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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For seasonal and special event success: plan beyond a great invitation

7 December, 2017 By Yvon Prehn Leave a Comment

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An invitation to an event at your church is simply the start of a relationship with someone who doesn't know Jesus. Plan from before you send it out to do more to make sure visitors connect.

When a church holds a seasonal or special event, initially we want to get lots of people to attend. But for a church that isn’t enough because we must always keep in mind that we are not just there to celebrate the various holidays, but to reach out to the community with the goals of helping unchurched people make a connection with the church, begin to come on a regular basis, come to know Jesus as Savior, and grow to Christian maturity.

We don't want to be satisfied with merely creating a great invitation and even with a great turn out at the event because as anyone who is involved in special events knows, attendance on the following Sundays, even if the seasonal celebration itself has a huge attendance, is almost always less than hoped for.

The problem is never because of the event itself—churches have figured out how to put on great events. Solving this problem is more complex than many churches realize but before we talk about solutions. . . .

First, a story that illustrates the importance of more than an invitation to events

This is a true story. Though the specific event discussed is Easter, the lessons learned from it apply to Fall, Christmas, and every other outreach event in the church. Here is what happened: [Read more...]

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Filed Under: Christmas, Easter, Seasonal, Seasonal communication strategies, Strategy, Strategy #2: Make the most of seasonal events—grow your church in numbers AND your people in discipleship Tagged With: church retention of holiday guests, Get people back to church after Christmas, get people back to church after Easter, get people back to church after holidays, how to get guests to come back to church

TEMPLATES—what makes the ECC church communication templates unique and how to modify them

3 December, 2017 By Yvon Prehn Leave a Comment

One of the SQUARE Christmas Business Card size templates available in our Christmas Template set, not only does the video show this one and many others, but how to get it professionally printed.

I may have tried to accomplish too much in one video, but it's hard to express how excited I am about the TEMPLATES we have for Christmas this year. I'm not only excited about all the new designs and templates, but I'm also excited about how they fit together in an overall ministry plan.

That is one of the things that makes the templates from Effective Church Communications unique—they are part of our overall goal of fully fulfilling the Great Commission, of intentionally helping people from outside the church and progressively enabling them become mature disciples. Your communications are a key part of this process and that's why we have templates not only for invitation cards and postcards, but motivational handouts and prayer lists for church members, Christmas letters to print for your congregation, seasonal connection and prayer cards, plus follow-up materials. (you can see a preview of all in the video below)

If you are going to make the most of your seasonal outreach you need to do communications BEFORE, DURING and AFTER your event. We will be highlighting and giving you specific strategies to do this with the various communication pieces, but this video gives you an overview of how it all works.

In addition to an overview and ministry explanation you have two options for how to use the Templates

The Templates from Effective Church Communications are all in PDF format, so you can simply download and print if you need something in a hurry.

In addition, the Templates are in MS Publisher format and are very simple to modify. I chose MS Publisher instead of Photoshop or InDesign or other fancy expensive program because that's what many churches use and it is the easiest and least expensive to use. In addition, you can do great designs with it. It is never the program, but the person who makes a successful, effective communication and if you use this set and the process recommended it will make your Christmas outreach VERY effective.

One more fun thing in the video is I show you how easy it is to get the templates printed with www.overnightprints.com. You can of course print them in the church office, but if you want a full-bleed glossy invitation card or postcard, after checking out a number of the online services, I really like how simple it is to get things done with Overnight Prints and I demonstrate this for you on the video. (I'll be doing others on this process.....like I said, a little too much here, but I was having so much fun with it and it turned out so well, I had to share it!)

One more thing that makes the Templates from Effective Church Communications unique

In addition to the typical templates use of graphics in the Templates, ECC also has TEXT TEMPLATES. There are a number of things I've written, longer pieces that you can use in either the templates as they've been given to you or you can pull them out and use them in your social media, websites, newsletters, whatever you want. Because I wrote them and retain all rights to them, I grant them to you to use however you'd like.

For Christmas, our piece Hark the Herald Angels Sing, but why? is a good example of this. It can be used as a Christmas letter, handout for Christmas events, and in many other ways. CLICK HERE to learn more about it.

Enough talking about the video, here is it:

 

To access all the Templates in the video and many more, you must sign up for Membership in Effective Church Communications. Right now we have a special price of only $59 a year! CLICK HERE to find out more and sign up.

 

 

 

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Filed Under: Christmas, Seasonal communication strategies Tagged With: church invitation card templates, church outreach postcard templates, Church Templates for Christmas, MS Publisher church communication templates

Fall Event Registration Cards to make sure people come back to church after your outreach event

16 October, 2017 By Yvon Prehn Leave a Comment

Fall Event Registration Card
A registration card like this for a door prize will help you get in touch with people after your Fall Outreach Event.

Fall outreach events typically get large turnouts from your community and here is a tool that will help bring them back to church after the event.

More than a connection card, which people have little reason to fill out at a fun, outreach event, this card is a REGISTRATION for a DOOR PRIZE.

