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.

Timely Tips for the Holidays

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Gayle Hilligoss Picture
Article by Gayle Hilligoss

Editor’s note: Thanksgiving is this week and then the holiday season starts in earnest. For most of us who are involved in church responsibilities as well as family events, things won’t slow down until January (just in time to start getting ready for Easter). Gayle’s wonderful tips will help bring some joy and peace back into your holiday season.

Timely Tips for the Holidays, by Gayle Hilligoss

Your life is always busy. Then along comes the holidays and make the rest of your year seem like a vacation.

Even for those who cherish the true meaning of the season, for those whose celebrations focus on church, family, and friends, it is easy to get caught up in the rush. Suddenly days become a blur of to-do lists, projects in progress, obligations, and unfulfilled intentions. This year resolve to have truly joyful holidays—days to enjoy now and to save forever as lovely memories. Choose from these tips used by others to keep their holidays unrushed and on track.

• Put plans in writing. Take a few minutes now (even if you think you don’t have time!) and save hours later. Planning helps make holidays what you really want them to be. Make a master list today of all you want to do before the big day. Then make it friendlier with the next tip.

• Create a schedule. Work backward from the holiday filling in your planning calendar with items from your list. The schedule you’ve made is likely packed. You may trim it later, but check out the time savers here first.

• Start early. Purchase and make gifts throughout the year. Take advantage of vacation trips and bring back interesting regional items to tuck away for Christmas. Some make after-holiday shopping the start of gift buying for the next year. Choosing the right gift is more fun without the crunch.

• Use smart shortcuts. Choosing the “easy” way can allow you to do something you might have to abandon altogether otherwise. Kids will remember you made cookies together, not whether they were slices of store-bought cookie dough or your favorite recipe from scratch. Your company will remember your hospitality, not whether the menu originated in your kitchen.

• Stock up. As you prepare meals now, fix an extra for the freezer. Not having to think about what’s for dinner each evening gives you extra time to focus on special events and activities or to treat your friends to a lovely evening in your home and a delicious buffet—all prepared ahead.

• Computerize Christmas greetings. Start now to assemble a data base of those to whom you’d like to send Christmas greetings. Print transparent mailing labels or address envelopes directly now. If you choose to send cards, sign a few each day in spare moments. Or, spend an evening composing a family letter with each member contributing to the update of your year. For friends and family who enjoy e-mail, send electronic greetings. Utilize Facebook and other social networks to share pictures and news.

• Do the unconventional. Some like to distribute tasks over a wider time frame by sending cards or greetings at Thanksgiving or New Year’s rather than at Christmas. This can provide more time to add personal notes and, in the later case, allows you to include a thank you for any holiday gift.

• Trim your schedule. Give the calendar you’ve made a reality check. Identify the activities that matter the most to you and your family; those are your priorities. Use time savers to ensure these activities remain on your list. All other items can be ranked according to their importance. Scratch altogether those things you are comfortable doing without for this year.

• Appreciate simplicity. Enjoy the pictures, plans, and projects for the spectacular that fill
magazines, television, and the Internet but limit the number of our elaborate undertakings
to what you can reasonably handle with enjoyment. Simple decorations, gifts, and menus can be beautiful.

• Postpone your Thanksgiving meal. Volunteer to serve meals at a shelter or community center on the day; have your own  family dinner on Friday. Or, invite a new family in the community to share your day. Obviously, this works well at Christmas too—or any day!

• Buy or make a savings bank today. Drop in at least some loose change every day plus a self-determined weekly amount from your check. Periodically deposit your funds in an interest bearing bank account (even today’s tiny percentages add up). You’re on your way to financing next year’s holidays.

• Reserve time just for the special people in your life. On your calendar, ink in two or three blocks of time for each of your most significant others: spouse, children, parents, whomever. Plan an evening just to enjoy the tree, to sip hot chocolate and listen to carols, to make cookies, whatever brings you close.

• Live in the real world. People’s personalities and habits don’t change just because it’s Christmas. When making plans and tailoring your holiday activities, you can stretch a bit (maybe your husband will go to see the Nutcracker Suite?) but be realistic.

• Devise a numbering system if you have gift snoopers in your house. Instead of using names on your gift list, use numbers. The master list is in a safe place known only to you. When you come home with gifts, wrap them immediately and put only the number on the gift tag. Even if snoopers find your hiding place, even when gifts are under the tree, they can’t be sure which gifts are theirs—until you break the code.

• Keep a notebook handy to jot down gift ideas starting now. A small notepad with a spiral binding works great. Make a page for each person on your gift list. As you get ideas, jot them down. List several ideas for each person; when you get ready to buy you can choose what you like best. When children ask for ideas for Dad, share ideas from your list. Make a page for yourself too; when someone asks, “What would you like for Christmas?,” you will have some good answers.

