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.

Spam is spam if it is good for you or not, you need to tell people WHY a Bible study resource is good for them and HOW to use it, not just that it is available

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Church Notices as SPAM
Spam is spam whether you think it is good for your congregation or not. You must tell them WHY it is valuable and HOW to use any resource or it's simply spam.

How would you respond to messages like this:

Here are lots of vegetables—free vegetables—eat all you want!

The vegetables are here for the picking, be sure to take as many as you can carry.

These are vegetables kids really like! Help yourself!

Most likely your response wouldn't be overwhelming. You know how to get vegetables; maybe you even have a neighbor with a garden that gives you extras.

After a while, even the offer of free vegetables can be tiresome, and then it becomes an irritation.

Bible Study Resources are no different

Most people know they should study the Bible or read it, but simply badgering them about a free resource without telling them why they should use it or what they will get out of it, may not produce the response you want.

I'm writing this blog because of some feedback I got from an Effective Church Communication reader. Here is what she asked (and though I don't tell you enough, if you have questions or experiences like this, you can contact me at yvonprehn@gmail.com--I won't publish your name and I usually change some of the details, to not embarrass the efforts we all make--most questions I get apply to many of us, so I turn them into blogs like this and we all benefit). Here is the situation:

Yvon,
I don't know what to do. My church signed up for a service (without asking the congregation if they wanted or needed it) that produces hundreds of free videos on various Bible topics. Then they notified us of it. I went to the site and had to give my information to just look around.

It looked OK, but much of what was appealing was already available on YouTube or the websites of the various ministries.

I thought that was the end of it, but oh no. Then the emails started, recommending this or that. Today I got a postcard from them.

All of them just tell me what is available--lists of names, titles of videos. No more information about them and no reasons why I should care, other than they are good for me.

I don't have kids, but apparently a lot of people on the list do because I've gotten lots of recommendations for videos for kids.

I'm getting really irritated and feel bad about it.  If I tell them to take me off the list, will they tell my church and think I don't care about the Bible?

What should I do?

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FREE Door Hangers for Valentine’s Day Outreach, plus why they work so well for outreach including 5 reasons you may not have thought of before!

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Valentines Door Hanger Templates
Door hangers are an effective and low-cost way to reach your community with a reminder of God's love.

Door Hangers continue to prove themselves as a low-cost and effective way to increase awareness of your church and invite your neighborhood. Below are TEMPLATES for Valentine's Day that remind people that God loves them. The Templates have room for you to personalize them for your church. In addition, on the back of the door hanger you can include more information about your church and/or invitations to specific events.

Following the images is a downloadable ZIP file that contains PDFs of the images and editable MS Publisher files.

After the images are excerpts from the article "Five Secrets to Door Hanger Marketing" that will give you added incentive to create this form of communication for your community. It will give you some useful ideas on how to use this inexpensive tool.

Combine distributing the door hangers with a Prayer Walk for your community

Distribute them in teams of two and pray specifically for the people in the homes, the neighborhoods, that God would touch hearts and make them open and willing to connect with your church and hear the good news about Jesus. Door hangers are a tangible way to advertise and walking the community to distribute them and pray is a much more personal and involved way to do outreach than impersonal Facebook or other digital advertising. I'm not saying local Facebook or other digital advertising is bad, but our outreach needs to get out from behind the computer periodically for maximum impact.

Door Hangers to personalize for your church for Valentine's Outreach

To download the ZIP file of the door hangers, click the following link:  MS Pub Valentines Door Hangers [Read more...]

Communications for a good continuing relationship with your volunteers—please don’t suddenly become Mr. Grumpy

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Don't switch from Mr. Nice Guy to Mr. Grumpy to your volunteers.
Don't switch from Mr. Nice Guy to Mr. Grumpy to your volunteers or you won't have many for long.

Update note: I'm reminding people of this article along with material on how to recognize your church communicators around Valentines' Day because good communication with volunteers is essential all year round. PLEASE especially take note of the advice here to communicate with people according to THEIR preferred communication channel. People are very picky about this today. Some will only talk on the phone; some never answer the phone and you must send them a text; some hate texting, but constantly check email. It is a huge challenge (and a lot of work) for anyone trying to reach all their volunteers, but it is essential work that needs to be done if we are to serve those we work with. 