For fall you might fill a big pumpkin with lots of candy and other goodies or a basket of local treats. Do something that is colorful and impressive and have it at a table as people come in, consider using eye-catching table runners, at CV Linens you can find table liners cheap products. Invite them to fill out the card for a drawing. Don't make them have to stay for it if you are doing the drawing at the end of the event and you'll get more cards filled out.

The content on the card is designed for unchurched people and here is what it says:

We are so glad you’re here! Please take a minute to fill out this card so you can be entered into our door-prize drawing and so that we have a record of your attendance and a way to contact you about future events for your family. Be assured this information will not be shared or used outside the church office and you can have your names removed from the list at any time by calling the church office.

It lets them know you will be contacting them again, assures them it is for church use only and lets them know they can have their name removed from your list at any time. At the same time you get all the information you need to follow up with social media or postcards.

Below are a set of designs FREE and are ready to download, print, and use.

The ZIP file below contains a ready-to-print PDFs, editable MS Publisher files and jpeg files of each design. If you aren't a Member of Effective Church Communications, you won't be able to see the download. CLICK HERE for Membership Information or to sign up.

CLICK the link following to download the ZIP FILE for Fall Registration Cards: Fall Event Registration Cards

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Filed Under: Connection Card Templaltes, Evangelism & Outreach, Fall Festival and Halloween, Seasonal communication strategies, TEMPLATES, Thanksgiving Tagged With: Alternative Halloween, Connection cards for fall outreach

What can happen if you if you work hard on your event, but don’t work on event communications

16 March, 2017 By Yvon Prehn Leave a Comment

Church Communication disappointment
If we don't create connecting communications at our seasonal celebrations and few people return to church after them, we are bound to wonder what we did wrong. This article and website can help!

Ed. note: I have shared this story before, but it is such an important reminder of how we need to create communications that will help people connect with the church AFTER the big event.

This is a true story. Though the specific event discussed is Easter, the lessons learned from it can apply to any event. In addition to applying to any event, we can all identify with the situation here. The challenges of ministry are so huge, it is very easy to get overwhelmed in one area and totally forget another one. May the Lord have mercy and help us all.

In one of my seminars, at the break, a woman literally came running up the aisle to talk to me.

“Oh, thank you, thank you,” she said, “Now I understand what went wrong.”

I had just been discussing the same ideas I’ve presented here about the importance of an overall communication plan for maximum results from your holiday outreach. I knew it was useful, but her response was more excited than most so I asked her to tell me more about her experience.

She then told me about a special Easter service her church put on that was a huge amount of work and an equally huge disappointment in results. They were a new church plant and wanted to reach out to their community at Easter.

They were meeting in the grade school, but they wanted to grow and to do that committed to reach their community for Jesus this Easter. On faith, they rented the high school gym so they would have room for a huge crowd. They prayed hard and worked hard to get lots of community involvement. They got it—merchants put up posters; they got lots of media exposure. The day came and the church of 300 had over 1500 at the Easter service held at the local high school gym.

They were so excited. The next week back at the grade school, they set up hundreds more chairs, printed lots of extra bulletins. They were excited to see what would happen.

They didn’t need to go to the extra trouble.

[Read more...]

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Filed Under: Blog, Evangelism & Outreach, Seasonal, Seasonal communication strategies Tagged With: how to get people to come back to church, outreach communications, Season communication success, Yvon Prehn blog

Look inward before you reach outward: make sure your church is ready for holiday and special event outreach guests

14 March, 2017 By Yvon Prehn Leave a Comment

Church
It doesn't matter how gorgeous your church is if the bathrooms are messy. Be sure every part of the church is at its best before Easter.

Around my home and for most people I know, one thing that always accompanies the holidays or any time guests are coming is a flurry of activity—cleaning, putting up decorations, making certain the bathrooms have nice soap and towels, flowers in the guest-room perhaps, and in special cases repainting and major household repairs. With actions big or little, we all do what we can to make guests feel welcome and the holidays special.

This is not only important for our homes when we are expecting visitors, but even more so for our churches. Not only is a check-up and perhaps some improvements important for the sake of a successful event, but if we want to make guests feel comfortable and come back, must make certain our church is ready for them.

Following are some areas that are important for you to check out and perhaps do a bit of renovation on before you invite your guests for holidays and special events so you'll not only be ready for the event itself, but for the growth in your church after it.

The physical plant of the church

The peeling paint in the bathroom, the junk stacked in the corner from a special event that has no permanent storage, the lack of handrails or handicapped access, the plants that need trimming—there are many things that we no longer see, because we see them every week, that are ugly eyesores to guests.

Take a clipboard in hand (or iPad these days) and go around the church asking the Lord to enable you to see the church as a visitor would see it. Note what needs to be done and schedule a "Welcome Home for the Holidays" workday at the church to tackle these tasks. [Read more...]

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Filed Under: Church Outreach and Marketing, Seasonal communication strategies, Volunteer Management Tagged With: church special events, church volunteer training, newcomers at church, special event follow-up, Yvon Prehn Church Communications

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