Effective Church Communications

Strategy #1: Clarify and commit to your objective—fully fulfilling the Great Commission

Our objective as church communicators is to fully fulfill the Great Commission. The Five Steps of Effective Church Communications and Marketing is our foundational way to do that. It is “a strategic, progressive system of church communications that helps people come to know Jesus as Savior and grow to mature disciples.”

Following are articles that have the chart of The Five Steps and links to an online course in our Church Communications Training School that will help you understand and implement them.

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The foundation for Effective Church Communications: The Five Steps of Effective Church Communications and Marketing, a course

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The Five Steps of Effective Church Communications and Marketing Course
This course will help you understand and implement The 5 Steps, a strategic, progressive system of church communications that helps people come to know Jesus as Savior and grow to mature disciples. It is part of our Church Communications Training School. Click on the image to go to i.

Following is the description of the course, The Five Steps of Effective Church Communications and Marketing. This course in the Church Communications Training School, a ministry of Effective Church Communications.

The course consists of 7 videos (75 minutes total) of instruction. There are PDF notes for all the videos as well as audio files you can download for review. All of the courses in the school are one rate, $10 a month, $99 a year, or $299 Lifetime Membership. As a member of the school, you have permission to download the course (videos and handouts) and share it with staff and volunteers in training sessions.

Overview of the course

This is the foundational course for effective church communications in that it will show you how to intentionally use your all your communications to take people from outside the church and develop them into disciples of Jesus through the steps of:

**INVITE

**INFORM

**INCLUDE

**INSTRUCT

**INSPIRE

The training in this course for each step gives you the reasons and purpose for that step, tells you the most important communications in it, and gives you tips on communications in both print and digital format that will accomplish the goal of that step and move people to the next one in their spiritual journey, all the while keeping a focus on the North Star of Effective Church Communications which is to fully fulfill the Great Commission.

The design, style, and looks of the communications will be unique for every church (and tips on how to make the most of these areas are in other classes in this school); this course gives your the foundational strategy and Biblical encouragement for why you do the hard work you do.

This course was developed by Yvon Prehn from decades of working in church communications and draws together the scattered hard work of church communicators into a strategic whole.

Today so much church communication focuses on the latest design trend or social media or technology update and while these are all important and have their place, they are secondary to how our church communications need to be about fulfilling the goals of the church of helping people come to know Jesus as Savior and grow to disciple maturity in Him.

Below is a PDF of the chart that summarizes the course. You will be able to download a copy of it when you sign up for or preview the course, following the PDF is a link that will take you to the course. It is part of our Church Communications Training School.

The Five Steps of Effective Church Communications and Marketing

 

Click on the link below to find out more about the class and to sign up for it:

https://church-communications-training.teachable.com/p/the-five-steps-of-effective-church-communications-and-marketing

Why church communications are sometimes ineffective and what to do about it

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Ineffective Church Communications
Sometimes our church communications aren't as effective as we'd like them to be. Here are some reasons for ineffectiveness and a proposed solution

Editorial note: I found this article when reorganizing the website. It was first written in 2009 and as I reread it I fear I sound excessively cranky. Do forgive me for that, but I think there are some worthwhile challenges in it and of course the  purpose of the Effective Church Communication ministry is to solve the issues discussed here.

The church today is the butt of late night television jokes, the target of aggressive atheists, and if not openly attached, seen as irrelevant to everyday life.  Why is this happening when....

  • We have the greatest message: that Jesus came to earth, died on the cross, rose from the grave, and offers eternal life to all who believe in him.
  • We have definitive, historical proof of the truth of our message: in terms of the history of people in the Bible and the textual support of biblical manuscripts, there is no other religion that can make the truth claims made by Christianity.
  • We have extraordinary tools: churches today have undreamed of power to spread their message through computer-generated print publications and the power of the internet, websites, and social media.
  • We have incredible people: people who work on church communications are extremely committed and dedicated.
  • We have an incredible promises: the Lord has promised to be with us in all we do and to give us the power to do the tasks he asked us to do.

So why aren't we getting our message out there clearly?

Sadly, many church communications are not created strategically, with any well-thought-out purpose or plan. We throw things together (like the church bulletin) because we’ve all ways done it that way; we put up a website (great template,  little content) because at a conference somebody said we have to have one; we get social media accounts because churches are supposed to have them, but don't have the time to update them or the energy to do much with them.

Finally, because we often work without strategic goals, we have no basis for measurement of how well we communicate the biblical message, how efficiently we use  our resources, or how effective we are in reaching people with our church communications.

To remedy this situation, I'll discuss the following:

  • Why we are ineffective in church communications.
  • A proposed overall strategic goal and approach for effective church communications

[Read more...]

