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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Details Matter—Looking Good in Print

10 August, 2014 By grhilligoss@gmail.com Leave a Comment

Details matter in church communications
the little things matter when we want to communicate in a way that honors our Lord.

When it comes to looking good in print, small details make a big difference.

As one ministry assistant pointed out, “Members use word processing at home now, so they pay more attention to our printed materials and notice how we put things  on the page. I really want to feel secure about how the bulletin and our newsletter look.”

One effective way to achieve that security is to develop an office style book. Start by choosing a reference to use as an authority. My personal preference is The Gregg Reference Manual, but there are others equally reliable. As questions regarding usage occur in your writing—newsletters, bulletins, correspondence, reports—look up answers in your reference and mark them for future use or make a list you can refer to easily.

The following brief guidelines from Gregg can get you started. In your own style book you can add examples and expand topics you use most.

• Ages
Express ages in numerals (including 1 through 10) when they are used as significant statistics. Spell out ages in nontechnical references and in formal writing.

• Clock time
Always use figures with a.m or p.m. If you have the option (and you likely do) use the small capitals A.M. and P.M. instead of lowercase letters. No internal spaces are used in either case. Avoid the use of all capital letters.

For time “on the hour,” zeros are not needed to denote minutes unless you want to emphasize the precise hour. In lists, however, when some entries are given in hours and minutes, add a colon and two zeros to exact hours to maintain a uniform appearance. Line up the colons to keep the lists neat and clean.

• Dates
Only when the day precedes the month or stands alone, express it in either ordinal figures (1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th) or in ordinal words (the first, the twentieth). The default on some word processing programs superscripts ordinal suffixes (1st). For a more professional look, undo this feature and put ordinals, when you must use them, on the baseline (1st).

In most writing though, the day follows the month. In these cases, use a cardinal figure (1, 2, 3) to express it: on May 6. Do not use the form May 6th or May sixth, even though those versions reflect the way the date would sound when spoken.

• Percentages
In body text express percentages in figures, leave one space, and spell out the word percent: 20 percent. The % symbol may be used in charts and graphs, on business forms, and in statistical material.

• Sermon and hymn titles
Quotation marks are generally used around shorter works: television shows, poems, short stories, sermons, hymns, essays. Longer works are italicized: newspapers, books, magazines, movies, television series.

• Telephone numbers
The use of parentheses to enclose the area code tends to make publications look dated: (717)555-1111. The same can be said for the diagonal: 717/555-1111. An updated style uses periods to separate the elements:717.555.1111. This makes phone numbers consistent with the dot addresses used in website and email addresses.

Using these six guidelines consistently will keep you looking good in print!

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Filed Under: Basic Church Communications Training, Church Communication Management, Columnist Gayle Hilligoss, Contributors, Editing and Proofing, Proofing, Writing Tagged With: details in church communications, grammar in church communications, style guide for church communications

ebook: Back to Basics, writing and design skills for church communicators

23 July, 2012 By Yvon Prehn Leave a Comment

Back to basics cover
This book will teach you the basics of many needed, but often not taught, communication skills in graphics, design, typography, writing, and managing. If you want your church communications to look more professional, you need this book. Available in print and ebook formats.

Most people who work on communication creation in churches have no training in design, layout, typography, and many related skills they need to do a good job. Training material is not easy to find because many of the materials available on communication design and related areas, require the use of expensive, advanced software and teach a secular, image-heavy approach that doesn't always fit the needs of the church audience.

This book provides basic training that can help every church communicator, even those with no previous graphic arts training create, write for, and manage a church communication ministry. This book is not a how-to on a particular software, but about the basic design and communication principles that form the foundation of effective communication creation.

This book is a scanned reprint of Yvon Prehn's earlier book, How to use your computer to create Better Bulletins, Newsletters, and More! All the examples in the book are from church communications and the advice is practical and Bible-inspired.

To be honest, the quality of the scans in the book isn't the greatest, but I felt the content was worth it to make this book available to you.

To buy a paperback version of the book on Amazon.com, CLICK HERE.

If you'd like the book in e-book, PDF format CLICK HERE

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Filed Under: Basic Church Communications Training, Church Bulletins, Clipart, Design, Editing and Proofing, Graphics, Images, Photos, Planning and Managing, Proofing, Writing Tagged With: basic church communication skills, basic church communications, basic design skills, basic writing skills, church publicaiton basics, design basics, writing basics

Do volunteers need to be perfect in their communication skills?

11 June, 2012 By Yvon Prehn 2 Comments

We might know we need to use volunteers in the church communication ministry, we might desperately need their help, but at the same time we might worry that the people who volunteer might not do a good job. Though obviously training and mentoring are important and can ease most of these concerns, we need to be aware of another issue that may be at work: an unrealistic view of the importance of perfection, as we define it, in the church. The following article from our FREE ebook about using volunteers in communication ministry may help. This article would be an excellent one to download, reprint, and use for discussion at a church staff meeting.