Back to the article on communicating with volunteers

Every church is desperate for volunteers. It's not only important to effectively recruit them, but after they are recruited, it is equally important to work hard to keep them. Unfortunately, the difference between how we treat volunteers when we are recruiting them and after they volunteer is sometimes similar to the difference with some couples between courtship and marriage.

Before the wedding the groom is all flowers and candy; after the wedding, he becomes Mr. Grumpy.

Don’t become Mr. or Mrs. Grumpy to your volunteers. Be as kind, caring, and thankful to them when they have been around for 6 months as you are the first week. Not only is this the proper response for a disciple of Jesus, but volunteers can easily quit if you make it difficult or unpleasant to serve. You can express that thankfulness to them through a variety of church communication projects such as:

Reminders of meetings or volunteer responsibilities

You may be reluctant to do this thinking that you are unnecessarily bothering people, but we need to remember that unlike many of us, the lives of most of our volunteers do not revolve around the church. People may volunteer with the best of intentions, but if they did not write down all the details after signing up in the church lobby or online to do something, it's easy to forget all about it.

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Free Instagram Valentines for sharing Jesus love and challenges to consider it

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Instagram Valentine
Share God's forever love this Valentine's day with these free images.

Everyone is looking for love or wishing they had love, or celebrating the love they have for Valentines Day.

But beyond the joys of human love is the love Jesus has for us that is incredibly more than we can imagine and will last forever. Here is a selection of Instagram images free for you to download and share however you want.

You can share them as they are or you can use them to link to an event, a study, a series, coffee time, or study in which you share more about the love of Jesus.

They are Instagram size, but of course, you can use them in any other way you want to share the love of Jesus.

CLICK on the following link to download your free images: Valentines Day Instagram images

 

Notes available for first video on Desktop Publishing in the Church, How to Use Your Computer to Create Better Newsletters, Bulletins, and More! by Yvon Prehn

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Cover of How to use your computer to Create Better Bulletins, Newsletters, and More!
The cover of my book on desktop publishing in the church. I found the printed notes that go with the video series (done 27 years ago), scanned them and you can download them. The video is available on YouTube. A link to it is in the article.

Several months ago, I posted the first video I did on desktop publishing in the church, How to Use Your Computer to Create Better Newsletters, Bulletins, and More! 

I uploaded CDs of it that had been created from the original VHS tapes. The quality is not what we expect today, but it was and is interesting to me how the basic principles of good design and communication haven't changed in almost 30 years from when I first wrote the book. Nor have the needs of churches and the still too frequent challenges they have in creating effective church communications. This book was based on Tap the Power of Desktop Publishing which was the first book out on desktop publishing for churches and as far as I know on doing communications with the computer for churches.

The first version of the book was published by David C. Cook and the second edition by Gospel Light. Though both books seemed to do OK, the second one did well enough for the company to do this video series, both companies told me they decided to not continue printing it because they didn't see a future for the computer to be used to create communications in the church. In fact, Gospel Light said they didn't see technology as a whole had any future use in the church.

Well, that was a miscalculation.

But I wasn't deterred--I made photocopies of the book at Kinkos and they sold well at the seminars I taught all over North America for many years.

It wasn't until recently I found the CDs of the seminar and put them on my YouTube Channel .  The link will take you to the first video.

I was frustrated because I couldn't find the notes that went with the videos though I thought I looked all over for them. However, recently, as often happens in my messy office, I was looking for something entirely different and there were the notes, misfiled.

I scanned them and made them into a PDF, which you can download HERE

The book it was based on is out of print, but I retained the rights to it and scanned most of it, and turned it into an ebook. I left out the chapters on computers and software as they were outdated and no longer useful. I renamedCover of Back to Basics, foundational skills for church communicators by Yvon Prehn the book, Back to Basics, essential foundational skills for church communicators. It's part of the soon-to-be-released Effective Church Communications Library, but I wanted to give you a free copy of it to go with the notes. Here is the link to a download of it: https://payhip.com/b/RK9hW
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