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.

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

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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.

 

 

 

FREE for everyone! An invitation to church with your Trick or Treat Candies

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Halloween Invite to Church p6
Put an invitation to church with your Halloween treats and see how the Lord might use it!

Hundreds of children will be coming to your doors this Halloween—why not take this opportunity to invite them to church? Below are some cards that can help you do this.

I'm making this file FREE for everyone because it's exciting to think about what might happen if many of you make up hundreds of these cards and give them to the children of all ages who come to your homes on Halloween.

Here is how it works:

  • Below the images is a ZIP file containing the cards.
  • It has PDFs of business-card size invitations back to church. They are fairly generic because I wanted you to not have to do anything, but print them off and on the back side you can create a personalized message for your church.
  • In addition to the PDFs, I also enclosed the editable MS Publisher file so if you want to change the wording or put info about your church on the front you can.

PLEASE share this with friends, other churches, people who go to your church. [Read more...]

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

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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

Essential website housekeeping and updating for Fall

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Cleaning up your website
You wouldn't go for years without cleaning your car or your house. Be sure your digital church life is as tidy as your physical church.

Just like we often clean the house before a special event, we also want our digital church home to be tidy. With your website and social media, going into fall is a good time to make certain that essential house-keeping tasks are taken care of for your website. Though not as exciting as creating special materials for special events, these tasks are essential for a church to have the most basic credibility. Some of these  for social media overall include:

Updated and complete bios of your staff

People want to know who your leaders are their background, education, why they do what they do. In an age when almost all business leaders have Facebook pages, blogs, Twitter accounts and almost everything else you can imagine for maximum exposure, for your church leaders to not have at least an updated and complete bio on your website does not communicate a positive image of your staff.

Updated links to staff blogs, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter accounts.

Visitors today expect to get to know church leaders through social media. If the church leader is not able to do this for him or herself, as is often the case when the leader is a baby-boomer who went to seminary before the days of the personal computer, assign a "web buddy" or editor, or co-writer to update or create this content. This is a wonderful expression of how we can serve and support one another in the church. It is important to be honest about this. This is also a good time to drop links if the staff person isn't using them.

Church Facebook pages should be more than photo albums

Yes, it's very nice to have pictures of your latest fun event, but if you don't also have some commentary about what's going on, why you do what you do, and have comments that make it clear the material is for people outside the church, your church Facebook page will look like an insider photo album only for the people already attending. In the same way that you need captions for pictures for them to make sense to anyone besides the person who takes them, you need captions on the Facebook images you share.

Your website also needs some house-keeping and following are some suggestions for that:

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Summer ministry opportunities—ideas from many churches

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Summer outreach
There are so many fun festivals your church can do to reach out to your community. Pick one from this article and do it!

Communicating with scores of ministry assistants throughout the country, I’ve learned many churches are using the exceptional evangelism and fellowship opportunities of the season to full advantage. Said one, “God’s work through our church does not take a sabbatical when it gets hot out.”

Some of their summertime activities:

  • Mega yard sale. All church members contribute; the community is invited; church music provided; free lemonade; brochures about church activities distributed; members mingle.
  • Day trips for parents and kids. Church bus used to take group to art museum, zoo, and other local attractions. On the ride: skits and sing-alongs.
  • A huge sprinkler party on church grounds each Saturday. Teens hand out flyers throughout the close neighborhoods—along with free snow cones—on the Wednesdays before.
  • Dads and kids cook out and camp out at a local park. Extra “Dads” are provided for kids whose parent is not available. Our church member Dads circulate and make sure everyone feels connected.
  • Outdoor tournaments. Softball, volleyball, horse-shoes, basketball, bocce—all can be organized as tournaments. Members serve as coaches, making sure everyone gets an opportunity to compete.
  • more......

[Read more...]