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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Encouraging Quotes and Pins for Church Communicators

29 August, 2016 By Yvon Prehn Leave a Comment

Church Com images set
This is one of the PINS and images set for church communicators--enjoy!

Something very different in this post today—graphics to encourage you! I did this because sometimes I feel like an Old Testament prophet of doom on this website—warning church communicators to Do this! Do that! And whatever you do, don't ever do this because what you do is SOOOOO important. And it all is very important because we've been entrusted with the words of eternal life and the eternal destinies of people. However, in the midst of all the heavy responsibility is great JOY! What incredible work we've been given to do!

The Devotion for today is incredibly important for you to read and let sink in because all of you doing work in church communications truly are the GREAT ONES in the Kingdom of God. I decided to do a Pinterest size graphic for that and share it on my Pinterest Boards (https://www.pinterest.com/yvonprehn/quotes-for-church-communicators/) which I've just started updating again. Then I decided to do that for all the Devotions for this year and share the graphics with you. Below are all the images and then below that is a link where Effective Church Communication Members can download the graphic files to use in any way they want.

Below you can download all the graphics to use however you want in any communication or website to encourage church communicators or others in ministry.

CLICK HERE:  Pinterest quotes, set #1 to download the ZIP file of Images

 

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Filed Under: Clipart, Graphics, Images Tagged With: encouraging quotes for church communicators, Free images for Church Communicators, PINS for church communicators

How to legally download images from Google and Bing

13 January, 2015 By Yvon Prehn 13 Comments

How to legally download images legally
It only takes a few seconds to make certain that the images you are downloading are legal--this video shows you how

I imagine it happens to almost everyone who has worked on church communications. You really need an image for the project you are working on. You don't have money to buy one. You go to Google or Bing, do an image search and grab the first image that looks good.

And then later you feel guilty because you feel you may have stolen an image that wasn't legally right for you to use.

What to do? Check out the video below for super quick and easy ways to make sure you only snag legal images.

I can't believe I just learned this, but there is a very simple solution which this brief video will show you:

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Filed Under: Clipart, Graphics, Images Tagged With: download images legally, free images, how to download church images legally

Free Image and media resources for church communicators

5 November, 2014 By Yvon Prehn Leave a Comment

Clip art is a key element to your seasonal masterpieces--here are lots of free resources
Images are a key element to your seasonal masterpieces--here are lots of free resources

In the coming months you'll be creating lots of communications for ministry and outreach over the holidays. As you do this, the following list of resources will help you with new images, photos, and an incredible way to create videos. All of the resources below have free sections, however, be careful because many of them also offer images for sale to finance their sites.

I didn't include standard, Christian sites because most of you already know about these and many of the images we use today are not your standard old-fashioned clip art images, but thematic photos.  I did include some basic clip art resources, but also a number of very contemporary photo sites.

I also included some smaller, new sites—if you like the material on these, be sure to download it ASAP—some of these sites don't last long, but have great images available while they do. Also, download the images before the site owners realize how much work it is to keep up the site and start charging for it, as I've seen happen on some sites.

TIPS on image collecting and organizing images and media

  • It's never too early to start collecting and organizing images for the upcoming holidays (and after Christmas it seems like Easter comes quite quickly). Here are a few tips to help you keep from getting overwhelmed.
  • Create folders on your computer for the different holidays and the images you'll save.
  • After some preliminary searching, decide on a theme, a look, perhaps even a color scheme for your upcoming holiday.
  • Use down-time to look for images ahead of time so you'll have them when you get ready to put your communication projects together. Doing this ahead of time makes actual production go much more smoothly.
  • If you have a laptop at home (this is what I do), browse through these resources while watching TV. There are thousands of images available today and it can take many hours to go through them to find just the right ones at the right price (free) for ministry projects. When I do this, I don't feel so guilty for watching TV.

Photos & other media

In many communications and on websites today the trend is towards using photos and not clip art (though there are times in church communications when clip art is still incredibly useful). Many church communicators think they need to buy photos, but the sites below have some excellent ones and all the photos are free and copyright free to use.

http://pixabay.com/  This site has an incredible collection of high quality photos that are all free to use under Creative Commons license. This site also includes simple vector graphics and illustrations. It has a useful search box that you can also sort your searches for photos, vector, or illustrations only.

http://www.imcreator.com/free/ Fairly new site, contemporary, high quality images. Many require attribution, but are free. Also has icons, website templates.

http://picjumbo.com/ very nice, contemporary photos, many of them free. Has a good listing of categories for searching. Not a huge site, but useful for up-to-date subject matter.

http://publicdomainarchive.com/  Interesting collection of images—some taken by the site owners others from public domain resources. Some are free, some for a membership fee. Worth checking back often as they post new images each week. They don't have a good search function.

http://nos.twnsnd.co/ New Old Stock—advertises itself as lots of uploaded old images or images in the public domain. Made me feel really old to see the space and astronaut images included.  No search function; and not particularly holiday related, but some great images and fun to scroll through.

http://magdeleine.co/browse/ "handpicked, free photos for your inspiration" very nice, contemporary photos, free to use attribution required. One nice feature they have is a search tool that you can search based on colors.

