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.

Effective Easter Outreach: Door-hangers, an invitation you can’t ignore

By Leave a Comment

Door hanger about hope
A person is usually alone when they read the message on a door hanger.  It can be an effective way to help them consider the meaning of life, Easter, and personal salvation.

You can't ignore a door-hanger—you literally have to do something with it and even if you toss it, chances are you'll glance at the message. One of the most powerful reasons door hangers can be effective Easter outreach is because often the  person reading them is alone and may not be thinking about anything else.

In addition to this quick glance, I recently read an interesting article about the impact of tangible, touchable marketing. It is from a study done by the Centre for experimental Consumer Psychology at Bangor University in the United Kingdom and used MRI brain monitoring to measure response between ads printed on a paper flyer and ads viewed on-screen. Here are their comments:

The ads that could be physically touched as well as viewed stimulated the most activity on the brain. . . By having something physical in front of them, the brain placed more authority and emotional resonance to that ad versus the one the participant could see only via a monitor. The takeaway from this experiment was physical involvement versus just visual involvement equated to a deeper connection. . . . . . It's also an important reminder that effective marketing needs to integrate all faces of the tools available, from print media to email, display ads to social media, and word-of-mouth to influencer marketing campaigns.
http://bit.ly/2ieEhkU

Here is one more reason door hangers can be effective Easter outreach—often the  person reading them is alone and may not be thinking about anything else.

Finally, there isn't anything magical about print or door hangers, but in addition to the reasons above, their low-cost and the ability to involve your congregation when you give them out (discussed in the article here) make them a useful addition to your Easter mix of outreach.

As the following images illustrate, we have a selection of door hangers for you to choose from for Easter. Some have room on them for church information on the front, others you can put it on the second side. One has a message for you about hope and that is below the images illustrated.

Message on the back of the door hanger about hope:

[Read more...]

Recipe for Greek Easter Bread, an outreach treat for Easter guests

By 1 Comment

Easter bread recipe
This delicious Easter bread recipe is a fun way to invite people to attend your Easter events.

Which would you rather get to encourage you to come to church for Easter? A postcard that tells you how wonderful the church is or a really great recipe? Of course churches are going to talk about how wonderful they are at Easter time, but a great recipe for free—that's different and might get attention in a way something else won't.

Everybody loves recipes and this Greek Easter Bread is exceptionally delicious. It's my version of a recipe given to me years ago by a very dear Greek friend. It's a sweet yeast bread (not a coffee cake) and bakes up beautifully. In addition to serving the main version for Easter, I came up with an alternate version to serve with soup, especially something like tortilla soup, any time of the year. In this variation, you add jalapeno peppers and cheddar cheese--it is sooooooooooo good. The regular version makes great French Toast and the Cheddar/Jalapeno version is fantastic oven-toasted. Either way, it's something everyone would love.

Below are finished cards for the recipe that you can personalize on the back and below I included a print of the recipe. The link to the ZIP file for them is at the end of this article.

Here are some ways you can use the recipe for Easter Outreach:

[Read more...]

What to do with the “few hours before sunset” in your church communications

By Leave a Comment

Challenging card.
We all need encouragement to spend our time wisely--this might help.

We all struggle with how to make the most of our time as church communicators. Every task seems urgent and important and there are never enough hours in the day.

While it is impossible to add more hours to our days, for most of us, we could do a better job at prioritizing our tasks. I know this is something I constantly struggle with. It seems like I'm always working, but I'm not sure I'm always working on what is most important.

This evening while riding the exercise bike and catching up on my Christian reading (multi-tasking that works well for me), I found this quote in the September issue of Christianity Today in an article about missionaries. Amy Carmichael wrote this in 1903:

We shall have all eternity to celebrate the victories, but we have only a few hours before sunset to win them.

For each of us, how we make the most of those few hours to win the battles we need to fight for our Lord and His Kingdom, will be different. But I know for each of us, we need to be reminded not to give in or give up too soon in the battles.

Practical application

I created this postcard-size reminder for you to print out and post.

At the end of the article is a zip file that has a jpeg image of it, the ready-to-print PDB and the original MS Publisher file.

Challenging card.
Click on the card to download a PDF to print out and remind you to make the most of your time.

One way to fight the war

In the past I've encouraged you to take part in Back to Church Sunday. Even if you don't take part in this event, here is a resource that provides materials for you to invite missing members back to church anytime:

Postcards: For Missing Members & how to get people to come back to church

No matter what you do this week or anytime, in your work as a church communicator or in all of life, ask the Lord to help you live so that you can say with the Apostle Paul:

I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. 2 Timothy 4:7

CLICK HERE to download the file, save and click to open.

Invitation cards to invite people to come to church

By 1 Comment

This invitation is free for everyone, just click to download a PDF of it.
This invitation is free for everyone, just click to download a PDF of it.

The creation of the cards below was inspired in part by these statistics:

  • "82% of the unchurched are at least somewhat likely to attend church if invited" –Dr. Thom Rainer, The Unchurched Next Door

  • Yet only 2% of Christians EVER invite someone to church!

In addition to the challenge of the quotes above, we know we should all be about inviting people to church as a step on their journey to a relationship with Jesus.

Effective Church Communications has a set of FREE invitation cards in PDF format. You can print your specific church information on the back.

The resources in the ZIP file below are:

  • A PDF file of all the cards, ready-to-print
  • The original MS Publisher file (2007, you can open it in later, but I know a lot of people still have this) so you can modify anyway you want and add your church information on the front or on the back.
  • Hi resolution images of the cards
  • Low resolution images of the cards

A link to download this file is at the end of the article.

Below is a gallery of all the cards from Effective Church Communications:

Back to Church Invitation Cards Card 2 hi res Card 3 hi res Card 4 hi res Card 5 hi res Card 6 hi res Card 7 hi res

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

To download the ZIP file that contains all these cards in PDF and original MS Publisher format, click on the link below, download the zip file to your desktop, then click on it and use the files.

CLICK HERE FOR THE ZIP FILE for Back to Church Invitation Cards.

A grief-ministry free communication resource created by a fire-fighter’s widow

By Leave a Comment

Families of the Fallen ebook
This well-written and helpful e-book is available by clicking on the image and downloading from the Families of the Fallen website.

Ministry to widows is a ministry dear to our Lord's heart and one that defines us as Christians:

The Christian who is pure and without fault, from God the Father’s point of view, is the one who takes care of orphans and widows, and who remains true to the Lord—not soiled and dirtied by his contacts with the world. James 1:27, NLT

But as important as we know that ministry is, we often struggle with how to make its application practical in our churches. Fortunately a widow of a fire-fighter, Susan VandePol, took her pain and turned it into a beautiful and extremely helpful resource for others. She contacted me via LinkedIn and shared her e-book: Families of the Fallen. You can download the e-book, by going to the website: http://www.familiesofthefallen.net/

There are two versions of the book, one for Firefighter's families and one for churches.

Website is also an excellent communication example of beautiful brevity and impact

The website for the book is a beautiful example of a simple, focused, and extremely useful site. It is a tiny site in terms of size, but it is tasteful, lovely and provides appropriate information.

Many thanks to Susan for sharing and please, if you have materials like this that I can pass on to the readers and members of Effective Church Communications, send them to me at: yvon@effectivechurchcom.com.

The Lord has given us all different experiences and we can all share and learn from each other.