Effective Church Communications
Effective Church Communications provides Timeless Strategy and Biblical Inspiration to help churches create communications that fully fulfill the Great Commission
Print is still one of the most powerful ways to communicate because if you do up a print piece, such as a postcard and it is placed on the refrigerator--you can't help but see it many times!
The US Postal Service reminded us of that in a little video they did, and a clip of that is in the very short video that follows. At the end of the video is a link that will take you to the template page shown.
To see the video full-screen, click on the little square at the lower, right-hand corner. Enjoy!
The title of this article is a trick question. There is no BEST way to market anything to everyone. However, video is obviously an extremely powerful medium as the current advertising campaign by the Mormon Church illustrates. Some comments about that project, some suggestions for creating your own videos, plus some suggestions on how you can combine video with other communication resources follow for an effective multi-channel outreach.
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Most likely you’ve seen some of the “I am a Mormon” videos on television or on the web. If you haven’t, I encourage you to look at them at www.mormon.org. I must admit to a bit of trepidation in referring you to the site because it is very powerful in advancing the Mormon religion.
My trepidation comes from the fact that I am not a Mormon and that I do not believe it is a Christian faith that correctly represents my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ (for excellent apologetic resources about the Mormon Church, go to www.equip.org).
That being said, you cannot help but greatly admire the overall campaign and the extraordinary production quality of the videos and the site. They have taken a large cross-section of people and through video and text have them tell their story. The stories are from women, single fathers, people of various races. The cynic in me notes the somewhat excessive attempt to break from the stereotype of Mormons as primarily white males, but cynical or not, the message comes across that all sorts of people, people like you and me, are Mormon.
The videos are short and though they focus on people telling their story, each story is a very carefully edited view of life that emphasizes Mormon values without much detailed information about theology. In short, they have perfectly captured the spirit of the age where relationships are primary and asking deep questions is pushed aside for warm feelings and the appeal of being part of a caring, loving group such as this.
This is not the time or place to critique in depth their theology, but as an example of extraordinarily well-done videos to advertise a church, they are brilliant.
Few churches have the resources to create videos of this quality—though some do and of course this magazine has a sister publication that is filled with great information all about video ministry. Be sure to sign up for it if you don’t get it at: http://www.christianvideomag.com.
A resource that I personally cannot recommend enough is www.webvideouniverity.com. There are lots of video training programs out there that, in my opinion, were too over the top to be really useful to the average person (not video ministry unit in a large church), who simply wanted to do some videos for teaching and ministry.
The person who runs the site, Dave Kaminski is an excellent, teacher who knows his topic extremely well and can explain it effortlessly. I personally highly recommend that you sign up for his video tip of the week and you can do that on his site, www.webvideouniversity.com. He offers an excellent, professional training course, plus training on specific topic including How to do Screencasts and How to use your flip-style camera to create videos. Please remember my ministry does not participate in affiliate programs or take advertising—I recommend what I genuinely like. To read a more detailed article on how his training helped me, go to this link:
Once you have created videos, you need to let people know they are available. You can do this in a variety of ways.
Social networking is an obvious one. You can upload videos to the numerous video sharing sites available, but if, like the Mormon videos, you may want to drive people back to your primary site, don’t upload all of them to YouTube or Vimeo or whatever else you use. Upload only a few teaser ones with links to your primary site.
Putting up links to short teaser videos, announcements of them, and links to a complete video site are obvious content choices for your church’s Facebook, Twitter and similar sites. We have recently assigned a person in our adult education class at church to be our “internet evangelist.” Her job is to continuously update our Facebook and Twitter accounts, plus interact and link with the main church site and the various members Facebook pages.
If you’ve done some things online that you and your people love, follow the lead of many national advertising companies and use print to inform people that the online material exists and to link them to it. Check out your snail mail this week and note how many advertisements, especially in the form of postcards, are created to get you to a website.
You can either do a postcard mailing from your church or you can create postcards in church office, and make up enough of them for every person in the congregation to have 3 of them. Put them in the church bulletin and then on Sunday morning, have the Pastor ask everyone to give or mail them out to friends or neighbors who might like to look at your videos.
