on this because those of us who work in the church are so immersed in church jargon we aren’t even aware of it when we use it or we may not realize that people outside the church may not use that word in the same way. Here a few examples (far from exhaustive) of terms or the locations we put them in that we might want to reconsider: [Read more...]

Are you still telling people to “Call the church office for more information?”

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Don't call the church office for more information!
Don't make the church office person responsible for answering all the questions about information you didn't take time to put on your website.

Don't do that.

In this time of social media, texting, and the information explosion at our fingertips on websites, with our ability to write unlimited content and link to related information, I naively assumed nobody made the mistake of saying that in their church communications.

But then I was checking out a new website for a church that was doing a major re-branding (in what follows, the details are changed and location not given so as not to embarrass anyone). This church has been around for many years; it was a large, well-known church in the area it was in. The senior pastor retired and a new, young pastor came in (all very happily, no church fights or ill-feelings). The church changed its name away from a denominational label to a contemporary one. They decided to get a new website and hired a very expensive, well-regarded company to do it.

The website had beautiful graphics and lots of alliteration for all the areas of ministry. There was not a typo to be found.

All good. Well, not so much—the site seemed cold and mass-produced because it didn't have any pictures on it of real people on it (not even staff) and all the text seemed like a "fill-in-the-blanks-of-a-template"—but perhaps those negatives were because it was new and they didn't have time to put in pictures or content from real people. This isn't a design critique, so I'll leave it at that.

....No, I can't do that.....even if your website isn't perfect—be real. Have genuine pictures of staff, write a human, honest letter from the pastor why he/she hopes people come. Take pictures of your people at events, post them, and put in captions that will make sense to someone outside the church. People don't come to a church because of gorgeous graphics and flawless mission statements. They come to have questions answered, needs met, and to connect with fellow pilgrims.

I'm sorry, I digress, but this is important. We are trying to win people to Jesus and if the site seemed cold and sterile to me, someone who loves the church and is cheering on new churches and communications, I don't imagine it would have a very welcoming impact on someone who wasn't into church jargon—no matter how beautifully illustrated it might be.

Back to the topic....

What the site did have

The phrase "Call the church office for more information" or the more contemporary, but similar statement, "Email the church office for more information" was added after many descriptions of programs or events. If the activities described (and there were several pages of these) didn't have that statement that after each description of either the ministry or concept, it was at the bottom of the page. I can honestly say there was not one thing on the site that was completely explained in the brief overview of it.

What's wrong with this and what should have been done

It isn't fair to the people in the church office. Usually when this phrase is included excessively in a website or other communication piece it's because the people on staff or in the ministry didn't take the time to communicate fully what was going on when they wrote the information for the site.  The person answering the phone or email can't be expected to know every detail about every ministry. If the ministry didn't give the person doing communications all the details when it was first written about, the people in the church office won't magically know them now.

What should have been done: Don't talk about a ministry, value, teaching, whatever unless it makes sense (at least at a basic level) in the communication piece you first talk about it in. This doesn't have to be lengthy, but should contain basic facts of what's going on, when it meets, who it is for, if there is a cost.

In addition: Each ministry that is mentioned should have one person IN THAT MINISTRY who is committed to answering phone calls or emails or other social media contacts about it. Of course you can't put complete information about every event in the bulletin or in a mention on the website and a personalized contact of someone actually involved in the ministry is important. But making people go through a series of people or phone calls to find the person who actually knows what is going, or the answers to basic questions on isn't efficient or kind.

People will not take additional steps to find out about something they know little about. Making a vague statement along the lines of "Connections are very important at our church, contact the church office for how you can get connected" probably won't get a lot of response.

What should have been done: Realize people are very busy today and love them enough to tell them what is going as fully as you can the first time you mention it.

Back to the website overall

It looked like the first draft (though a very polished one) of the website. It was so perfect that you could almost see the drafts passed from staff member to staff member to make sure not a typo escaped. Or maybe it was written by the website company and presented in all its perfection to the church.

