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; Effective Church Communications can help.

The disappointing results when you jump into church communications without planning and how to change them

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Planning is vital for success
Planning is essential if you want success in your church communications.

We have extraordinary tools available to create church communications and to wow people with our multi-media technology creations. Churches of every size can create can challenge members with video, media-rich websites and colorful print graphics. Dedicated church communication teams work hard to turn church leadership vision into reality. So what happens when we create these great communication pieces, but few people show up or volunteer for our ministry event?

Often the reason we don’t get the results we want is because we rushed to PR communication creation without doing the planning needed to assure that the PR communication we were able to create would result in concrete ministry results. This article shares two true stories of situation like this and follows them with suggested solutions to make certain your ministry goals are accomplished. [Read more...]

VIDEO: Church Communication FORMS: to help you plan, measure, and evaluate communication effectiveness

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This video goes over a set of forms that will help you be more effective in your church communication ministry. It shows you step-by-step how to use them and explains why they are useful for ministry.

Many problems in church communications planning and management can be solved if the church uses forms because forms take opinions about communications and helps you effectively evaluate the validity of your opinions.

For example, if someone says: "The web is the best way to advertise!"  and another person on staff responds, "No, nothing beats bulletin inserts and postcards!" the use of forms puts this discussion into an objective evaluation of what works best.

Below the video are links to the PDFs of the notes for the video presentation and for a PDF of the forms used in the video presentation. Though the video is free for everyone, the notes and forms are only for Effective Church Communication Members. CLICK HERE for ECC Membership information.


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Below are the notes for the presentation as well as reproducible PDFs of the Forms shown

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Click on the image of each form below to go to the PDF file.

PDF for FORMS video cover of handoutsPDF forms cover

Some types tips to make your materials more readable

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A few little changes to how you use type can make a big difference in the readability of your communication as this PDF shows.

Some of the tips below are not what people intially expect. For example, most people think that to put type in a color emphasizes it, but unless the type in color is quite large, colored type is usually harder to read than simple black on white because there is less contrast.

Even though it is very popular today for some blogs to be done all in reversed type (white on a black background), that is always much harder to read. You have to decide—do you want people to read what you have to say or think your site looks really edgy?

What the poster illustrates is how you can use a fancy typeface to catch attention as we did when we did up a flyer to remind kids to donate to a shoe drive, but the actual instructions to the parents are in a plain, clear typeface. This is a good example to follow on the kinds of communications you design for people to put up on the refrigerator to remind them of church events or ministries.

To download the PDF, click here or on the image.

Misc. type tips

Typefaces that look great for an entire publication

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You can save yourself a lot of time and trouble if you don't keep changing typefaces throughout your print publications. You can use a different typeface for your headers and your body text, but you certainly don't have to. Especially type-setting longer printed pieces, using one typeface throughout and varying the weight and style will give you a timeless and professional-looking piece.

Remember, the type itself should always be invisible—you want people to grasp your message—not notice the type that contained it.

Some of the typeface families that work well for this are shown in the PDF below. To download the PDF, click here or on the image below.

Typefaces that look great for an entire publication