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.

Can your congregation read your newsletter on their mobile phone?

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Make your newsletter mobile phone compatible.
We rely on our mobile phones for so much of our communications today--be sure your website works on them.

You may have noticed that this newsletter came in a new format –and this was much more than a simple design decision. It was a change from a simple layout using a newsletter template to a text-only format and it was from a non-responsive to a responsive format.

I actually feel pretty dumb it took me so long to do this about this because I firmly believe in the present and growing importance of mobile phone communications.

I'm far from the only one who thinks this. According to a recent article in Litmus.com, a site that tracks email effectiveness:

It’s official: mobile now accounts for the majority of email opens, with a 51% share. That’s an increase of three percentage points since the previous record of 48% from September and October. Desktop opens now make up 31% of opens, while webmail has dipped to 18%.

https://litmus.com/blog/mobile-opens-hit-51-percent-android-claims-number-3-spot

In spite of knowing the importance of mobile and working very hard to make my website compatible with mobile phones and tablets, and making it a responsive site, I forgot all about making one very important part of my communication ministry compatible with mobile phones: my newsletter.

Ways to make a newsletter easier to read on your mobile phone

Below I'll share with you what I'm doing to make the newsletter easy to read on a mobile phone. This includes some of the changes I made before this last week.

  • I decided to have my newsletter be a blog broadcast of the latest articles on my website.  What this means is that the newsletter program I use (AWeber) sends the newsletter out automatically.
  • I use AWeber as my newsletter creator because it does blog broadcasts better than the other programs I tried.
  • AWeber has recently created templates for mobile phone newsletters, but to use them, you have to create your newsletter using them. Here is the article about them: http://www.aweber.com/blog/email-marketing/mobile-responsive-email-templates.htm
  • Because I use the automatic blog broadcast, that doesn't work for me.
  • Currently even the templates for the blog broadcast aren't mobile compatible. This is where I made a mistake—when I switched to the blog broadcast, I tested the blog broadcast template I chose on my computer, not my mobile phone. This week I was reading an article about making sure your newsletters are compatible on your mobile phone and I realized I hadn't tested mine on it.
  • When I did, as they say, "my bad!" –I realized how hard it was to read. The template was not responsive. It was a shrunken version of a computer screen-complatible newsletter. It was hard to read and none of us have time to pinch and move the screen around.
  • I went back to AWeber and after trying other templates and modifying them, I realized that the text-only format was the only one that would work.
  • That was fine with me because on a mobile phone, we don't really need graphics for a quick newsletter skimming of topics that go back to your website for longer articles for the complete article. The purpose of most newsletters is information--not to share great artwork and this format does that well.

If you are reading this on your mobile phone, you see the result. If you don't have a mobile phone--borrow one and check it out.

The bottom line is that making our newsletters easier to read on a mobile phone is simply one more tool to help us better share the messages on our websites and ministries that will help people find Jesus and grow to maturity in Him.

For church newsletters, there are some things you shouldn’t do

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Most of the material on this site tell you what to do; this PDF tells you what NOT to do to create effective newsletters.
Most of the material on this site tell you what to do; this PDF tells you what NOT to do to create effective newsletters.

Newsletters are one of the primary reasons people first started creating communications with their computers.

This article was written primarily for people creating newsletters on paper, but its advice is also useful for newsletters created digitally.

It is so easy to change newsletter format on the computer screen, but the reasons why a lack of consistency is a no-no re as valid for online newsletters as they are for paper ones. This PDF will explains those reasons.

The additional no-no of not printing on colors is even more important online. Having a colored or worse yet, patterned background for an online newsletter is a reader's nightmare.

After reviewing a website with a very hard-to-read background of faded squiggly lines running through a tan and white background, I asked the creator of it why his church chose that background.

"Our communication secretary said it looked like parchment and that would be a cool look for a church online newsletter, " he answered.

It wasn't. Bless her heart, I'm sure the church communicator was thinking very creative thoughts and since she also wrote most of the newsletter and laid it out, she understood what it was about and so her focus had turned to making it look interesting. What I'm sure was put in with the best of intentions was a distraction that made the newsletter difficult to read. Paper or screen, nothing beats black print on a white background for clarity.

One associated bit of advice. White text reversed out of a black background is quite popular with some bloggers today. It does look good, but it is harder to read and quite tiring to read at length. Question for those enamored with this look: what is more important, that people think your site looks edgy? Or that they read what you have to say?

If you have short, snappy, pithy, and precise little nuggets, the reverse might work, but don't expect many to read any indepth teaching shared in that way.

To download the PDF and read about the no-nos in more detail, click here or on the image.

note: this PDF is from Yvon Prehn's archives and is the only format of this article available presently. Not the greatest quality to be sure, but shared with the belief that the content is useful.