It would have been so much better, as stated earlier, pictures of real people; content that didn't read like it was computer-generated, COMPLETE descriptions of people or ministries. This church as been around for decades and there was no sense of history or of any of the people actually involved in the ministries.

Simply "having a website" isn't enough. Make sure your content, perfect or not, reflects who you truly are as a church and be sure all the people in it take responsibility for their area of ministry and can be contacted directly (whenever possible) about it.

Afterthoughts and a check of the Wayback Machine

I was very grumpy when I wrote this, but after re-reading it, I realized that more than grumpy I was terribly sad because I remembered the website of the church in the past. I remembered it (though I'd forgotten when I first started writing this) because someone I knew was doing a special program there and I wanted to check it out. The images of the site came flooding back to me. It wasn't nearly as polished or perfect, but I remember it was filled with great content, that I linked to for a study I was doing on a similar topic. The site overflowed with people who loved the church and were involved in ministry. I remember thinking how good the site was at the time instead of my current frustration with every page on it.

To make sure I remembered correctly, I looked up the site on the Wayback Machine (an archive for old sites) and again, the site was not nearly as fancy, but it was human. Messages from ministry leaders, lots of pictures of the people and ministries, and not once did I find a "contact the church office for more information." If there was a contact link (and there were) it was always to a specific person at the church.

This is not a plea for old-fashioned sites and a bashing of new expensive ones, but a reminder that looks aren't nearly as important as your heart when you are reaching out to people in any communication channel. Let your heart, your care for people and love for Jesus come through. Think about the people who will be answering questions about the information you leave out, be complete, no matter if it is a little messy and your site will be worthy reflection of the church instead of a frustration because of invisible people and incomplete information.

 

 

 

 

 

Print and Digital—More Powerful Together! videos and studies to show you why

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Print and Digital E-book, more powerful together! by Yvon Prehn
If your want people to respond to your communications, use every tool you can!

People are busy, stressed, and time-starved—what is the best way to reach them? Many voices would answer "SOCIAL MEDIA!"

But if that is the answer, why aren't our churches filled and every event well-attended, when social media costs almost nothing to produce and we can push it out to the world?

Part of the problem could be that we have confused the popularity of social media with effectiveness (source for this idea in the video below). We assume social media is the way most people communicate today, and though that idea is wildly incorrect for many congregations, even among those who do live glued to a Twitter feed, don't necessarily take action on what they see on social media.

What follows isn't about bashing social media

Far from it--keep tweeting, Facebooking, Pinning and Instagramming, as the Apostle Paul said, "we need to become all things to all people to win some" (1 Cor 9:22).

But consider re-introducing PRINT into a more significant place in your church communication mix. As you'll see a number of communication and marketing studies show this is the most effective way to get an audience to respond to your message.

Below are 2 videos--one a more lengthy teaching one about the effectiveness of combining print and digital for any non-profit group and the second one is a series of slides with thought provoking quotes and commentary.

Below each of them are handouts of the presentation.

Below both is PDF e-book that has the quotes, studies listed and more.

Why here, now and free to all?

As I've been working on Fall and Christmas communications I've realized that unless you understand some of the key points in the material that follows your fall outreach will not be as successful as it could or should be.

Either one of the videos would make an excellent discussion topic for your next staff meeting because communication ministry is the foundation of the success of many ministries in the church and it is far more difficult today than it was in the past when you only needed to worry about how many times you printed an announcement in the bulletin.

I'm working on a longer class and book on this topic, but I felt it was too important not to get out now what I did have ready.


CLICK THE FOLLOWING LINK TO DOWNLOAD THE PDF of NOTES for the video above: Print & Digital More Powerful Together HANDOUTS


CLICK THE FOLLOWING LINK TO DOWNLOAD THE PDF of NOTES for the video above: Slide Show of Print and Digital Quotes, HANDOUTS

Print and Digital E-book, more powerful together! by Yvon Prehn
Click on the image to download a copy of this e-book.

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...]