Strategy #1: Clarify and commit to your objective—for ECC it is The Five Steps of Effective Church Communications and Marketing

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5 Steps of Effective Church Communications and Marketing
This book will give you a comprehensive plan to use your communications to take people from outside the church and grow them to mature disciples of Jesus Christ.

INTRO note: the following is from the preface of the book on The Five Steps which is an overview of our approach to church communications. We we are different than many other church communications resources in a number of ways and this book is a good explanation of many of them.

In addition to the information in the book, the Effective Church Communications ministry (though the name has changed) is somewhat unique in that it's been around a LONG time—since before the internet and social media were used in the church.

Yes, we were able to communicate back then, amazing as it may seem—but seriously, because of that our training is about much more than how to be great at the latest tech tool currently in vogue. Though we keep up with and encourage the use of every means to help people come to know Jesus, we know that it takes a foundation and a vision beyond current trends to accomplish all we need to fully fulfill the Great Commission.

That is why a biblical strategy is so important. Our tools can and will change, our objective and strategy won't. What follows explains the North Star, our ministry objective we keep our eye on as we create training and resources for you.

The Five Steps of Effective Church Communications and Marketing

Author’s Preface—the North Star of this book

There are many fine websites and resources today for church communicators and churches benefit greatly from these varied resources. In this mix, it might be helpful to clarify the North Star of Effective Church Communications, the ministry behind his book, and the foundational goal of it which is:

How to create communications that will help your church fully fulfill the Great Commission.

This is the one goal around which everything we do revolves. The time-lapse image above of how all the stars revolve around the North Star instead of every star going in a different direction illustrates what we are trying to do. We want to help churches chose a North Star and intentionally revolve all their communications around it.

Our North Star was chosen in obedience to the Great Commission Jesus gave us in Matt: 28:18-20 when he said:

 “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore, go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”

North Star, to fully fulfill the Great Commission
Just as all the stars revolve around the North Star, so too all our communications should revolve around fully fulfilling the Great Commission. The Five Steps of Effective Church Communications and Marketing will help you do that.

Fully fulfilling the Great Commission means that in addition to helping people come to know Jesus as Savior, your church helps believers become mature disciples of Jesus. Anything less is incomplete obedience. [Read more...]

The 5 Steps of Effective Church Communications and Marketing, redone, simplified, essential

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The Five Steps of Effective Church Communications and Marketing
This is a way for you to put all your work into a strategic, progressive system of church communications that helps people come to know Jesus as Savior and grow to mature disciples.

Throughout human history, voyagers in the Northern Hemisphere have used the North Star, that one fixed point in the sky, as a reference for navigation. And though in the church office, you don't rely on a physical star and though not all communicators throughout the world can even see it, it remains a good analogy for all of us that we need a fixed point to keep our eyes on so our work accomplishes the goal our Lord wants us to reach.

For church communicators that fixed point, our North Star, is the Great Commission, where Jesus told his followers and says to us today:

“All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore, go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.” Matthew 28:18-20

We can summarize this command by saying we are tasked with:

  1. Helping people come to know Jesus as Savior
  2. Helping them grow into mature disciples

Both are commanded, but unfortunately many churches today stop short of developing their people into mature disciples. That is incomplete obedience.

As a corrective to this, for Effective Church Communications, our North Star and the one strategic and practical goal we have for all church communicators is:

To create communications that will help your church fully fulfill the Great Commission

The key phrase here is fully fulfill. Your communications should not stop at just bringing people into the church and involving them in uplifting worship services. They must help people become disciples.

How to do that?

Through The Five Steps of Effective Church Communications and Marketing

The Five Steps is a progressive way to organize and order your communications to take people from outside the church to mature discipleship. Here they are:

Step #1: Invite

Step #2: Inform

Step #3: Involve

Step #4: Instruct

Step #5: Inspire

The progression in evangelism or discipleship is not always obvious or explicit. An invitational postcard or social media post doesn't say "This is Step 1 and we are inviting you to an event where you can consider Jesus."

A clear podcast and notes on How we got our Bible and why we can trust it doesn't say, "This is Step 4 and you are being instructed in the Christian faith so you will become a mature disciple." But prayerfully progress is being made and lives are changed bit by bit.

I've been working on this system for decades and it has proven to be effective and inspiring to the people who have seen it in books, seminars, and online.

As part of my recent reorganization and updating of the ministry, I simplified the chart that illustrates it and following is the result. Following that is a link to the online class that explains and goes through the chart, though I trust the chart itself will make sense and help you see how you need a progression of church communications created with the goal of continuously moving people to the next step of Christian maturity.

Please download and share the chart.

The Five Steps of Effective Church Communications and Marketing Chart

Click on the image to download a copy of it.

The Five Steps of Effective Church Communications and Marketing