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.

Don’t hide the real reason why you celebrate Christmas—communicate it!

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Don't forget Jesus is the reason for the season!
Be sure to tell people about Jesus at your Christmas event, don't simply entertain them.

From our archives a useful article as you do your Christmas planning:

Many churches consider the Christmas season a huge success if they have a large turn-out at Christmas events, but sadly, many of them remind me of the line from Macbeth where he describes life as "fully of sound and fury, signifying nothing." That may seem a bit harsh, but it is tragedy to celebrate the birth of the Savior without telling people about Him. Following is a true, but sad story about one such event  and how it could be different…..

Sad, but true story of a city-wide Christmas outreach

As in all the stories I tell on the Effective Church Communication website, this is a true story, but without details, location, people, or church mentioned. I also remind people who because I look at and am passed on stories about communications from churches literally from all around the world (one of our latest members and stories came from a Pastor leading a group of churches in the Australian bush), if you think the story is about you, it probably isn't.

Here is what happened: a church in a large city decided to host a Living Nativity for their community. They were given a large lot with a winding driveway leading up to it in a location near a busy shopping area. Because of generous donations by many members (it was a moderately large, well-off church) they put on an extravaganza. There was a huge turnout every night for the week it was held. And no wonder—they put on quite a show. They had live animals, a full size inn, angel choirs, and leading up the road, Roman soldiers and shepherds in the field. They had 3 shifts of actors in full costumes and make-up. They had cider and cookies for guests as they left.

What was the one thing they didn't have?

[Read more...]

How to offer a fun and functional Church Photo Booth for your members

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Photo Booth ideas for Churches
Photo Booths are no only fun for your church, but are a great outreach tool when the photos are shared.

by Katy Dunigan, Guest Writer

Whether it’s a special holiday service or an average Sunday in September, many families attend church together as a unit—perhaps dressed a little nicer than they do on a regular weekday. This creates a wonderful opportunity to capture a meaningful and fun family photo.

Church staff can use this time as an effective way to collect photos of church members when putting together a church directory or a church photo album, but beyond the practical uses, a photo booth can create a powerful ministry opportunity as well.

How many members will share their family photos on social media pages, perhaps send it as their Christmas card, or place it in their office at work? Maybe many! Each photo’s post or placement opens the door to conversations with peers, colleagues and friends about your church, the member’s faith and family, and Christ’s grace and forgiveness.

We might think of it as just a photo opportunity, but it could very well create a witness opportunity as well!

Thinking about putting together a photo booth at your church? Go for it!

Here are some basic How To Photo Booth Tips and Suggestions to get you started.

Form a Volunteer Team

Photo booths offer a great opportunity to involve several members in a fun and worthwhile project.  Make sure you have these team members to help you:

  • a creative
  • an organizer
  • a photographer
  • a processor

Creative Team Member Tasks

Remind this team member that Photo Booths don’t have to be complicated. They can be as simple as a well-placed chair, some flowers, a pretty window, or maybe an attractive outdoor spot. Simply create a nice setting that lets your members capture a special moment, share an important message, or tell a story.

Organizer Team Member Tasks

In the days or weeks prior to the photo booth event, send out notices (in both print and digital formats) to your members, inviting them to participate! Remind them to come early or stay late for a fun photo opportunity!

In most cases, people want to participate and are just waiting for an invitation. Be sure you are clear about the times the booth will be available, suggestions on what to wear, and if they can bring their own props.

Photographer Team Member Tasks

You have choices on how you want to get the photographs, here are the options this team member should have in place:

  • You might prefer that all photos be taken by a photographer, which is fine to do.
  • Some participants might prefer to take their own photos because selfies create fun and original pictures, but not everyone carries smartphones with good cameras in them.
  • Make sure a volunteer photographer with a camera is ready when needed if you primarily do selfies.

Processor Team Member Tasks

To prevent confusion, be sure to put a process in place. The process needs to communicate:

  • Why you are offering a church photo booth
  • Where the line starts at the photo booth
  • How members can get copies of the photos, if they don’t take selfies.
  • Suggestions for posting the pictures on social media & share where the photo was taken. This is a great way to highlight your church and church community.