• Give gifts from the past. Nostalgia and the holidays so go together. List in hand, visit an antique mall or flea market. Start someone off on a fun collection of vintage games, green handled kitchen utensils, old medicine tins, ornaments, tools—the possibilities are endless.

• Say why. Do more than say, “I love you.” Tell the someone why: I love you because you make me laugh, because you keep the yard so pretty, because you like my cooking…

• Cook a family meal together. Everyone makes a favorite dish. Get out the best china and silver, light candles, enjoy

Some special tips, just for you.

Over-focusing on responsibilities, tasks, chores, and pressures is especially common during the holidays. Often “you” is who gets lost in the process. As a result, all that running, all that concern, has no positive payoff. Instead of the blessed time you hoped for, the holidays become a stressed time of bad tempers and tired tootsies.

Some ideas for a more tranquil season—

• Be your own guest. Deck out your room as you do your guest room: flowers on the nightstand, fresh fruit in a pretty bowl, a stack of interesting books, fragrance on crisp sheets, soft music in the background.

• Get comfy. Take a few minutes for yourself when you get home from work to slip into something soft, cozy, and comfortable. Remove your makeup and smooth on a favorite face cream. Look good; feel good.

• Pretend you are at a spa. Relax at the end of your day with a leisurely soak in a tub of bubbles or bath oil. Light a few candles, wind up a music box, meditate and count your blessings.

• Take shopping breaks. Rather than shopping until you drop, schedule a little break every hour or so. Rest, regroup, and treat yourself to your favorite energy food (say cappuccino and a cookie). A little pampering can be good for us.

• Shop online. It has never been easier to purchase every gift on your list without going within miles of a mall. You might even choose the same category of gift for everyone: book, sweater, slippers, CD, video, cosmetics, candles, foodstuffs. One website and you’re done!

May you enjoy the most blessed of holidays.

Measure success correctly—or why a big turnout doesn’t necessarily mean a successful event

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How do you measure success in a church outreach event? Immediately after any event is a great time to evaluate past actions and plan future successes.

A great turnout doesn't equal great results

I recently looked at a church website that celebrated the great success of their fall outreach by listing the number of hot dogs served and bags of candy given away. Though I understand they were celebrating that they got a great turnout for their event, a great turnout alone does not make for a successful church event, especially for this kind of event. If you do even the most minimal advertising, it's difficult not to get a great turnout when you are giving away free food and candy. [Read more...]

Resource collection: How to effectively recruit the volunteers you need for fall outreach and always

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With all the fantastic opportunities fall provides for church outreach, no doubt your church calendar is filling up. But as your calendar fills, your worries also grow as you wonder how you will ever staff all the events. Will you get enough volunteers? Or will you be so tired as the holiday season approaches you can barely drag yourself through it?

Be encouraged! I've put together a number of resources for you that will help you recruit all the volunteers you need. Some are free for everyone, a number of them are for Effective Church Communication members only--and these are so useful, the ones offered this week alone are reason enough to join! Before we talk about the specifics of recruiting volunteers, I'd encourage you to consider this....

Providing help isn't the most important reason to work hard to get church volunteers

Recruiting volunteers is an extremely important ministry in the church, that's true. You may have primarily thought about recruiting volunteers primarily as something you needed to do so you'd have enough people to help at your upcoming event. But it is so much more than that.

As Christians, we know that one day we will stand before Jesus to be evaluated on the work we've done while we are here on earth (2 Cor. 5:10, 1 Cor. 3:8-15). We remember how the Apostle Paul reminded the Ephesians in Eph. 2:10 that they were created to do good works. In reality, when we make it possible for people to volunteer, we are helping them grow to spiritual maturity and to do the works Jesus wants them to do.

Though we may have lofty and true spiritual goals we want to achieve with our outreach events, to accomplish them takes detailed, focused earthly communication work. The following resources will help you do what it takes to have the volunteers you need for the ministry God has called you to. The result will be that you and everyone you work with will be blessed.

Video: How to be more successful in recruiting volunteers, a case study

This on-line video will take you step-by-step through a real life example of what a church did to try to recruit volunteers for a fall outreach event (and failed miserably) and what could be done for success. The principles taught here will work in any volunteer recruiting situation.

This ECC Training video (and many more like it) is one of the benefits of this website You can use these videos to train yourself and you can also project them and use them to train your church staff and church communication volunteers.

Click here to go to the online webinar.

PDF Book: How to be more successful in recruiting volunteers for church events, a case study

Many people have told me that a step-by-step PDF really helped them carry out what was taught on the video. I put together a 17-page booklet that takes you step-by-step through all the processes, plus has extra articles on how to recruit and retain volunteers. This article has the FREE link for ECC Members and links to how to buy it (only $5.00) for non-members.