We’ve found business cards with a condensed message are a great way to get people to our church and ministry websites. Make up a large number of them for the members of your congregation, give them out and encourage people to pass them on to friends. In the midst of life, we have lots of conversations and if your people are excited about some videos you have produced online, maybe even if they are part of it, they will want to tell their friends about it. Always having a business card with you that has the URL is a great way to share and connect with friends.
Creating print items for your people to give out accomplishes lots more than simply adding another communication channel. You are also involving your people in outreach in an active, hands-on way.
Outreach is the task of everyone in the church—not just of those whose job it is to create professional communications while the people in the pew sit quietly and wait for new people to come. When you have invitation cards or postcards and everyone is involved in handing them out, they will most likely talk to the person to whom they are giving the card and nothing beats a personal recommendation for great marketing, whether it is for coffee or churches.
When the church is growing because people are involved in inviting, it also helps them be more welcoming when newcomers arrive—they are expected and prayed for.
Yes, it is more work to create the print communications and involve your people in using them, but remember when Jesus gave the Great Commission, he didn't pull aside a select group of marketers or pastors to go and share the gospel message. He gave the challenge to everyone listening. Sharing, marketing your church is everyone's job.
Video may not be the most powerful way to advertise your church, but if you create them yourself with honest, true content and use combine your use of video with other channels of communication; you will have a tool in the never-ending challenge of ministry to powerfully communicate your message.
One of the things I love best about this ministry is that I get to research resources for church communicators and then pass on great ones to you. I do this in a way that is perhaps a little bit different than some reviewers or bloggers in that:
With those disclaimers in mind, I'd like to share a resource that I have found extremely helpful:
This site is run by Dave Kaminski, one of the best online teachers I've observed. He knows his material really well and does a great job explaining and illustrating it.
To check him out, don't go directly to the website www.webvideouniversity.com, because it looks like just another sales pitch for making money with internet video. In ministry we have very different reasons for doing video and though his sales page wasn't tacky or as tedious as some, it didn't tell me what I needed to know. In fact, it was this page that kept me ignoring his site for months. My opinion changed however when I signed up for the free weekly video tip. A collection of these is at the link below and I STRONGLY recommend that you check this out:
Once I started getting his weekly video podcasts and checked out the podcast site, I was impressed.More than impressed, I realized that Mr. Kaminski had a depth of knowledge that would be useful for the things I wanted to learn to do.
I had been looking for a way to improve my webinars and was very interested in learning how to do both Screencasts and videos with a flip camera. Screencasts are a sort of PowerPoint on steroids that you can then turn into webinars or videos. Though I've used PowerPoint, literally since it was invented and have taken a number of classes on it--I knew I was not making the most of it and using animations to make things move, expand, appear, etc. was not something I ever felt I made the most of. It seems like a lot of videos these days consist primarily of moving words. Though there are a number of ways to do this, a screencast using PowerPoint is probably one of the easiest. After watching his video training series Screencasting, —it has changed the entire way I approach teaching with PowerPoint and in the coming months you'll see the results of that on this site.
I have recently signed up for the course on creating videos with the flip camera and the overall video course--lots to learn, but I have been extremely impressed by the site and resources so far and wanted to share them with you.
Video is a fantastic resource, but it is not the only resource you should you use to communicate your message or market your church. Please read this article: "Is video the best way to market your church" (Click on title or HERE to go to it0 for some advice on some excellent examples of church marketing videos as well as advice on the print and other communications you need to create to make the most of your videos.
People often email me to ask how I create the online videos, the webinars and online videos that I do to create the materials on my websites for my church and communication ministries.
In this webinar, I'll give you a tour of the software and programs I use.
I know there are other programs that do what I'll be sharing with you, but these are the ones that work for me and I'm quite happy with all of them. I'll give you brief descriptions and costs of the programs I use in my workflow.
Below, for ECC Members is a video of the webinar, along with a PDF of the notes for it.
PLEASE, if you have comments on any of the programs or other ones you would suggest, please post them in the comments section here. Thanks so much!
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Click on this image to download the PDF of the notes.
