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.
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Why church ads in the newspaper don’t work and an alternative that does

19 October, 2011 By Yvon Prehn Leave a Comment

Though the use of newspaper ads for church advertising is declining, they are still one of the key pieces of advertising considered by church staffs. Though your church may want to run one on special occasions if you have the extra money, it is the position of Effective Church Communications that church ads are not the best use of your outreach budget, nor are they the most effective.

With the computing power available today to churches including the ability to create your own invitation cards, postcards, websites, email newsletters, social networking  and a host of additional digital communications in every form from podcasts, mobile messaging, and  videos, there are far more effective ways to market your church, especially if you want to reach unchurched people.

In the midst of all this technology, there remains a tiny, paper-based communication piece that can make a powerful impact if used properly.

For this alternative to newspaper ads for reaching people and growing your church, read on—

Take a realistic look at your unchurched audience

If you are a person who does not go to church, who has never had anything to do with church, but as St. Augustine said, you have a restless heart that you suspect only God can fill, where would you go for answers?

Sadly and honestly today, most people don’t immediately think, “Oh, I’ll look at the religion section of the Saturday paper and see what church looks like it would be a good place for me to attend to find answers to life.”

Unchurched people are usually not great fans of the Saturday religion section and even if they go to it, there is usually little that will appeal to an unchurched person. Most of the ads are full of church jargon and many of them today promise the same things, “A friendly church, upbeat music and a great children’s program!”

Not every seeker today wants friends, likes music, or has kids. What they want are answers.

In addition, some of the church ads even have embarrassingly similar sermon topics. Particularly around the holidays if a number of the same pastors in a town are downloading the same sermons from Sermon Central or pastors.com, it can be hard to distinguish one church from another.

Some churches with big ad budgets and catchy slogans will attract church shoppers/hopper who are looking for something “more” at church than their current church offers them or a different place to attend if the pastor in their current church wasn’t inspiring enough or if the music became a bit boring, but what appeals to a church shopper/hopper will seldom draw in an unchurched person.

A few final bits of advice about church ads, before moving on to a possibly more effective outreach tool:

Take the money that you would spend on a church newspaper ad and with the help of someone who is recently converted, come up with an offer that would appeal to someone who does not attend church and put it somewhere in the paper other than the religion page ghetto. Our local paper will give the religion rate to churches for placement any day of the week in any section. If your newspaper doesn’t offer that, ask, newspapers are desperate for ad dollars these days.

For example: put the ad on Friday in the Entertainment Section and maybe say something like:

Tired of your usual weekend? Come to the encounter, a coffee, music, and discussion time on Sat. night, 7-9pm at The Journey Church, at Main and Telegraph—thought-provoking answers to real life questions. For more about us, check out our website at: www.yourwebsitehere.com.

In the sports section what about:

Had enough of playing games with life and people? The men at OUR CHURCH are inviting the men of the community to hear local sports star talk about “How I decided to get real with God and people.” Join us for a BBQ and talk, details at (again give website and other contact details).

An alternative to ads: equip your people

It might be difficult to connect unchurched people with the religion section of the newspaper, but one thing they are certain to come in contact with are other people.

While it is sadly true that once someone becomes converted, they soon have few friends who are not believers, that doesn’t mean that they totally withdraw from the world. Most people still work at secular jobs and everyone has many contacts a week with people in the business community such as:

• the waitress or waiter at the coffee shop,

• the Starbucks employees,

• the clerks at various stores,

• the person standing next to them in lines at airports, or the driver’s license bureau,

• the person sitting next to them on the bus or subway.

These brief moments are often filled with casual chatter, but that casual chatter could redirect an eternity with a simple statement such as this….. “Yes, I agree our world is a mess today, but you know, this week we’ve having a Saturday night discussion (or a Sunday talk, or a Wednesday soup and classes or whatever) and our topic is ‘How to be at peace in an unpeaceful world— I’d like to invite you to come.”

What happens next is incredibly important, because what moves that encounter from a pleasant, momentary conversation to a potentially life-changing connection, is a an invitation card.

Invitation cards, a low tech connection tool with high impact

An invitation card is simply a business card you have created with your church’s information on it: location, meeting times, map if necessary AND most important of all these days, your website and email.

This in itself is simple to create, you’ve got the technology in your church to do it, but what is important is that this provides a very non-threatening link to more information about your church and Jesus.

It does this for two reasons:

First, because it provides essential connecting details:

It gives them the specifics of time, location, address, etc. to actually get the invited person to your church event. Without these connecting details a nice verbal invitation is easily forgotten no matter how appealing it seemed at first. It doesn’t matter how big, small, prominate or interesting your church is; it doesn’t matter if you could find it in your sleep, many people don’t know it exists or how to get there.

Second, because it links to your website.

