Effective Church Communications

10 essentials to prepare your church website for Easter

2 March, 2020 By Yvon Prehn 4 Comments

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...]

An incredible example of speaking to YOUR audience, of tailoring a message to a specific group

19 February, 2020 By Yvon Prehn Leave a Comment

Focus on YOUR people when creating communications — We need to get our audience in focus and clearly see them before we can successfully create communications for them.

One piece of advice I frequently give church communicators when creating their materials is to always keep in mind their specific church, location, audience. Templates can be useful, and this also includes the templates I create for you, but no matter what the design, if it does fit for your people, either modify it or use something else.

I know my templates won't fit for every church and though I try to do things in a variety of styles, for some churches I'll totally miss the mark. For others, they will be exactly what they need.

With the strategy of always designing your communications with YOUR audience in mind as background, on one of the church communication groups, I'm part of had one of the BEST examples of designing with a particular audience inside that I've ever seen and I wanted to share it with you.

Without further babbling on my part, here it is:

The question to the group was to share an example of church advertising. Here is one reply:

Michael Tuszynski Here in Utah, there's a church that runs roadside billboards (yes, they still work if they are done right). The two ads simply read:
"church with coffee?" - picture of someone with a coffee
{church website}
"church without a tie?" - someone in a dress shirt, sans tie
{church website}
For context, in Utah the dominant religion is Mormonism. They don't drink coffee, and they wear ties to their services every Sunday.
Both of the ads do SUPER well for that church and it doesn't say much of anything. However, because of its simplicity, it was brilliant.

It was brilliant because it cut to the heart of issues near and dear to its intended audience.

The challenge to all of us

What is it that we can do that will speak to the HEART of our audience?

The deeper question, of course, is how well do we know our audience? If we want to invite or minister to a particular group of people, how well do we know them, their needs, fears, wants?

What style will appeal to them or repulse them? What media channels do they frequent?

Before you answer, be sure you aren't simply designing in a style or in media channels YOU feel most comfortable using.

It might be a little uncomfortable to be honest in your outreach. We might think the above example is brilliant, but I imagine it was somewhat scary to put that out there the first time.

Brainstorm, pray, ask someone in the group you want to reach how they react to your creations.

If you come up with something unique to a particular group, please share it with us. Send it to me at yvon@effectivechurchcom.com.

FREE Instagram Images & Inspiration for Random Acts of Kindness Day

17 February, 2020 By Yvon Prehn Leave a Comment

Set of kindness images for instagram — Kindness is a characteristic of our God and one He expects us to develop in our lives. Use these images to encourage kindness in your congregation.

Feburary 17, is Random Acts of Kindness Day and in celebration of it, I've created a set of free Instagram images for you. Click on the link below them to download and use the set however you'd like, not only to celebrate today but anytime you need encouragement for kindness.

Unless some of the random "day of" whatever holidays, this one has an unusually serious organization behind it--please check out the information below the images for more information on Kindness.org.

Click the following link to download the images: KINDNESS Images for Instagram

An organization, research, and resources dedicated to kindness

Kindness.org is their website and though it contains some things you would expect--suggested acts of kindness, stories of people doing kind acts, etc., there is an unexpected (at least it was to me) depth to it.

The site was started by Oliver Scott Curry, a PhD who teaches cognitive and evolutionary anthropology at the University of Oxford. He is part of a group called the Kind Lab that conducts research and creates programs on kindness.

This joint endeavor is a partnership between Oxford and Harvard University and joined by what they describe as a "multidisciplinary team of scientific advisors and have a community of over 400 Citizen Scientists in 45 countries.

Take time to go through their studies and programs for practical ideas on ways we can obey the Biblical commands on kindness. [Read more...]

New FREE set of Connection Card Templates available

23 January, 2020 By Yvon Prehn Leave a Comment

One of a set of Free Downloable Connection Cards — This is just one of a set of free, downloadable Connection Cards for your church.

Connection cards are a humble, but one of the most powerful communications your church can produce. With them, you can, of course, respond to visitors and in so doing grow your church, but when you include an invitation to share a prayer request, these cards are also a powerful way to pastor your people.

Below is a set of simple connection cards in two sizes. Yes, you can make them much more complicated and there might be times you want to do that, but similar to how marketers have found that people sign up for email lists more when they are only asked for the most essential information (name and email) than when they need to answer more questions. Below is a free set of forms for simple connection cards. Below them, a link to a FREE KINDLE download of my book on Connection Cards.

To download the Free Template file that includes ready-to-print PDFs and editable MS Publisher files, CLICK the following link: 2 Sizes Basic Connection Cards

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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

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

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The challenge to all of us

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An organization, research, and resources dedicated to kindness

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