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.
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Cautions about auto-responders with church visitor follow-up email

4 September, 2019 By Yvon Prehn 2 Comments

Be careful with church auto-responders
Church visitors may not want to hear from us nearly as much as we may assume. Respond with graciousness, not assumptions.

Churches sometimes use auto-responders—the messages that are sent out automatically with your email programs to people who either join a church mailing list or who have been entered into a church management software system.

These are useful in that the church doesn’t have to create individual follow-up messages for every person, but they can be a disaster is they are done with the wrong expectation as I recently discovered from a series of irritating auto-responders I received.

My irritation resulted from incorrect assumptions that the sending organization made. I’ll list them below with church applications.

#1 Irritation—That people want to hear from you

I didn’t. I was checking out a piece of information I needed and to download it, I had to give them my email. I know that is common practice (I don’t do it on the Effective Church Communication website), but just because someone is forced to give an email that they want to hear from you.

If someone visits your church and you send a follow-up email, please do so with kindness, courtesy and no assumptions that they are dying to hear from you. Especially if the people did not initially give you any permission to contact them (e.g. they simply filled out a visitor or connection card), don’t assume they want to be contacted.

Be brief, be kind, be gracious on any initial follow-up or outreach email. Give them a way to opt-out from hearing from you in the future.

#2 Irritation –Assuming I’d done what they wanted me to do

The company assumed (based on no interaction whatsoever) that I had tried their product, found it was wonderful, and without any evidence of these things happening wanted to tell me what to do next with the product.

Don’t assume the spiritual condition of people who showed up at your church and filled out a connection card. This includes not using church jargon or phrases that make little sense to an unchurched person.

#3 Irritation—it was all about them, nothing about how they might help me

In contrast to this irritating company, I’m also checking out another company that I am probably going to be using in the future. The auto-responses from this company are consistently helpful and primarily a series of questions on how they could help me accomplish my goals.

You can be less irritating and more helpful in similar ways when you offer to pray and answer questions.

PLEASE do be sure that if you reach out in these ways you have someone who monitors the church email constantly through the day and who promptly responds with answers to questions and assurances of prayer.

Technology has given us great tools with which to interact and reach out to help people come to know Jesus and grow in their faith. Let’s be sure to use them intentionally, prayerfully, and graciously. Let’s be a help and not an irritation as we serve our Lord.

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Filed Under: Misc. Advice and Articles Tagged With: church auto responders, effective church emails, how to respond to church visitors

And now podcasts—one more way to share encouragement, training, good news, our faith!

1 November, 2018 By Yvon Prehn Leave a Comment

Podcasts by Yvon Prehn
One of the oldest ways of communicating--with our voices is now one of the newest in Podcasts!

Who would have imagined the oldest way to communicate—with our voice—would be the latest, greatest thing in communications?

Even more, who would have imagined that one of the oldest technologies—radio—would be the basis for it?

But here we are with podcasts, a booming area of communications that literally anyone can do.

Effective Church Communications and podcasts

If you've been part of Effective Church Communications for some time, you know I've done a number of podcasts. I did a moderate amount of radio in the past, love the format and have done a lot of teaching and speaking so it seemed like a natural tool.

As with many things, the technology of it was very scary and that put me off for some time until I realized how simple it could be (this is an EXTREME simplification and I hope to do some videos to explain it more) with free Audacity and Lame software, plus an inexpensive headset microphone from Target (that's how I create mine).

Creating them was easy, what to do next was hard. I've tried various systems, all time-consuming and though the storage and distribution systems didn't cost a lot, it is a monthly cost. But the biggest challenge was HOW to distribute them? Yes, there are all sorts of ways to do that, but my brain was stretched enough just getting the podcast done and available.

Anchor changed everything

[Read more...]

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Filed Under: Bible 805 Podcast, Misc. Advice and Articles Tagged With: Church Communicators Podcast, intro to podcasting, Podcast on the Bible, Podcasts, Yvon Prehn Podcasts

Canada Day bulletin insert on GRACE for the nation and one for the U. S.

17 June, 2018 By Yvon Prehn Leave a Comment

Georgia Bamber, an ECC Member, sent me a GREAT example of modification of the bulletin insert and prayer for the 4th of July that used the acronym GRACE as a prayer for America. She took the same idea and applied it to Canada Day!

She was then kind enough to send me a PDF of her creation which I've attached as a PDF and which you can download by clicking on the image at the beginning of the article.

4th of July Bulletin Insert
Georgia took this publication and modified it to apply for Canada Day.

You have both my permission and my encouragement to do the same for your country. Make it your own—modify the text and the headers to apply to where you live.Use this to remind your people who God wants all nations to experience His grace and to remind your people to pray for it.

Here are the words on the flyer that you can use as a prayer guide, bulletin insert, or an encouragement to pray for your nation either at your national celebration like Canada Day or the 4th of July or anytime your people need a reminder of the need for God's grace in the affairs of our world. If you do one for another country, please send me a copy and I'll pass it on! Send to: yvon@effectivechurchcom.com.

[Read more...]

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Filed Under: Fourth of July & Summer celebrations, Misc. Advice and Articles Tagged With: 4th of July Free prayer for America, Canada Day card, Prayers for Canada

My giant mistake on mobile phone layouts and why I should have known better

25 March, 2018 By Yvon Prehn 7 Comments

Mobile phone mistakes
I made some big communication errors because I didn't check my content on a mobile phone.

This is bang your head against the wall, repeatedly, time. I know mobile phones are incredibly important in church communication today and getting more so all the time.

I know how important it is for your website to responsive, that means that it looks good on all devices from computer screen to tablet to video. I even wrote an article and did a video about it.

And I know WordPress automatically adjusts articles to fit on your phone.

But what I didn't do was check how my current home page actually looked on my phone. Until this afternoon that is, and then the head banging against the wall started. [Read more...]

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Filed Under: Misc. Advice and Articles

Results of the NEWSLETTER Poll

4 March, 2018 By Yvon Prehn 2 Comments

Yvon Prehn, creator of Effective Church Communications Ministry and website

A big hug and thank you to all of you who responded to the poll asking you which days of the week you wanted to receive the twice a week newsletters from the Effective Church Communications Ministry.

The very clear preference results of the survey are MONDAY and THURSDAY! So that is what we will do!
Your comments were also extremely helpful and the things you asked for gave me great ideas, some of which I will be implementing right away for content. I did not expect the many kind, wonderful, encouraging things many of you said in the final comments and I can't tell you how much joy and strength that gave me.

A new newsletter format is coming

Maybe this week, but by next week for sure I'm going to be changing the format of the newsletter. I have been using AWeber because it allowed me to send out the automatic emails when I created new material for the site.
But I never really liked the program--lots of glitches and problems and plugin conflicts, after looking at various programs I'm going back to Constant Contact, the newsletter system I started out with. I like the things I can do with it a lot and I'm excited to share them with you. Please click on "show images" when you get the new one.
Thanks again for your input on the newsletter and I praise God for all of you!
May He give you joy and strength as you serve Him today!
Yvon

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Filed Under: Misc. Advice and Articles

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