Have Fun

Remember, you’re building community among your members and making great memories too, be sure to have fun doing both. All of your volunteers are responsible for ensuring this is a fun event, so encourage them to keep a happy, welcoming, relaxed attitude.

If done correctly, your photo booth will be a big hit and your event a big success.

Make a photo booth available as often as you like. Use those opportunities to update photos in your church member directory, but remember to change the themes to fit the seasons and always remember to keep it functional and fun!

For additional photo booth ideas and information, please visit our Pinterest site:

https://www.pinterest.com/CTRNONLINE/church-directory-photo-booth/

Katy Dunigan is the Marketing Coordinator for onlinechurchdirectory.com and serves on several United Methodist leaderships teams in the Southwest Indiana District.  She is also an active member of the #chsocm community on Twitter and Facebook and is a contributing author for several church communication websites, newsletters and books.

 

How to involve ALL parts of your church in a Season of Inviting

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For your church to be successful with a Season of Inviting, where churches can use all the events of fall or spring as a time to invite people outside the church to the church, requires every part of the church: leadership, communication team,  and the congregation.

Not only is this the most effective way to grow your church through seasonal events, but it is the model we should use on all outreach projects. Jesus did not give his disciples the Great Commission and then qualify it by saying: "The command to be my witness and to reach your world is only for paid pastors and for rich churches with huge PR budgets."

No—outreach is every believer's task and seasonal celebrations are a great way to reach our world. This article will define each group's tasks and then give you some tips for implementation with links on this website that will help you carry out the suggestions. Some of the links go to free articles or how-tos, some are for Effective Church Communication Members only. For information about how to become a member, CLICK HERE.

Church Outreach Success work division

Though everyone should be involved, various parts of your church need to be involved in different ways, meaning in practical terms that the church leadership, communication team, and congregation each have different primary responsibilities. Following is a suggested breakdown of each group's tasks:

Church Leadership

The church leadership decides which events will be celebrated and when. With the communication team, they decide an overall theme and activities not only for the event itself, but how they are going to involve the congregation, follow-up, and evaluate the results. Leadership needs to offer the spiritual guidance and prayer direction for the event. Leadership needs to continuously encourage, motivate, and thank those involved in the event. Leadership needs to decide on the goals for the event and assure accountability for measuring and evaluation to make each event and each year are more effective than the last one.

Technology Application Tips: Go online and search for holiday communication ideas. See what other churches are doing or have done. Email the church if you like something and ask for advice. Effective Church Communications has strategies that other church leaders have found useful at the first link below. The next two are overviews on what you need to do at your church to be prepared for seasonal ministry.

https://www.effectivechurchcom.com/category/seasonal/an-overview-of-seasonal-communication-strategies/

https://www.effectivechurchcom.com/2011/09/look-inward-before-you-reach-outward-make-sure-your-church-is-ready-for-holiday-and-special-event-outreach-guests/

https://www.effectivechurchcom.com/2011/09/how-to-revitalize-your-volunteers-before-seasonal-or-special-event-outreach/

Communications Team

Based on their guidance from the church leadership and their knowledge of the community, the communications team creates print and digital communications for before, during, and after the event that both the church office and the congregation will use. Advertising, website support, PowerPoint, and every social media avenue should be used repeatedly to assure communication saturation. The communications team tracks materials created, sent, frequency, and response to the type and number of communications. During the process, the team continuously prays for wisdom and insight as they create communications for their congregation and for audience receptivity and positive response. Think of ways you can create materials that your congregation can use in their social media. Short videos to link to, images for Facebook and Instagram, suggested Twitter links.

