Effective Church Communications

The Effective Church Communication ministry from Yvon Prehn provides inspiration, training, and resources to help your church create communications that fully fulfill the Great Commission. It focuses on Bible-based and timeless principles and strategies that work no matter what digital or print channel you use to create your communications. The site has links to many free TEMPLATES and other resources, plus links to free TRAINING VIDEOS, and a RESOURCE LIBRARY for church communicators. 

The Effective Church Communication ministry from Yvon Prehn provides inspiration, training, and resources to help your church create communications that fully fulfill the Great Commission. It focuses on Bible-based and timeless principles and strategies that work no matter what digital or print channel you use to create your communications. The site has links to many free TEMPLATES and other resources, plus links to free TRAINING VIDEOS, and a RESOURCE LIBRARY for church communicators.
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Changes in image usage—the “free” sites may not be what they seem and what you need to do about it

30 May, 2020 By Yvon Prehn Leave a Comment

What to do when disappointed with image usage rules
What it feels like when you are excited about images you think you can use and then you find out the rules changed and you can't. What do about it is what this article is about.

Sometimes it is hard to do the right thing, but as disciples of Jesus, we must try.

As I’ve been working on getting lots of material ready for launching the Bibleverse collection of related ministries some guidelines have come to my attention about the “free images” on sites such as Canva, PicMonkey, and Snappa, where you can use the images they have, plus the free images sites themselves such as Unsplash, Pixabay, Pexels, and that many of us (me included) use to create social media and templates. What follows does not apply to sites in which you pay for a membership. But since many churches and organizations make use of free sites, it's important you understand the changing rules.

The take-away conclusions from my research and limitations to the use of "free" images

I won’t bore you with listing the number of articles I’ve read recently, but following is the distilled research and application takeaways both for how it applies to you as a church and how you use things and for the Effective Church Communications ministry.

Overall, as a church creating communications that you freely give to church members and that are primarily shared within your church, you have much more latitude than I do in Effective Church Communications. What I create falls into the “commercial” area and the usage guidelines for that are much more limiting than your non-commercial uses in the church. I have changed many things I charged for in the past to free when I wasn't sure exactly of what drifted into the commercial area.

I'll summarize my bottom-line recommendations shortly and then give you details from various sites.

However, and this is a big, However—if your church does something as seemingly innocent as selling a t-shirt for camp, or a cookbook as a fundraiser or selling anything else, you are now in the commercial category also. Sadly, there are some professional groups (Getty Images has a reputation in this area) that love to go after churches if they feel their image rights are violated. For these reasons, in addition to keeping you informed as to why I do what I do for you, you need to be as careful as possible in your communication creations and in the media you use for them. [Read more...]

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Filed Under: Blog, Free image sites, Graphics, Images, Image editing, Social Media Tagged With: copyright rules for churches, free church sites, Free image sites, free image use for churches, Image usage rules

How to change the colors of artwork in Canva

10 February, 2020 By Yvon Prehn Leave a Comment

Canva is an incredible program and though I've used it for years, I continuously discover new things about it. In this short video, I'll share how to change not only big blocks of color (which is obvious and easy) but how to change even small parts of images in the program. Lots of great options for your designs—check it out!

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Filed Under: Canva, Design, Graphics, Images, Misc. Advice and Articles Tagged With: changing colors of images in Canva, Changing template colors in Canva, How to modify images in Canva

Canva’s remove background tool–absolutely WONDERFUL!

9 February, 2020 By Yvon Prehn Leave a Comment

This is the greatest tool ever to help in creating church communications! If you have ever tried to remove background around an image, you know how difficult it can be.

With Canva it is almost magically easy and then you can export the image to use in any program you want.

I had heard about the tool, but I didn't get around to using it until one Sunday morning my pastor (now sort of retired, but still preaching at times) HAD to have a flyer for a service he was doing later that afternoon. The video below shows how Canva came to the rescue to help me create what I needed.

 

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Filed Under: Canva, Misc. Advice and Articles Tagged With: How to use Canva, How to use Canva remove background tool, How to use Canva to create a ministry flyer

Snappa: The easiest way to create social media verses

9 January, 2019 By Yvon Prehn Leave a Comment

Share your faith Snappa graphic
What an encouragement something like this can be when it comes across our social media. Snappa is a super easy way to create them.

Images with verses on them that fill our screens and phones can be wonderful moments of encouragement and refreshment. If we want to create them to share with others, Snappa is a fantastic program to use because it is so easy to create them. Though there are many programs you can use to do this, I like Snappa because it has more flexibility in placement of images and texts.

In addition, you can very quickly resize images in Snappa to fit any social media or print graphics format you want. Following is a short video I did to show how easy this is to do.

One quick reminder, Effective Church Communications does not take any affiliate advertising—I'm telling you about this because I personally love and use it all the time.

More videos about Snappa, click on the link below the title

A video comparison of PicMonkey, Canva, and Snappa
https://wp.me/pDky9-8il

Snappa: Review and How-tos of a GREAT program to create social media graphics
https://wp.me/pDky9-8hw

Snappa: How to create a side-bar ad
https://wp.me/pDky9-8mB

 

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Filed Under: Design, Graphics, Images Tagged With: how to use Snappa, Snappa, Social media creation with Snappa

Snappa: Super quick and easy, how to create a side-bar ad with it

9 January, 2019 By Yvon Prehn Leave a Comment

Side bar ad example--read through the Bible Chronologically
This and every other sidebar ad you see on this site was created very quickly and easily in Snappa. The video here shows you how to do it.

Snappa has removed a huge source of frustration for me because I never seem to manage my creative time as well as I start the day hoping I will. I'll work hard on project (like the one for this sidebar ad on Reading through the Bible in Chronological Order), and after the work is done on the project I realize I need to create a graphic to tell people about what I'm doing.

I panic. But then I remember I have Snappa, so I take a deep breath and usually less than 5 minutes later I have a graphic—polished, done, and ready-to-use.

Below the short video shows you how to do it.

I can't recommend Snappa enough—even if you are better at time management than I am, it's a super quick and easy way to create any kind of digital graphic you need.

 

For more videos on Snappa, click on the links that follow the title:

A video comparison of PicMonkey, Canva, and Snappa
https://wp.me/pDky9-8il

Snappa: Review and How-tos of a GREAT program to create social media graphics
https://wp.me/pDky9-8hw

Snappa: The easiest way to create social media verses
https://wp.me/pDky9-8mw

 

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Filed Under: Design, Graphics, Images Tagged With: how to use Snappa, side bar graphics with Snappa, Snappa

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