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.

Create events that are an “easy ask” for your church members

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how to create "easy-ask" events
Do you make it easy for your church members to ask people to events? This article will show you how.

Question: which is easier for you to invite your unchurched friends and neighbors to? Also which one do you think they are more likely to respond to?

The Sunday morning church service.

or

Summer free movies in the park with free popcorn, lemonade, and frozen yogurt, bounce house and face-painting?

The fairly obvious answer is the second one and that answer is more than hypothetical to me as our church just finished sponsoring the second one of three Fun Free Friday Movie nights this summer.  A professional I do business with attended with his daughter. Though we'd talked about church, he was someone who previously was not interested in attending any church events. But not only did he attend this one, he went out of his way to too thank me and tell me what a great time they had.

As I was sharing his response with one of the leaders at our church, she responded by telling me that one of the reasons they did this is because events like this are such an "easy ask." I'd never heard that term before (probably most of the rest of the world has), but I loved it and wanted to share it with you, along with some related ideas on how your church communication ministry can apply them.

What makes an "easy ask" for a church event?

Here are some characteristics:

  • This is an event that you aren't embarrassed to invite an unchurched friend to attend.
  • There is no cost, no obligation to attend.
  • It is sponsored by your church, but not an obviously churchy event.
  • You have something tangible to remind them of the event. We had postcards/invitation cards with the time, date, location and website link on them. For additional information on how to create invitation cards and how you can use them effectively: https://www.effectivechurchcom.com/2012/10/church-invitation-cards-why-they-work-so-well-how-to-use-them/
  • The reason this last detail is so important is that it isn't easy to ask someone to something if they don't know how to get there, if there is a cost or not, what is involved. Communications are one of the most important details and one many times forgotten--but remember you can have the greatest event in the world, but if you don't have something tangible (postcard, business card, invitation of any kind) to remind people of the details when they remember it at the last minute, they are not likely to attend.

Why schedule easy-ask events?

In our post-Christian world where few people have a felt need to go to church on Sunday morning, easy-ask events are a wonderful bridge to involvement with your church. You can create these events around any special event (free movies, any fun things for kids and families) or around any holiday or seasonal celebration.

To contact people for further interaction and invitations to your church you can capture names and contact information with sign-ups for free drawings (at our summer events, we have a variety of local business gift cards with the big prize give-away of a $200 Target gift card). There is a lot of additional information on follow-up after special events on this website and one of the most useful articles is: Follow-up after a church holiday outreach event: speed dating or relationship building?

Now it's your turn

You can use any holiday, a fun celebration, or any special event in your community as an "easy-ask" event for your church members.

Please share any ideas or events your church has done in the past in the comment section below--let's make it easy for everyone to invite everyone they know to church!

Be proactive, not reactive in your church communications as you look ahead in the New Year

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Plan, measure, evaluate your church communications
As the year begins, take time to plan, measure, evaluate your church communications.

The start of each year is a good time to set goals to make your church communications more effective in growing your church, introducing people to Jesus, and helping them grow into mature disciples. One of the best ways to do that is through a proactive approach to communications.

To understand what proactive communication is, it helps to first look at its opposite—a reactive approach to communications, which is how most churches do their communications. While there is little "wrong" with this approach, it isn't always the most productive.

The characteristics of reactive communications

Last-minute communication production is a key characteristic of reactive communications.This is communication that is created after the event planning is done and the event is about to take place. Because everyone is overworked and often stressed, the details of many events aren't in place until a short time before the event and so the church staff waits until then to begin telling people about it. Unfortunately, by then many people have other plans or won't hear your message. [Read more...]

When the holidays or anytime doesn’t go as expected–tips on how to grow through conflict

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Things don't always go as we want in the church office at Christmas or any other time--here are some tips to help.
Things don't always go as we want in the church office at Christmas or any other time--here are some tips to help.

Ed. note: We all dream of what the holidays should be--everything perfect and peace and love all around. But if we are working at a church, we also know things don't always go as planned. When this happens, Gayle's advice that follows will, as it always does, encourage and equip you to handle the conflict well in your service for the Lord.

Growing involves having experiences—most pleasant, some not. Positive lessons can be learned even by negative encounters. Here is one assistant’s account of how she grew through adversity. [Read more...]

Words or images? What works best to communicate your church message?

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Words or images, what works best to communicate our church message?

Here are some blogs that expand on the topic in the video:

Why words and images need each other–the feedback loop of meaning

We’ve all heard the phrase, "a picture is worth a thousand words"– a phrase which I consider one of the most meaningless and destructive phrases to meaningful communication ever coined. That is because without words, the proper response to that statement is, "which thousand?" [Read more...]

How I created an INFOGRAPHIC with MS Publisher

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Infographics are extremely popular today and though a number of free sites on the web that advertise how "easy" it is to create them, I didn't find them useful for my needs in Church Communications. After many failed attempts and frustration, I turned to MS Publisher and was very pleased with the results. You can see the finished graphic at:

Below is a short video that shows how I created it and below the video the resources mentioned in it.

[Read more...]