Click here to go to the book overview.

Free article: Communications for a good continuing relationship with your volunteers

Getting volunteers to sign up or help you once is one thing, getting them to continue is another. this free article will give you some ideas on how to form lasting and productive relationships with your volunteers.

Click here to go to the article

Effective Church Communication MEMBER LINKS:

Membership in the Effective Church Communications website certainly DOES have its privileges and this month they are incredible. Not only do you have 24/7 access to the training webinar, but you get the following (click on the title area of each entry below to go directly to it):

PDF of the PowerPoint notes

That go along with the Video, so that whenever it would work out for you to show it to your staff or volunteers you can print out this PDF for them to take notes with.

An e-book copy of the book

On how to be more successful in recruiting volunteers for church outreach events. In addition you have permission to make as many copies of it as you need for volunteers and church staff members.

PDFs of Samples of Church Volunteer Samples from churches

THIS IS INCREDIBLE--you really have to see the sample materials here to understand how valuable it is. These are copies of volunteer recruitment samples from real churches. There are four pieces here including a 25-page handbook: Community is Contagious, that is an instructive and inspiring volunteer, church team guide. There are also volunteer recruitment booklets and one of the best ministry brochures I've ever seen included.

ECC Member Article: Clear communications help you create effective volunteer recruitment and retention

This article goes into more depth on how to actually write recruitment material for volunteers than the video has the time or format to do. No matter what the communication channel you use to recruit, web, print, bulletins, brochures, whatever, this will be helpful.

Be encouraged and keep working at equipping and involving volunteers

Doing the work needed to recruit and train volunteers effectively is not easy, but may the Lord use the samples and ideas here to give you inspiration and strength. When you, along with your volunteers and the people who came to know Jesus because of the events you held meet Jesus face to face it will all be more than worth it.

Fall event strategy: just because a lot of people show up, does that make your church special event successful?

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How do you measure success in a church outreach event?

Is it about the number of people who showed up? Is it about what a fantastic time they had at the event? Is it about how many volunteers you had show up to help and how many stayed around to help clean up? Though all of these things are important and satisfying when they happen,  in our churches we should always look beyond the immediate as we measure success.

As we head into fall, we need to review how we look at and evaluate success in church events. We need to look beyond initial attendance and evaluate church outreach events for lasting effectiveness, no matter how well it seemed we did at the event itself.  As you'll find, in this article, many of the things we think are successful aren't when looked at in how they impact long-term church growth.

A great turnout doesn't equal great results

I recently looked at a church website that celebrated the great success of their fall outreach from last year by listing the number of hot dogs served and ice cream bars given away. Though I understand they were celebrating that they got a great turnout for their event, a great turnout alone does not make for a successful church event, especially for this kind of event.

This was a neighborhood church many people could walk to. Even with the most minimal advertising, it would have been difficult not to get a great turnout when they were giving away free food and ice cream.

To give away goodies is not the purpose of the church

The church exists is to fulfill the Great Commission—to introduce people to Jesus and to help them grow into mature disciples. An fun event and food give away might be the start of that process, but it won't be any more than that if you don't spend some time in prayer and careful strategic planning. The rest of the article will help you do that.

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Strategy and planning is not the most fun thing to do, but it is the most essential

You are not putting on the seasonal event for the sake of having a fun party. Your goal must be to begin a relationship with people that will grow your church and change lives. You want to represent Jesus so people will come to know him.

To help you plan for events coming up this fall, it can be helpful to look back at events from past years and honestly evaluate them. Following are some questions you need to discuss in your church staff meetings as you look to the future:

Event evaluation questions

  • What made this church event different than the similar events hosted by the local mall or downtown merchants?
  • What did people learn about the church from attending the event?
  • How many people came back to church the following week because of the event?
  • Did the attendees learn anything about Jesus from the event?
  • Did the attendees leave with any follow-up information that invited them back to the church or gave them information on how to find out more about the Christian life?

We've got to get honest with ourselves about the results of what we have done if we want to make an impact on our world. If your answers to the previous questions aren't all you want them to be, take some time to think about how you can make your upcoming events produce the results you want. The following ideas might help.

Effective communication suggestions for your fall and other outreach events

In church staff meetings everybody (trained or not) has an opinion about what makes for effective church communication. With all respect, sometimes those opinions are neither valid, correct, or useful if we are trying to win our world for Jesus. It's sad that we have to be reminded that our primary goal is evangelism, not just having a good time, but it seems like so many churches today focus so much on having a good time in the futile hope that if we show people how friendly Jesus is they will eventually get around to considering him as something more than the host of a party.