Perfection in church communications, inspired by Jesus

Sometimes people don't think they are doing all they can for the Lord, that they aren't excellent or perfect enough in their communications ministry unless what they produce is done in slick, full-color printing, preferably produced by an outside design company, or in the case of a website, one that is professionally programmed.

Sadly, since the standards of design and production are so high, it also often means that no one in the church is considered good enough to create the communications in print or on the website, so an outside, professional firm must be hired to do it or only products purchased from a professional company are used. Or, if done at the church, only a select person or two in the church is good enough to produce the quality needed.

But being expensive and professional, as defined by using the standards of a professional ad agency isn't the only standard of perfection for the followers of Jesus.

If we honestly look at Jesus' life, what sort of standards of perfection did he have?

If we honestly want to follow Him, let's look at three areas where we see his choices in quality and perfection

First, his disciples: the ones he chose who would be trusted to carry out his message were a pretty scruffy group and they didn't get better in three years. Not one of them was a professional religious person.

Second, his meetings: they weren't very organized affairs. There were often little kids running around, not enough food, constant interruptions by sick people—not what anyone would consider a professionally managed event.

Third, his succession plan: when he left his remaining disciples with the task of evangelizing the world, he didn't leave them with a plan even vaguely perfected. The Great Commission could be summed up as "tell people about me and help them grow in the faith." For a perfectionist manager today, those parting words have a tremendous about of wiggle room that would allow wildly divergent attempts to apply it.

It wasn't that Jesus didn't care about excellence, but he obviously had a different standard of perfection than what we might consider communication perfection today.

The true standard of perfection

Though perfection in service is an admirable goal, the primary goal in all ministry areas, communications included, is love. First Corinthians 13 helps us take love out of the realm of theory and make it practical in the challenge of perfection in communication ministry. In 1 Cor. 13, the chapter starts out talking about doing all sorts of things, one might say, with perfection: speaking in the tongues of men and angels, etc. The chapter continues by saying that if all of this is done without love it's just making noise and the chapter ends by saying that the greatest attribute we can have is love.

Love is also what matters the most in our church communications

I see a lot of communications today, in print and online that are perfectly beautiful and that express love in a variety of ways.

Right now I'm looking at a sample from my files of church communications: it is a professionally printed folder, done in gorgeous full color printing and it has 2 DVDs inserted in the folder so visitors can see the worship service and hear the praise band. It also has a coupon for a free coffee from their coffee cart (one of my favorite ways of showing love). It is professional, beautiful, and yet very friendly and non-pretentious. No question this would fit anyone's standards of perfection in a visitor piece.

I'm also looking at another church bulletin sample that is perfect and loving in another way. This one was not produced with a computer. The church is small and very poor. The bulletin, with service information and weekly activities clearly described and listed, was produced on a very old word processor and the clipart hand-pasted on. It was reproduced on a copier that had obviously seen better days. Though she knows the limitations of the equipment, the person who shared it with me also shared that the church secretary who produces it each week wants it to be special for the church and visitors. She carefully prepares and proofs it and after her paste-up job she prints it on colored paper. She then collates it by hand and does a 1/3 of the page offset fold on each piece of paper. Down one side of the cover fold, she hand-cuts (with the scissors you use to cut scrap-booking pages) a fancy edge. She hand-cuts and hand-assembles each one. Her love and care for the congregation and Jesus in this labor-intensive production brought tears to my eyes.

These church publications are very different in surface ways, but at their core and what comes through most loudly is that their creators loved the people they were creating publications for.

Following are a couple of additional observations, commentary and final application notes on how Jesus gives us lessons on perfection in communications:

Observation #1: Jesus always focused on the needs of people in his communication, not on impressing people or showing how great he was.

He could have created a little world in the palm of his hand as a demonstration of his power; he could have had stars fall from the sky to demonstrate his might; he could have healed all the sick in a city with one booming command, but he didn't do any of those things to show his perfect godhood.

He showed us what God was like by meeting needs of his creation. He bailed out an embarrassed groom who ran out of wine at his wedding feast; he made little kids comfortable; he healed a woman humiliated by a chronic disease.

Commentary and application:

Perfection in communications doesn't come from showing people what a big-deal perfect church you are or how you can create communications that are more expensive and fancier than the church down the street.

Jesus idea of a perfect publication, if we follow his plan, would be one that made sure it addressed the needs of people. It would be one that told them why the event would help them, how it would serve them, how their lives would be better because of it. It would give them all the details necessary to attend without having to take an extra step of calling someone or looking it up on the web or jumping from link to link if it was an email. Those details would include the time, location, name of person in charge, directions, child care provisions, and cost would all be there and easily accessible.