Technology Application Tips: Start early to collect images that you can use for holiday themes. Some of the free images on the sites below are great for seasonal communications and are far more contemporary-looking than what's available through some of the church clip art sites. Some searching and modification will give customized themes for your church for no cost. I search these sites at night while watching TV and work on modifying them--this kind of work takes a lot of time, but you'll get some great results. Following is a great list of resources for artwork.

https://www.effectivechurchcom.com/free-image-and-media-resources-for-church-communicators/

 

Congregation

The congregation should be involved in every step of the process: motivated by the leaders and equipped by the communication team to pray for the events, volunteer to make them happen, invite their unchurched friends, help evaluate and follow-up with visitors. The congregation has the primary responsibility for inviting and bringing unchurched friends to the event, interacting with them at the event, and following up with them afterwards. This process needs to be continuously taught and reinforced, until it becomes part of the DNA of the church. When the congregation looks at seasonal and special event celebrations with anticipation as opportunities to share the joy of the Christian faith with their unchurched friends, you will experience natural church growth in numbers and in your people in spiritual maturity.

Technology Application Tips: Social media is a great tool to use to invite people to church-sponsored seasonal events. Using images, tips, and content provided by the church or your own, create a social media campaign to bring your friends to church. Social media has been the driver of political revolutions around the world—pray that you can use it to change your community for Jesus.

Create specific sections on your blog and social media that support the holiday outreach for your church: Why not do one all about an upcoming holiday with imput from your church and your people. For example you could do a Christmas site where you share traditions and recipes from your congregation. If you put that website on your outreach postcards and invitation cards it would be a wonderful way to involve unchurched people in your church.

What this whole church approach avoids:

In far too many churches season celebrations are events the church leadership puts on for the entertainment of the congregation. This then results in outreach being viewed a commodity purchased, not an ongoing ministry in the church, therefore if the church is not growing it is the pastor's fault or the worship leader's because seasonal celebrations are seen as promotions put on by professionals—congregational involvement is primarily to provide money to make the production possible.

These attitudes and actions are all unbiblical and ultimately unsuccessful if you want to grow your church and people. They are also deeply sad because the congregation does not experience the joy of sharing the gospel and their church and the community does not experience the joy of getting to know your church and Jesus.

For the holidays and special events to be more than traditional church family celebrations, all the church needs to be involved in new and creative ways; we are all to be Jesus' witnesses. The seasonal times of the year are a great way to reach out. We are all responsible if our church is growing or not, let's get busy this holiday season doing just that.

For many more ideas and practical tips on how to use seasonal celebrations as times to reach your community with the gospel message, grow your church in numbers and your people in spiritual maturity go to: https://www.effectivechurchcom.com/category/seasonal/

What to do with the “few hours before sunset” in your church communications

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Challenging card.
We all need encouragement to spend our time wisely--this might help.

We all struggle with how to make the most of our time as church communicators. Every task seems urgent and important and there are never enough hours in the day.

While it is impossible to add more hours to our days, for most of us, we could do a better job at prioritizing our tasks. I know this is something I constantly struggle with. It seems like I'm always working, but I'm not sure I'm always working on what is most important.

This evening while riding the exercise bike and catching up on my Christian reading (multi-tasking that works well for me), I found this quote in the September issue of Christianity Today in an article about missionaries. Amy Carmichael wrote this in 1903:

We shall have all eternity to celebrate the victories, but we have only a few hours before sunset to win them.

For each of us, how we make the most of those few hours to win the battles we need to fight for our Lord and His Kingdom, will be different. But I know for each of us, we need to be reminded not to give in or give up too soon in the battles.

Practical application

I created this postcard-size reminder for you to print out and post.

At the end of the article is a zip file that has a jpeg image of it, the ready-to-print PDB and the original MS Publisher file.

Challenging card.
Click on the card to download a PDF to print out and remind you to make the most of your time.

One way to fight the war

In the past I've encouraged you to take part in Back to Church Sunday. Even if you don't take part in this event, here is a resource that provides materials for you to invite missing members back to church anytime:

Postcards: For Missing Members & how to get people to come back to church

No matter what you do this week or anytime, in your work as a church communicator or in all of life, ask the Lord to help you live so that you can say with the Apostle Paul:

I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. 2 Timothy 4:7

CLICK HERE to download the file, save and click to open.