Such an attitude (and it is far more prevalent than we'd like to admit) is not worthy of you who have been called to fully fulfill the Great Commission. It is also not a professional way to use the people and resources that have been entrusted into your care.

Fortunately it isn't difficult to evaluate what works and what doesn't in outreach communications. Just as in a basketball game, it doesn't matter if you don't like the team colors or their strategy. Only one thing counts—the final score. There is a similar way to determine the success of church events.

To fully fulfill the Great Commission (which is what this ministry and website wants to help you do) here is a way to determine the score

To keep peace in the body of Christ, this can be very helpful in that the bottom line for evaluating the effectiveness of any piece of communication or church marketing is not whether someone likes it or not. It's not how many people had fun or not. If the goal of effective church communications is to fully fulfill the Great Commission, the measure of success is whether this goal is being fulfilled or not.

Remember at a basketball game the success of the team is not determined by how many hot dogs were sold or how many people filled the stands—it's who won, who had the highest score.

We evaluate success in church events in a similar way as we do in basketball—we look at the score and in the church that score is dependent upon how well we fulfill the Great Commission.

To determine our our score in fully fulfilling the Great Commission we need to look at two actions we can count:

1. The people who come to know Jesus as Savior, in a word: salvation.

2. The people who grow to maturity in their faith and become disciples, in a word: discipleship.

Keeping score starts by simple counting

This is not rocket science. Score-keeping in church communications is determined by first of all by attendance, the simple numbers of people that respond (or didn’t) after you created and distributed your communications.  You can't start either one of the processes of either salvation or discipleship until people show up.

What is the attendance score at your event?

The attendance score is determined by asking questions such as these:

  • Did you do a mailing? Send a postcard?  An email? Web announcement? Pulpit announcement?
  • Did you equip your people with communication tools? Connection cards, postcards, website links?
  • How many people attended event? How many were new to the church?

Making up a simple chart of what you did to promote an event and then the results of it moves discussions of church effectiveness away from personal opinion to objective numbers.

The simple numbers of how many new people attend the church event, why and what brought them there is important because you cannot start the road toward sharing the message of salvation without people getting inside the church and becoming part of the process. Whether your church accepts individuals as believers with a simple confession of faith after one visit or whether becoming a Christian is defined by a series of explorations and classes,  followed by a decision and baptism, or any combination of these events, whatever your tradition, it must start with simple attendance.

Be honest in record keeping and evaluation

For example, if you put on a Christmas outreach event and you spend thousands of dollars, what was your return on investment? Again ask the questions above: how many are now attending the church because of the event? How many have become Christians because of the event?

I suspect far too many churches do Christmas and other holiday events because the people currently attending the church really like to put on the events. To determine if this is the primary motivation—track the results. To repeat: how many new people are now attending the church because of the event? How many have become Christians because of the event? What did it cost and what was your return on investment in the lives of people?

If you aren’t tracking costs and results, why not?

Even without tracking it, if you know the answer is something along the lines of “We didn’t do a very good job of communicating it to people outside the church and we can’t honestly point to anyone who is now attending or who has come to know Jesus because of it,” you then have two choices:

1. You can learn to communicate more effectively so that your holiday events will yield measurable results in the future.

or

2. Quit spending all that money to entertain yourselves and give it either to a mission group or church that is successful in outreach or give it to feed hungry children.

Track more than holiday events; track all ministry events

Tracking our communications and the results of them will keep us honest in church programming and evaluation.

It can keep us from over spiritualizing. What I mean by that is that it is easy to conclude that people aren’t interested in something such as spiritual growth, when in reality we simply didn’t advertise it very well.

Honest evaluation can also keep us from false excuses. You can create many communication pieces today for little or no cost and that will keep you from the current popular excuse for not advertising church events which is that “We just can’t afford to advertise church events because of the recession.” There is a lot of marketing that doesn’t cost much: web-based, email-based advertising, creating websites and blogs with WordPress.com; making sure what you do create has complete details, involving your people instead of buying mailing lists, e.g. equip them with inexpensive postcards to mail to friends—all these ideas can generate lots of church marketing for little or no money.

In print marketing, I'm encouraging churches to look at publication techniques such as digital duplicators which enable you to create communication pieces for a fraction of the cost of color copiers. Print is still one of our most powerful communication tools and equipping your people with inexpensive printed invitations can be one of your most powerful tools.

Finally, it's too important not to be honest

The eternal destiny of people is what is at stake as you plan your outreach events. In addition, the temporal growth of your church and all the spiritual and emotional benefits it can provide to the people who become part of it are important considerations.

In addition, putting on special events is a lot of work and usually costs quite a bit of money. If you take the time to carefully plan and then commit to honestly measure the results all the hard work and money will be worth it.