One area that I see this "perfection" lacking in so often today is in the area of church websites. I've recently observed a number of websites that were created using professional groups that supplied a fancy, flash-enabled, website with photos of smiling people on the nameplate, great colors and buttons to push to hear sermons. But try to find the details of what or where small groups are meeting or what time to get your kids to a youth group meeting and where it is being held or what the church really believes about anything and it can be an impossible task.

People do not go to church websites to be wowed by flashing graphics and bright colors or cheesy pictures of ethnically-diverse, grinning people, they go to have needs met. If they can't get those needs met quickly and easily, your website is far from perfect no matter how slick the home page is.

Observation #2: Jesus focused on potential perfection.

When Jesus called Peter, he was not anything like the Rock he would become. He was more of an irritating pebble in Jesus' journeys.

But every time Jesus called him, "Peter", Simon had a vision of what he would become. I imagine each time he heard that, he stood up a little straighter, perhaps determined to follow Jesus more closely. Eventually, he became the leader and pastor, the Rock, Jesus knew he would be.

Commentary and application

Your volunteers and staff members doing ministry publications seldom come into that job with any training at all. They are like Simon, far from, but growing into a Peter.

They are often far from perfect in communication knowledge about design ideas or execution. Focus on encouraging, equipping, and providing opportunities. Love them lots. Give them time to try things and to grow up in their skills. Provide training and tools and they will often amaze you at what they produce. Never pre-judge someone based on age either as being too young or too old to learn any communication skill—with interest and proper training I have often seen church leaders astounded at what their own people were capable of.

Regarding training, I was recently talking to a lady whose church had spent several thousand dollars (a typical amount) to have their website professionally designed. In spite of the money spent, they were having all sorts of problems getting their church content to fit into the design and the costs kept mounting with each modification they asked for.

Knowing there were other options for getting this done (such as doing it yourself with WordPress, my strong recommendation), I asked her, "How do you think you could have done if the money spent on this company had been used to train you and give you time to implement what you learned?"

She just sighed.

This situation is repeated far too often and it shouldn't be. Your people have tremendous potential and with time, money and training they will not only accomplish great things for the church, but you will have participated in growing them in skills and service. To invest money and time in your people instead of a quick, "professional" solution may take more time, but the results will be much more lasting.

Observation #3: Jesus protected and encouraged his people

"Fear not!" "Be of good cheer!" Reminding his followers that the hairs on their heads were numbered—all of these and many more were the protecting and encouraging words Jesus continuously shared with his disciples. He reminded them he was their shepherd, vine, bread of life.

Commentary and application

Doing church communication work can be scary and discouraging. Complement your church communicators for every step of learning; encourage them to try new things and support a less-than-perfect effort if done with enthusiasm.

  • Take extra care to shield them from negative and nasty people when helpful comments become hurtful criticism.
  • Remind the critics to pray and contribute to the communication program at the church.
  • Remind them that all of us are pilgrims and we haven't arrived at perfection in anything as yet, but that we all need love and encouragement as we progress to becoming more and more like Jesus in the perfecting of our service to him.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Additional resources related to the use of volunteers in the communication ministry of your church
FREE Ebook: In the church office, to save time and your sanity: Divide your communication team into 2 production levels
There is never enough time to get all the work done that needs to be done in church communications. One way to solve this problem is to have volunteers do some of the work. However, many church office administrators and church leaders aren't comfortable doing this because they are concerned about the level of quality that volunteers product. Or they worry that they won't really be able to control what volunteers do.

 

Six Strategies BookEbook: Six Strategies for Effective Church Communications
Free for ECC Ebook and Template Club members, available for purchase and immediate download, all e-reader versions and in print at this link:

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Filed Under: Basic Church Communications Training, Editing and Proofing, Proofing Tagged With: church communication standards, church office standards, church office volunteers, perfection and Jesus

Q & A: Resources needed for proofing communications in the church office

23 January, 2012 By Yvon Prehn Leave a Comment

QUESTION:

Do you have any recommended resources that you would recommend that I can give to our church's admin assistant to improve her proof reading skills?

question sent by a pastor via email

ANSWER:

Proofing publications is critical and horrible; important and irritating. One of my favorite quotes on this topic is:

"The urge in a human to love or hate, is never as strong as the urge to amend the writings of another" 
quote from a class on editing

To get on with answering the question, I have several resources that you will find useful:

Click on this image to download the PDF Chapter on Proofing.
Click on this image to download the PDF Chapter on Proofing.

A PDF of a chapter on Proofing.

This is from my book on the Back to Basics.

Jesus and Perfection in Publications

This is an important balancing article, CLICK HERE to go to it. It is important, because though proofing and a desire for perfection is important in our church communication work, there are other considerations that are equally, if not more important that must be looked at if we want to conduct our ministries in ways pleasing to the Lord.

If you have a question on church communications that will be considered for an answer in this series, please email it to: yvon@effectivechurchcom.com.

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Filed Under: Church Office Skills, Proofing, Q & A Tagged With: church communications proofing, Proofing, proofing for churches

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