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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My personal motivation for Backpack ministry—my memories and prayers about crayons and little kids in need

6 July, 2018 By Yvon Prehn Leave a Comment

Contribute to back to school ministries.
Few things were more exciting to me as a child than a new box of crayons--and we have opportunities to share that joy with needy kids.

Remember the smell when you opened a new box of crayons? Waxy and warm with a bit of paper mixed in.

Remember what it was like to see all those new crayons? Sometimes there were new colors. The metallic crayons seemed magical. I almost hated to use them, to turn the neat, sharp points into smushy stubs.  But there was always another year to look forward to, another start of school and a new box of crayons.

Crayons were just the start—pencils, notebooks with lines unfilled, sometimes a new lunch box.  Back-to-school was my favorite time of year. I hated summer. I didn't particularly like to play kid's games, especially outside. I wanted to be left alone to read.

We moved every year (my father was in the military and that's what they did then) and the first place I would try to find in any house was some quiet corner to read. My very favorite was at the end of a long closet where there was a window. In front of it were some packing boxes just big enough and at just the right height for an 11-year-old girl to with a book and read and look out the window. Clothes were in front of the boxes, effectively shielding me from the outside world. Still, my mother would find me and make me go out and play. I was obedient, but I didn't like it. [Read more...]

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Filed Under: Back-to-School, Children's ministry, Skills Tagged With: backpack ministry, Children's ministry, church communication, Communications, yvon prehn

How to train churchcom ministry volunteers

22 April, 2018 By Yvon Prehn 2 Comments

church communication volunteers
Recruiting volunteers is just the first step in assembling a team to help with the church communication ministry and here you'll learn what else is important.

Few church offices have enough time or people to get done all the communications they know they need to do to adequately inform and instruct their congregation and to get them involved in ministry activities that will help them grow to Christian maturity. Rather than complain or cut back on communications, one solution is to train a team of volunteers to help. That suggestion can be terrifying, but in what follows I’ll share strategy and tools that make it possible. Not easy, but possible.

First divide your communication ministry into two levels

Before we discuss the specifics of training tools it’s important to divide your church communication ministry into two levels because one of the greatest concerns churches have is that volunteers won’t do an acceptable job or won’t meet the overall standards expected by the church.

This is a valid concern, but it can be solved by dividing your communication ministry into:

#1 The PR Level

#2 The Production Level

The PR Level is the top level that encompasses the communications that define the church: the website, the church bulletin, the overall newsletter. This level has the strictest guidelines in quality and because of that, the work done by church staff.

The Production Level varies in communications, but it has items such as postcards, flyers, misc. communications from individual ministries within the church. This level can vary in quality (be realistic, you don’t need the same care for the postcard reminding the men’s ministry of a workday as you do the Sunday morning bulletin. There are lots of communications that are important to get people involved in ministries, that remind, educate, and encourage, and these are ideal projects for volunteers.

Prepare Guidelines and Templates

Two more things need to be in place before you launch your training program. [Read more...]

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Filed Under: Planning and Managing, Strategy #4: Divide your communication team into two production levels—save your sanity, expand the ministry Tagged With: how to train church communication volunteers, volunteer training materials, volunteers in church communications

Why church communicators need to be on the church leadership team

14 March, 2018 By Yvon Prehn Leave a Comment

Teamwork is needed in church communications
God put us in a body for a reason and church communicators and leadership need each other to fulfill the goals of the church.

Many of you may now be part of the leadership team of the church, but for those who may not be and for those who are timid in their job, following are some reasons why it is important you are part of this team.

Church Communications are what make ministry reality in the lives of the congregation and community

The church leadership team can come up with a great plan to get everyone in the church into small groups. They can come up with a fantastic slogan, a great curriculum, all the members of the leadership team may be personally committed to small group interaction for discipleship growth.

How does that become real in the lives of the members of the congregation?

It becomes real through communications—through the lists of small groups, the website entries, the brochures, the maps that tell people how to get to where they need to go, the social media and church apps that remind and report.

In many ways church communicators are entrusted with continuing the reality of the verse, "and the Word was made flesh and made his dwelling among us" (Jn. 1:14) by taking the ministries of the church and turning them into the tangible communications that enable the congregation and community to become part of the ministries of the church.

Church Communicators can give strategic advice to church leadership teams

One of my goals in Effective Church Communications is to give you the BIG picture of church communications and to help you see how vital they are in helping your church fully fulfill the Great

Commission. I've developed the Five Steps of Effective Church Communications and Marketing to help church communicators and in turn their churches see how all the communications we do should be going towards the goal of fully fulfilling the Great Commission, which means to help people either come to know Jesus as Savior or grow to maturity in Him.

Individual communications might be tiny steps in the overall mission of the church and in being obedient to the Great Commission, but church communicators can help the staff see that you aren't just "creating another Sunday bulletin" but that you are creating an essential link that will help INFORM and INCLUDE people in the church.

Please take time to CLICK HERE to go to an article that explains the FIVE STEPS in more detail and help your church staff understand the importance of each communication piece.

