Effective Church Communications

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!

31 January, 2022 By Yvon Prehn Leave a Comment

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

30 January, 2022 By Yvon Prehn 2 Comments

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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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

9 January, 2022 By Yvon Prehn Leave a Comment

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 renamed 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
[Read more...]

Introducing the Bibleverse t-shirts and mug shop, merch for you–support for ministry!

15 November, 2021 By Yvon Prehn Leave a Comment

When you see a snarky t-shirt, how does that make you want to act?

I want to be snarky.

When you see a coffee cup that reminds you of a happy vacation what do you think about?

I think about that happy place.

It seems to be a core fact of human nature that we are influenced by short messages we see around us. Moses made note of it when he was attempting to get the children of Israel to listen to God’s commands about their lives. They heard God speak at Sinai; Moses wrote 5 BIG books of very detailed rules.

Yet during all that, he also recognized the need for less thunderous and lengthy reminders, when he said:

Write these commandments that I’ve given you today on your hearts. Get them inside of you and then get them inside your children. Talk about them wherever you are, sitting at home or walking in the street; talk about them from the time you get up in the morning to when you fall into bed at night. Tie them on your hands and foreheads as a reminder; inscribe them on the doorposts of your homes and on your city gates Deut.6:6-9, MSG

Today our visual reminders are not on doorposts or phylacteries (the leather boxes, Orthodox Jewish men wear on their heads and arms during prayers) but as I realized when I was praying about how to get people to think about God’s Word more, want to learn about it, and live by it, today we have mugs and t-shirts!

There is a t-shirt for everything.

A major event happens, and t-shirts appear almost before the news blast is over. People’s politics, beliefs, causes, and attitudes are all loudly proclaimed by the t-shirts they wear.

So as part of my ministries of wanting to get people to focus more on God’s Word (www.Bible805.com) and effectively creating church communications, I thought I need to learn to create t-shirts! Maybe that tiny turning to the things of God will lead people to greater exploration.

That was my first idea, but it took the longest to bring to reality. I started researching it, but oh my how complicated (cheery, loud, YouTube videos aside) it is in reality.

While researching that I came across the idea of Printables, (Bible verses and saying printed out and frames as visual reminders) which I quite like and had already been doing for my personal use. That resulted in the Bibleverse Shop, (www.payhip.com/Bibleverseshop) and you can read all about that lengthy process on that site.

But I still wanted to do t-shirts and mugs.

Designing them was super easy for me but how to sell them? And more importantly, how to sell them without being consumed with the business details of sales tax, shipping and much more?

My primary ministries are teaching and writing (through www.Bible805.com and www.effectivechurchcom.com ). The creation of these items I realized could be an important way to support the ministries, which I desperately need to do, but I could not let that overwhelm my teaching and writing time.

Fast forward through months of trial and error (I am a slow learner in some things) and I’ll detail it more on my blogs, but I finally found www.payhip.com to sell the Printables (check out my store at www.payhip.com/bibleverseshop ) and www.bonfire.com to sell my t-shirts and mugs.

Here are some of my final products:

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Yes, for those of you who know about such things, I could make more profit with other companies than Bonfire, (for a $17-$29 product I get maybe $4-$5), but Bonfire does ALL the hosting, handles the shipping, and most important of all to me pays the proper sales taxes to the states and countries that require it.

The Payhip and Bonfire people have been quite pleasant and helpful to work with, do not charge anything until a product is sold, and their interface for uploading products quite simple and intuitive (compared to dreadful ones like Shopify, Woo Commerce, and others).

I am extremely excited about this new adventure. I love to create designs when my mind is too tired to write or teach, and I feel like it gives me a way to make the most of my time for our Lord.

But what I feel is not as important as what I pray the mugs and t-shirts do for you. When you sip your morning tea or coffee, I pray the encouraging words will help turn your mind to Jesus. When you wear a t-shirt with a Bible verse or Bible-inspired setting I pray it will help you remember to represent Jesus well and give you an opportunity to share about your life in Him.

I also pray the shop will be a practical way to support the Effective Church Communications and Bible805 ministries—a win-win for all concerned!

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

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

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Back to the article on communicating with volunteers

Reminders of meetings or volunteer responsibilities

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When you see a snarky t-shirt, how does that make you want to act?

There is a t-shirt for everything.

But I still wanted to do t-shirts and mugs.

—

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