Effective Church Communications

Don’t be guilty of bait and switch in your communications

20 June, 2017 By Yvon Prehn Leave a Comment

Presenting one image on-line but being very different in reality isn't what you want to do as a church communicator. Always be who YOU are where God placed you.

Don't be guilty of bait and switch in your communications wherein you send out some slick, fancy printed piece, or display an over-designed, glitzy website if you're a little church plant meeting in a basement. Big, glossy and professional is not always more appealing—many people are looking for a real, intimate, and honest interaction about God. They might miss you if you come across looking too slick and professional. Worse, if they come expecting a big, fancy church and find you meeting in the church basement, they might assume that if you lied about who you are in your advertising and outreach, you might be presenting a false picture of God, Jesus, or salvation.

This is especially important for church plants. YOU DO NOT need to spend a lot of money on slick advertising. One of the best outreach pieces you can do is a simple business card that describes your church, tells people when you meet, how to get there and that displays your website, and social media info. Give them to your current members and tell them to share with their friends and the people they contact as they go about their daily lives. Every invitation becomes a personal one and is far more effective.

Keep in mind the parable of the talents

Jesus did not expect a person with one talent to do the work of the five talent person, but Jesus expected the one-talent person to make the most of what he or she had. If you are a tiny church with few resources, don't feel you have to create publications or a website like the ones you saw at whatever big church conference the staff most recently attended.

You could be burying your talent in a purchased design because it would not be an honest reflection of your church. Be who YOU are, communicate to your people with the resources you have, and the Lord will bless your efforts.

Variety is standard in professional communication

Contrary to what some communication companies want you to believe, there is no ONE perfect way to create any one communication piece. There is no ONE way to do any communication that is THE PROFESSIONAL way to do it. There is tremendous variety in all professionally created communications depending primarily on the target audience they want to reach with their message.

An excellent example of this is the variety in magazines. Go to your local Barnes and Noble or other big book store and look at the magazines. The design, style, and even the paper used, for example, is very different for Architectural Digest than it is for Car and Driver. Both are professional, well-designed publications, but both serve different audiences and their style reflects that audience, not some absolute, unrealistic standard.

For the editor of Car and Driver to think he'd be more professional or cutting edge if he created an issue of his magazine in the same style as Architectural Digest would make about as much sense as it makes for the pastor of a small neighborhood church pastor of a 250-member church in a farming community to attend a mega-church creativity conference in Dallas, come home and decide the church needs to create publications that look like the ones the mega-church in Dallas created. That is just goofy. [Read more...]

Updated Senior Newsletter and why you should have a newsletter for the Seniors Ministry in your church

8 June, 2017 By Yvon Prehn Leave a Comment

In another article I shared a Senior Ministry Newsletter and here is an updated version of it. But even more important than the additional design are the reasons given below as to why creating a newsletter for Seniors is incredibly important for your church.

Reasons why you should have a newsletter for the Senior Ministry in your church

Not only is it the right thing to do and a Biblical command to care for the older members of our church, but it is also a fact that in most churches the older members are the primary ones who support the church ﬁnancially.
However, they are less likely to give generously if they don’t feel they are a signiﬁcant part of the church. A newsletter like this that not only is useful to create a community for seniors, but it informs them about ministries in the church and invites them to become involved.
You need to print this out because overall, most seniors, even if they have a computer, prefer to read material like newsletters (and bulletins and information from the church) in a print format.
Just because you print this doesn’t mean you ignore technology. You can also create a PDF version of this publication to post online. This particular layout works well online because in PDF format you don’t have to scroll up and down as you do in a multi-column newsletter layout.
This simple layout can be adapted to create newsletters for any ministry in the church— Women’s, Men’s, Children’s, Missions. They are also projects that ministry members can do themselves. Challenge your church ministry leaders to increase their communications and THEY WILL see an increase in involvement. People do not give to, volunteer, or pray for ministries that they know little or nothing about.

Below are images of the two pages of the revised design and following is the link to download the MS Publisher Template file.

To download the ZIP file that has the MS Publisher file for this newsletter, click the following link: Senior Newsletter Revised Design

Newsletter advice: long or short; sermon in them or seeker-friendly?

8 June, 2017 By Yvon Prehn Leave a Comment

Seeking church communications feedback — Seeking feedback, trying different lengths and contents is all part of ministering to your people with your church communications.

A question came in from a church business administrator: “For our church newsletters, should it contain long articles or short ones, sermons or not, should it be visitor friendly?” It’s a great question and one that should be answered as you plan the content for your church or ministry newsletter. We’ll explore the options for answering it in this article.

(Update note: I wrote this article originally for written newsletters, but the advice following applies equally well to online newsletters, though you may want to start some of the articles in the online newsletter and continue longer material on your website.)

Long articles or short?

The answer to that part of the questions isn’t as obvious as it might seem. I think initially, with our busy schedules today many people would instinctively answer “SHORT!” Almost no one complains that newsletter articles are too short.

But in consideration of length there are a number of factors to consider:

Newsletters contain a variety of material. Some is vision-casting from the senior pastor, some teaching, some history or story-telling, some news, notes and announcements.
More important than setting an arbitrary length, the length of the articles or announcements in your newsletter material should be appropriate to the topic. For example, if the senior pastor is explaining the vision of the church, inspiring members for outreach or missions, setting a new direction or challenging for a building campaign, that piece might need a page or two.
Currently there is a growing popularity of "long-form", meaning simply longer length articles. Particularly when you do an online version of your newsletter, you might add additional information, background, commentary, or links on a topic. Many of the major newspapers today (the New York Times is a primary example) and have found this extremely popular. While waiting, commuting, or tired of playing games, people will often read longer articles on their mobile devices.
Announcements of re-occurring events usually do not need long, lengthy explanations on why people should attend. Short, catchy announcements designed what I call “want-ad style” and that contain the name of the sponsoring person or group, purpose, starting and ending time, full contact information, cost and directions to get there and if child care is provided are what is needed.
At the same time, even more lengthy material that takes a page or two can be made more visually interesting by breaking it into sections with headers, summarizing key facts in a sidebar, pulling out interesting or key quotes and highlighting them, adding a picture and caption. A page or two with these visual elements integrated into the story will be read more easily than a solid page or two of text with no breaks.

Sermons or not in your newsletters? Seeker-Friendly or not?

[Read more...]

Make the most of your Father’s Day Connection Cards

6 June, 2017 By Yvon Prehn Leave a Comment

Make the most of Father's Day Connection Cards by including options for information on ministries related to men.

The selection of Connection cards that follow for Father's Day includes some cards that not only have the standard information on them, but that give men the opportunity to request information about ministries that may be of interest to them.

These include: Service Projects, Men's Group, Habitat for Humanity Build, and Children's Ministries. Having these on the card is one way of advertising these ministries that men may not even know go on at the church. In addition, asking on a card directed primarily to men on this Father's Day that includes asking for information about children's ministries, lets men know that the church is aware that many men today participate actively in child-rearing. More men than many churches are aware are single dads and greatly appreciate it when a church is aware of this and actively works to minister to them.

Below the gallery of Connection Cards for Father's Day below is a link to download a ZIP file that has ready-to-print PDFs and editable MS Publisher files.