Church Communicators can provide a reality check

In a previous article, It may not be your fault that nobody shows up for a ministry event that you advertised heavily, I talked about the reasons why no matter how great your communication piece might be in terms of writing, design, frequency, and multi-media outreach, people simply might not respond.

The reasons they don't are often because of decisions by the leadership team. The purpose in saying that isn't to assign blame or point fingers, but to encourage church leadership to have church communicators as part of the decision-making team about what and how to promote events to the congregation.

We all have blind spots, we all see things other don't and by expanding the spiritual gifts and viewpoints involved in making decisions about church communications, we will have fewer failures that could have been avoided by an additional viewpoint.

Also, church communicators can provide reality checks on scheduling and costs of communication ideas. The church leadership team may come back from a church conference with a great idea of what worked in a church of 10,000 and want the home church of 150 people to implement it immediately. That rarely works and the church communicators often are the ones who are realistic about what the church can and can't do AND can often provide ideas and options for how the great idea might be adapted or modified for their church.

In scheduling church communicators can help the staff understand that if they want a devotional booklet written, designed, laid out, and printed before Lent or Advent, that the church communication team needs more than a week to work on it. It's not fair for church staffs to make major decisions involving big communication projects or holiday outreach campaigns without having input from church communicators from the start.

It's a biblical model

We are called into a body and with the Lord as leader, when church staff and church communicators can work together respectfully and productively the Lord is honored and the church will be more successful in reaching the world and growing disciples in the church.

 

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Filed Under: Church Communication Leadership, Church Communication Management Tagged With: church communication teams, church leadership and church communications, teamwork in church communications

Print and Digital—More Powerful Together! videos and studies to show you why

10 October, 2017 By Yvon Prehn Leave a Comment

Print and Digital E-book, more powerful together! by Yvon Prehn
If your want people to respond to your communications, use every tool you can!

People are busy, stressed, and time-starved—what is the best way to reach them? Many voices would answer "SOCIAL MEDIA!"

But if that is the answer, why aren't our churches filled and every event well-attended, when social media costs almost nothing to produce and we can push it out to the world?

Part of the problem could be that we have confused the popularity of social media with effectiveness (source for this idea in the video below). We assume social media is the way most people communicate today, and though that idea is wildly incorrect for many congregations, even among those who do live glued to a Twitter feed, don't necessarily take action on what they see on social media.

What follows isn't about bashing social media

Far from it--keep tweeting, Facebooking, Pinning and Instagramming, as the Apostle Paul said, "we need to become all things to all people to win some" (1 Cor 9:22).

But consider re-introducing PRINT into a more significant place in your church communication mix. As you'll see a number of communication and marketing studies show this is the most effective way to get an audience to respond to your message.

Below are 2 videos--one a more lengthy teaching one about the effectiveness of combining print and digital for any non-profit group and the second one is a series of slides with thought provoking quotes and commentary.

Below each of them are handouts of the presentation.

Below both is PDF e-book that has the quotes, studies listed and more.

Why here, now and free to all?

As I've been working on Fall and Christmas communications I've realized that unless you understand some of the key points in the material that follows your fall outreach will not be as successful as it could or should be.

Either one of the videos would make an excellent discussion topic for your next staff meeting because communication ministry is the foundation of the success of many ministries in the church and it is far more difficult today than it was in the past when you only needed to worry about how many times you printed an announcement in the bulletin.

I'm working on a longer class and book on this topic, but I felt it was too important not to get out now what I did have ready.


CLICK THE FOLLOWING LINK TO DOWNLOAD THE PDF of NOTES for the video above: Print & Digital More Powerful Together HANDOUTS


CLICK THE FOLLOWING LINK TO DOWNLOAD THE PDF of NOTES for the video above: Slide Show of Print and Digital Quotes, HANDOUTS

Print and Digital E-book, more powerful together! by Yvon Prehn
Click on the image to download a copy of this e-book.

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Filed Under: Books for Church Communicators, Church Communication Leadership, Church Postcards, Church Websites, Evangelism & Outreach, Social Media, Strategy, Strategy #3: Create multi-channel communications—to reach and serve every audience, Videos, Yvon Prehn books Tagged With: Print and digital, social media. effectiveness in church communications

Raise money for your church communications program with designated giving

24 August, 2017 By Yvon Prehn Leave a Comment

Designated giving advice
It can be a confusing puzzle to raise money for your communication ministry. Designated giving might be an answer.

A continuous challenge for any church communication ministry is having enough money for equipment, software, and training needed to run a truly effective church communications ministry. Though one of the most important ministries in the church and the one on which the success of most other ministries depend, it often isn't a priority when it comes time to set the overall church budget.

But new equipment and training is needed—so what to do?

Designated giving may be the answer

Designated giving is, in short, where church members can decide they want to give money (above their regular tithe of course) for a special project.  This is a greatly simplified explanation and later I'll give you a link to a longer, more complete one, but this is enough for the foundational idea that designated gifts are definitely an area worth pursuing. [Read more...]

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Filed Under: Church Communication Leadership, Church Communication Management Tagged With: Designated giving advice, raising funds for a communication ministry

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