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; we can help.

Last minute checklist for Easter Sunday to assure visitor connections

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Easter checklist of church communications
You work so hard to prepare for Easter--here is a list to make sure it is successful in helping you connect with people who need to know Jesus.

In addition to making certain your Easter celebrations themselves are joyful and honoring to the Lord, take some time to make certain that the guests that come for Easter Sunday return next week. Following is a checklist and some links to help make that happen.

__Involve every member in your Easter outreach

In social media reminders, individually, and every opportunity you have, remind your current church members that the Easter celebration isn't just for them and their families. Remind them everyone is responsible to:

  • Invite their friends,offer a ride, be sure they come
  • Be a greeter and  welcome guests as representatives of Jesus
  • Invite friends new or people you meet to brunch afterwards to talk about the service
  • Invite friends and guests back to church
  • PRAY without ceasing that God would touch hearts and people not only enjoy the service, but that they meet Jesus

[Read more...]

FREE Easter Communication Essential–a panic pack for churches with no time and no money!

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Easter Connection Card B&W Panic Pack
You don't need fancy publications to connect with people at Easter, but clear useful ones that get the job done.

In all the hard work before Easter, lots of communications are needed to connect visitors to your church, to answer questions, to explain your church and bring people back. To do to accomplish all these goals takes extra time that many who work in church offices don't always have.

You are probably working on fancy, colorful pieces such as a special church bulletin or program as your main communication, but a colorful and well-designed bulletin, as beautiful as it might be, isn't what will connect people with the church or bring them back next Sunday.

In addition to what will impress, ask yourself: "what are the most important communications churches need to create to get key connecting jobs done?"

As I thought about that goal and the communications needed to accomplish the goal of connecting people with and bringing them back to the church , I came up with these: [Read more...]

Communications that will get people to come back to church after Easter, why, how to do them, and examples of effective ones

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Note: this is from our archives and many of the publications have updated versions in the TEMPLATES section. However, the overall theory here is an important summary for why you need to do all the things you need to do to get people involved in your church following Easter and I thought it would be useful for you to go through. The PDF download at the end has all the publications pictured.

In most churches their biggest turnout of the year is for Easter Sunday. This doesn't happen by accident-churches pour time, money, and resources into their church communications prior to Easter and it pays off with a full-sanctuary for multiple services. However, few churches have a continuing increase in attendance after Easter.

Brunch Invitation
You may have published a invitation to church or ministry brunch in your bulletin, but why not create a personalized invitation people can give out?

Easter week may have been fantastic, but without intentionally working on developing a continuing relationship with the people who only come at this time of year, we aren't communicating the total message of Easter. Jesus came to earth, died on the cross, and rose from the grave to enable us to have an eternal relationship with him, not just a yearly visit to his church.

For the Easter activities of your church to build relationships, you may need to expand your goals in the communications you create for this time of year. The remainder of this article will give you some ideas on how to do this.

Make Easter a connecting point, not the end result

Invite friends to Easter
A bulletin insert like this will encourage your people to invite friends for Easter.

In the church communication production prior to the Easter season, almost everything is geared solely towards getting people to the Easter week services. Though this is a worthwhile goal, if it is your only goal, you'll not accomplish all you could to make a lasting impact in people's lives and in the growth of your church.

Instead of seeing Easter week attendance as the only goal and end result, consider changing your thinking and strategy. Look at Easter as a connection point between your community and Jesus and your church. You want to bring people into the church Easter week, but you don't want them to go away and never come back-you want them to meet Jesus, to begin and grow in a relationship with Him.  In addition, you want them to get to know your church and to enter into a continuing relationship with your church community.

To accomplish these purposes, you have to be very intentional long before Easter in not only the communications you create to get them there (which you most likely already have in place as you are reading this) but also in what you give people at each event or service during Easter week.

There are two overall areas in which you need to create communications at this time: communications to introduce and connect them to Jesus and communications to introduce and connect them to your church [Read more...]

Sample of seasonal jpg file in a church bulletin, and how you can use the ones on this site for your publications

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This is a wonderful example of how a church communicator took one of the jpg images, available to Effective Church Communications Members for all the holidays, and how she took the one for Easter and used it in her bulletin.

Some churches prefer not to have loose bulletin inserts (either way works, it is matter of what your church prefers) and so this church communicator emailed and asked that I do the inserts in a graphic file format. I was every happy to do that and don't know why I hadn't done it before! The RED arrow points to the jpg graphic from Effective Church Communications. If you click on the image you can download a PDF where you can see the entire bulletin. It is very nicely done and I'm sure you'll get some great ideas from it.

Many of the Template files now have images included with them for you to use either in print or social media. Many have a line drawn around the images so they will stand out from background. If you want that removed, you can go to the original MS Publisher files, remove it from the Master Page and resave that page as an image file.

Not only does this illustrate an idea of how to use an image, but two other things:

  1. I really appreciate and try to carry out your suggestions when possible on what you would like on the site and what might be useful for you, so do feel free to send them to me at yvon@effectivechurchcom.com.
  2. It is great to have samples of how people are using materials from ECC in their publications. Please send them to me with your permission to use them.  These GREATLY help your fellow church communicators. For information on our Great Idea Swap, CLICK HERE.

 

Bookmarks and Bulletin inserts that explain what you do regularly for Easter Visitors to return

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Church Bookmark that will help bring people back to church after Easter.
Church Bookmark that will help bring people back to church after Easter. FREE for all, click to download.

You've worked hard to get people to your Easter service and that's wonderful, but the work doesn't stop there! You need to work equally hard to get them to come back and to continue to connect them with the church on a continuing basis. This is especially important after having guests at your church for Easter as churches usually have a different schedule and different activities that Sunday than they have at any other time.

If you don't intentionally do something to let people know what you do on a regular basis and when you do it, they won't return. They may even want to come back—but you have to give them specific information to help them do that.

BOOKMARK FREE for ALL

To help you do that, the image to the left is a FREE Bookmark you can make up to give to guests. CLICK HERE or on the image to download a Zip file that has a PDF of it and editable MS Publisher file. The Template would look nice on colored stock, perhaps a parchment looking cardstock. Bookmarks work especially well as reminders as they are something people can keep and if you have the regular schedule and connecting information about your church on the back they are more likely to return.

In addition to the bookmark, below is a collection of Templates that include bulletin inserts of various sizes and other bookmarks for you to personalize with information about what you do on a regular basis. The file below has both ready-to-print PDFs and editable MS Publisher files.

 

To download the ZIP file of bulletin inserts to help people come back to church after Easter, Click the following link: Church Explanations for Easter Sunday