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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Details Matter—Looking Good in Print

10 August, 2014 By grhilligoss@gmail.com Leave a Comment

Details matter in church communications
the little things matter when we want to communicate in a way that honors our Lord.

When it comes to looking good in print, small details make a big difference.

As one ministry assistant pointed out, “Members use word processing at home now, so they pay more attention to our printed materials and notice how we put things  on the page. I really want to feel secure about how the bulletin and our newsletter look.”

One effective way to achieve that security is to develop an office style book. Start by choosing a reference to use as an authority. My personal preference is The Gregg Reference Manual, but there are others equally reliable. As questions regarding usage occur in your writing—newsletters, bulletins, correspondence, reports—look up answers in your reference and mark them for future use or make a list you can refer to easily.

The following brief guidelines from Gregg can get you started. In your own style book you can add examples and expand topics you use most.

• Ages
Express ages in numerals (including 1 through 10) when they are used as significant statistics. Spell out ages in nontechnical references and in formal writing.

• Clock time
Always use figures with a.m or p.m. If you have the option (and you likely do) use the small capitals A.M. and P.M. instead of lowercase letters. No internal spaces are used in either case. Avoid the use of all capital letters.

For time “on the hour,” zeros are not needed to denote minutes unless you want to emphasize the precise hour. In lists, however, when some entries are given in hours and minutes, add a colon and two zeros to exact hours to maintain a uniform appearance. Line up the colons to keep the lists neat and clean.

• Dates
Only when the day precedes the month or stands alone, express it in either ordinal figures (1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th) or in ordinal words (the first, the twentieth). The default on some word processing programs superscripts ordinal suffixes (1st). For a more professional look, undo this feature and put ordinals, when you must use them, on the baseline (1st).

In most writing though, the day follows the month. In these cases, use a cardinal figure (1, 2, 3) to express it: on May 6. Do not use the form May 6th or May sixth, even though those versions reflect the way the date would sound when spoken.

• Percentages
In body text express percentages in figures, leave one space, and spell out the word percent: 20 percent. The % symbol may be used in charts and graphs, on business forms, and in statistical material.

• Sermon and hymn titles
Quotation marks are generally used around shorter works: television shows, poems, short stories, sermons, hymns, essays. Longer works are italicized: newspapers, books, magazines, movies, television series.

• Telephone numbers
The use of parentheses to enclose the area code tends to make publications look dated: (717)555-1111. The same can be said for the diagonal: 717/555-1111. An updated style uses periods to separate the elements:717.555.1111. This makes phone numbers consistent with the dot addresses used in website and email addresses.

Using these six guidelines consistently will keep you looking good in print!

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Filed Under: Basic Church Communications Training, Church Communication Management, Columnist Gayle Hilligoss, Contributors, Editing and Proofing, Proofing, Writing Tagged With: details in church communications, grammar in church communications, style guide for church communications

3 reasons why you need to “put the long term ahead of another quick fix” in church communications

19 October, 2012 By Yvon Prehn 2 Comments

Keep eternity in mind as you create your communications
The communications you create in church have eternal consequences.

The advice above to "put the long-term ahead of another quick fix" comes from an editorial in USA Today and, as you might assume, applied to the U.S. economy.

While the merits of that advice, or any other, when it comes to economic policy in any country, can be endlessly debated, the wisdom of that statement when it comes to creating effective church communications is beyond doubt. Following are three reasons why we should consider the long-term effects over quick fixes: [Read more...]

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Filed Under: Basic Church Communications Training, YP Foundational Tagged With: church communication trianing, church communication vision, Church vision, communicate for eternity, why we do church communications

YouTube Playlists–videos organized by topic to help you learn

22 August, 2012 By Yvon Prehn Leave a Comment

With over 130 videos created over 3 years time, it can be difficult to find videos on similar topics in church communications from Yvon Prehn's  Effective Church Communications YouTube channel. To help you focus on whatever it is that you want to learn, I have organized the videos into Playlists that group the similar videos together and that you can watch together.

Some of the current playlists are:

  • MS Publisher Uses, Examples, Templates & Tips

  • How to create websites with WordPress

  • FREE Clip art Image Resources--video reviews

  • How to write for the web

I will continue to organize the videos into topics, please SUBSCRIBE to the YouTube channel and that way you will know when new things are added.

Check out how the Playlists work here:

Videos organized by topic into Playlists at http://www.youtube.com/yvonprehn

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Filed Under: Basic Church Communications Training, Skills, Video, how-to Tagged With: how to videos, videos for church communicators, Yvon Prehn's Youtube

What is difficult about YouTube and what it teaches us about church communication

8 August, 2012 By Yvon Prehn Leave a Comment

YouTube has a lot to teach us about communications
YouTube has a lot to teach us about communications creation.

The popular perception of YouTube is that it is really simple, easy, and anybody can slap up a video. In addition--if it is catchy, funny, or  inspiring enough that the video will go viral and the video creator will gain immediate fame and fortune.

It doesn't work that way.

I've spent a lot of time on YouTube lately trying to understand how it works and how I can make the most of it to equip and inspire church communicators. Part of that has been to study some of the popular producers and to look the advice YouTube gives on realistically how to make a video channel that will have significant impact on the audience you want to reach. My first conclusion is that it is much, much harder and more difficult than I imagined. [Read more...]

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Filed Under: Basic Church Communications Training, Devotions & Challenges for Church Communicators, Evangelism & Outreach, Leading & Managing Tagged With: church communication strategy, Communications, difficulty of church communications, YouTube and church communications

ebook: Back to Basics, writing and design skills for church communicators

23 July, 2012 By Yvon Prehn Leave a Comment

Back to basics cover
This book will teach you the basics of many needed, but often not taught, communication skills in graphics, design, typography, writing, and managing. If you want your church communications to look more professional, you need this book. Available in print and ebook formats.

Most people who work on communication creation in churches have no training in design, layout, typography, and many related skills they need to do a good job. Training material is not easy to find because many of the materials available on communication design and related areas, require the use of expensive, advanced software and teach a secular, image-heavy approach that doesn't always fit the needs of the church audience.

This book provides basic training that can help every church communicator, even those with no previous graphic arts training create, write for, and manage a church communication ministry. This book is not a how-to on a particular software, but about the basic design and communication principles that form the foundation of effective communication creation.

This book is a scanned reprint of Yvon Prehn's earlier book, How to use your computer to create Better Bulletins, Newsletters, and More! All the examples in the book are from church communications and the advice is practical and Bible-inspired.

To be honest, the quality of the scans in the book isn't the greatest, but I felt the content was worth it to make this book available to you.

To buy a paperback version of the book on Amazon.com, CLICK HERE.

If you'd like the book in e-book, PDF format CLICK HERE

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Filed Under: Basic Church Communications Training, Church Bulletins, Clipart, Design, Editing and Proofing, Graphics, Images, Photos, Planning and Managing, Proofing, Writing Tagged With: basic church communication skills, basic church communications, basic design skills, basic writing skills, church publicaiton basics, design basics, writing basics

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