CLIPART and Image Resources

http://www.clker.com/ simple clip art images for the holidays, with an emphasis on very simple images, but often that is exactly what you need.  You have to scroll past some ads, but thousands of images here. One other useful feature is when you click on an image, they include a number of similar ones, e.g. search for "Santa" and on the download page are dozens of other Santa images in many different styles.

The program also has a built-in simple editing program, SVGEdit.  For example if you download a line drawing of Santa, you can open up the program and with one click change the color of the image to a red, instead of black line drawing.

http://thepatternlibrary.com/ Fascinating collection of patterns—not a lot of them, but definitely worth looking at and downloading—you can do so much with them later.

Videos

www.animoto.com  I LOVE this program! It allows you to create incredible videos (think alternative announcements, etc.) by simply adding images and captions, hitting a button and then the program turns them into great videos with amazing graphics and transitions. When you first look at the program you may wonder why it is listed as "free" but scroll down to the bottom of the page and you'll see a section for "non-profits" where you church can get a free membership.

I know there are many other sites, PLEASE send me the ones you like and I'll do another collection of them, email to: yvon@effectivechurchcom.com.

 

 

 

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Filed Under: Clipart, Seasonal Tagged With: free clipart, free images, free images for churches, free seasonal images

How to get any color from the web into MS Publisher

13 January, 2014 By Yvon Prehn Leave a Comment

How to get any color from the web into MS Publisher
The skills in this brief video will help you make exact color matches in your communications.

This video shows you how to solve the challenging problem of when you see a color that you like on the web and want to use it--but how do you get that color into MS Publisher so you can use it? Not a similar color, but the exact same color--how do you do it?

This short, but incredibly helpful video will show you how to download a tool that will identify the color and then will give you the RGB values you can put into MS Publisher to make the color available to you. Don't worry if you don't know what I just meant about "putting RGB values into MS Publisher"--the video shows you how to do that also.

The video is one of our "FREE for 48 hrs" videos and after that it will only be available to Effective Church Communication Members.

Below the video are the step-by-step instructions for what was shown in the video.

How to get any color from the web into MS Publisher

•Process for Firefox Browser
•Go to http://colorzilla.com
•Download
•It will automatically go into the tools in Firefox
•Open a web page
•Click on Tools—Colorzilla
•The RGB numbers will appear
•Copy and put them into MS Publisher and use as you want!

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Filed Under: Clipart, Design, Graphics, Images Tagged With: color matching, color picker, MS Publisher color tips

Colors of the year for 2014 and inspiration on to use them

8 January, 2014 By Yvon Prehn Leave a Comment

Pantone's color of the year 2014
Pantone's color of the year 2014 is Radient Orchid-- a great accent color for church communications.

Using the colors of the year isn't essential, but learning about them is fun and trying them can add a contemporary and timely feel to your communications. Below is a short video tour of the colors of the year from 3 organizations, plus some ideas for how to use them.

As you'll see the various organizations have different opinions on what the most important color is and two of them (you'll see which ones when you watch the video) would work well as accent colors in church communications. For instructions on how to get the colors into MS Publisher, check out this video: How to get any color from the webs into MS Publisher. 

Below the video is a list of direct links for all the resources in the video.

Following are the live links to all of the sites shown in the video above.

This list is for Effective Church Communication Members Only, for information on how to become one, CLICK HERE.
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Links about Pantone's Color of the Year

http://www.houzz.com/ideabooks/20854181/list/Best-Ways-to-Use-Radiant-Orchid--Pantone-s-Color-of-2014

http://www.pantone.com/pages/index.aspx?pg=21131

Benjamin Moore Color of the year:

http://www.houzz.com/ideabooks/21212187?utm_source=Houzz&utm_campaign=u415&utm_medium=email&utm_content=gallery4

SHERWIN Williams color of the year

http://www.houzz.com/ideabooks/21108135

Target Colors

http://www.target.com/c/bath-towels-home/-/N-5xtv9#?lnk=gnav_home_6_3&intc=829636|null

http://www.target.com/p/botanic-blush-collection/-/A-15033149#CollectionItems

Other fun new color inspirations

http://www.zazzle.com/purple_poppy_green_zizzag_chevron_birthday_cards-137997733558768048

http://patternbank.com/autumn-winter-2014-15-print-trend-report-part-1-pdf-download/

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Filed Under: Clipart Tagged With: color accents, Color of the Year 2014, Color theory

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