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.

Strategy, the essential, but often missing foundation for effective church communications

Strategy is how you get to where you want to go; it’s how you achieve your objective. It is the commanding general in your head that chooses and uses whatever resources necessary for victory.

Instead of a communication ministry that is driven by deadlines, trends, tech tools, and whatever the promise that THIS item or way to do things will get thousands pouring into your church, when you learn to think and implement strategically about your church communications you’ll accomplish far more of lasting value.

This is the approach we want to teach you in Effective Church Communications and the articles that follow will show you how to implement effective church communications strategy in a variety of communication situations.

 

 

How to train churchcom ministry volunteers

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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...]

Is your church marketing failing because of the lack discipleship in your church?

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Our personal discipleship and effective church outreach
Could our main challenge to effective church outreach be the person in the mirror?

The goal and North Star of Effective Church Communications is to "Fully fulfill the Great Commission" which means helping people to not only come to know Jesus as Savior but to grow to mature disciples. And though that is our goal, the following, incredibly challenging article, thoughtfully links the lack of success in our church communications to the lack of discipleship in our lives.

Following is a key quote from it and click the link below to read the entire article:

To put it simply, we don’t have a marketing problem, we have a sales force problem. Study after study reveals American Christians simply don’t believe in our product anymore. Can we turn it around? We believe we can, but not until we get serious about living the kind of life that astonishes the surrounding world. Remember in the gospels how people were “astonished” at the message of Jesus? But 2,000 years later, how many people are astonished at our message or our lives today?

 

8 Ways for Christians to Regain Credibility

It may not be your fault that nobody shows up for a ministry event that you advertised heavily

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Weight of communications responsibility
Sometimes church communicators feel like the entire weight of the success of a communication is on them, but often it involves reasons outside their control.

Sometimes church communication ministries don't realize the extraordinary responsibilities they have to communicate the message of salvation and the challenges of discipleship to their communities and congregations, but more often church communicators feel a tremendous weight of responsibility.

If an important event or training program doesn't get the response you anticipated, it is easy to blame yourself. You might feel your communications weren't catchy enough or your graphics not gripping or your text not as enticing as it should be.

Maybe those reasons had something to do with it, but probably not. Sometimes the reason people don't show up has little to do with what you communicated. Following are some true examples of times this happened, of course with some details changed so as not to embarrass any member of the Body of Christ.

Unknown scheduling conflict

You may find out the real reason no one comes to an event you advertised is the same as it was when one church launched a Sunday morning class for young parents. They wanted to target this group (what church doesn't), but on the day it launched 2 grandparents and no young parents came to the class. When a few informal calls were made to the target audience of young parents in the church and they were asked why they didn’t come to the class, the answer was that because the new class was at the time of the main service and the children didn’t leave for the children’s program until after the children’s sermon, which was 10-15 minutes into the time the class started. The parents weren’t going to leave their kids in the service alone to go to the class—no matter how well it was advertised and promoted. [Read more...]

21 FREE image resource sites and a course to help you make the most of them

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Previews of 21 Image Sites
There are thousands of FREE image sites out there today. This course will help you make the most of them!

It's a great time to be creating communications today because thousands of images are available to you for FREE! And this course that was just posted to our Church Communications Training School will preview 21 websites of FREE IMAGES and give you tips to make the most of them!

No matter what some paid sites may tell you, everything you need to create great-looking communications in print and online can be found without spending any money. This course not only will give you a list of sites that will give you what you need, but it will give you video tours of all the sites so you can decide if that source is useful for you before you waste time checking it out.

There are five videos previewing sites

The first one of large overview sites is the longest at about 14 minutes and the others are 5 or 6 minutes.  You can download either the PDF of the course PowerPoint that lists the sites or a PDF list of the sites to make notes on what might be most useful to you. This is one of the best things about the course because instead of getting a random list of sites that may or may not be useful, you can sit back, relax, and have me preview the sites for you.

(Personal note here.....I had NO idea how long this would take to put together. What I thought would be a few hours ended up a few weeks. I've always hated the lists of sites for any recommendation of free this or that or recommended this or that and found that checking them out was always such a huge waste of time because half were useless and obviously nobody pre-screened them. Now I understand why; it'a a lot of work! But I'm committed to doing this for you and the ministry and I trust you'll find it useful.)

In addition to showing you sources for thousands of useful images, this course also has:

Introductory TIPS on images

Images are very important, but they are not THE most important thing in church communications. We'll briefly discuss why, what is most important and how to use images most effectively.

You'll also learn why captions for your images are critical and how without them images have no inherent meaning.

Guidelines and cautions

There is an overwhelming amount of fine print on image sites today. Not only is it very confusing, but as a church communicator you want to do things legally and it's hard to take time to sort through all the rights, usage agreements, and licenses involved.

This course has done all that work for you and all the sites shown are free, copyright free, attribution free, and can be used for commercial purposes (if you create a t-shirt and sell it, that's commercial).

Bonus--quick edit ideas in PicMonkey

Sometimes you want a little more from an image. You may want a different size, focal point, or color. You may wish it had a different mood or effect. A great program that can do that is PicMonkey and the overview of images ends with a short video from Pic Monkey showing how you can very quickly make changes like the ones below. The first image is the original off the site and following are is a less-than a minute change. The video has additional changes of this picture and another one.

This course is part of our All-Access Membership- for the Church Communications Training School, which is a ministry of the Effective Church Communications Site-sign up today and have easy access to thousands of FREE IMAGES for every communication project you can imagine.