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.

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:

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Ministry opportunities your website may be missing

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Every church knows they need a website and most churches have them today. Sadly, however, many churches buy a website creation program and do little more than fill in the blanks needed to make sure that something is on all the template pages.

Sadly that something is often no more than a paragraph, that once entered is often forgotten.

The church can say it has a website, but a website like this misses many ministry opportunities, including:

The staff misses the opportunity to become real people to their community.

Is the pastor a real person? What does he or she really think about God or problems or people? Are they in touch with the real world? If the pastor writes a blog or articles, people checking out the church can get a real sense of what that person is like. Not only the pastor, but Bible class teachers, the staff, ministry leaders, small group leaders, all would benefit from an online presence. People in your community are looking for real people with the answers to spiritual questions. The web provides a priceless opportunity to allow people to get to know you.

One caution: NEVER have your blog written by someone else—blogs or online articles do not have to be perfect literary masterpieces to touch people, but they do have to be honest. [Read more...]