In our culture today, when we want to check out anything from a national car company to the latest movies, to airline prices and restaurant reviews—we check out the website. Websites are great because they allow the viewer to not be pressured, to maintain their distance, and yet explore a product or service without commitment.

Of course to be useful to a curious, exploring, unchurched person, your website must have more on it than a list of service times, in addition, if you are actively giving your people invitation cards with the intention of driving lots of unchurched people to your website, this should be a great motivation for you to re-evaluate your website and make sure it has on it information that is complete, up-to-date and in language understandable to an unchurched person.

In addition to the basic information, your website should contain invitations to specific ongoing events of interest to an unchurched person, answers to their questions and an email connection for more information or answers to questions. On your website you can get as complex and innovative as you want with links to blogs, podcasts, on-line discussions, email newsletters, videos, music, whatever your church creates to share the good news about Jesus.

Your church might have the most engaging, exciting, seeker sensitive website imaginable, but how are people outside your church going to find your content-rich website or your sensitive, interactive blog?

The humble little business/invitation card can make that link.

How to connect people with your church using invitation cards

Here is a process that can make a significant difference in your church attendance and outreach at your next special event.

**Create a section or blog on your website about your event. If your website program makes it difficult to do this, you can create a free website/blog with WordPress. Go to https://www.effectivechurchcom.com/category/church-communications/church-websites/ for articles, videos and  information on how to create a website with WordPress.

**In addition to the attendance information, on the site explain the importance of the event. For example, for Christmas why Jesus really is the reason for the season, for Easter, explain the importance of the resurrection, for Halloween, what really happens after we die. On this section have explanations from your church but in addition links to sites that explain in detail what it means to be a Christian. Some you might include are:

http://www.whoisjesusreally.com

http://www.christianity.com/becomingachristian/

http://peacewithgod.jesus.net/

http://www.leestrobel.com/

http://www.equip.org

**Make invitation cards with an invitation to your event and prominately display your website link to the additional information about the holiday and the Christian faith.

**Make up enough cards for every person in your congregation to have 10 of them.

**Give them out at a service where you tell people to simply give them out in the coming week to anyone meet in the course of life or with friends and neighbors. No pressure or intimidation, just share.

**Have a challenging message on the card, something like: “Everybody feels like they will live forever…..the question is, in what neighborhood?  Check out our website for some options and an upcoming event…….”

**In addition to informational links on your website also have a confidential email address with volunteers who will interact with seekers promptly.

**Monitor your web statistics to see what happens.

**Report the results to your congregation and challenge everyone to pray for the people who receive the cards.

Don’t stop with doing this for just one event

Make the creation of invitation cards for every special event an ongoing ministry so people expect them, pray about them, and look forward to seeing how God uses them in your church.

 

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Filed Under: Church Invitation Cards Tagged With: church business cards, Church Invitation Cards, church newsletter ad alternatives, church newsletter ads

Video and article: How to create full-color FREE church postcards, business cards and other publications with VistaPrint

28 July, 2011 By Yvon Prehn Leave a Comment

Please note: Videos are at the end of this article. This article is a few years old and the system has changed a little, and they may not have the free offer, but the material following should be useful.

Most of the printed publications we do in the church are done with either the copier or a digital duplicator. Sometimes we use color if we have a good color copier. These machines work for most of the products we create, but sometimes we long for full-color or glossy printing on our church business and invitation cards or church outreach postcards.

Many churches justify the cost of special projects for major holidays, but most wouldn't think of doing a full-color business or invitation card for a Sunday School class, children's or women's ministry event in the church because of the short run and the cost. But you might think about doing it--if the price was FREE. FREE or almost (there are a few little charges I explain later) is what is honestly available through Vista Print. Remember what follows is my experience and opinion, only, not anything from the company, but I trust will be useful to you. What prompted me to do this article and the associated videos is that I wanted to get some full-color, glossy business/invitation cards done for the Sunday School class my husband and I teach. There is no way I could go to my local printer and afford to get that done, but then I got one of the special discount emails from Vista Print. As I was putting together my order, I realized I could share it with all of you.

About Vista Print

Vista Print (www.vistaprint.com) is an online printing company. There are a number of them out there today and many churches use them successfully to create high quality print items at a low-cost. They are in NO WAY a substitute for your copier or digital duplicator, but when you want 100 business cards or a vinyl banner or a couple of full-color yard signs they are great.

Vista Print has been around a long time and they do a reliable job. I've used them for church and business jobs and have been happy with all the results.

You don't have to use Photoshop to get professional results!

Many of the online print companies (Vista Print does this also) recommend that you use Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator to create your products.  At  first look, it seems like if you don't use these products you won't get quality results. But that is not true! As the video below will show you can easily create a publication using MS Publisher that is extremely simple to load up and have created with Vista Print--and the results are great! [Read more...]

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Filed Under: Church Business Cards, Church Invitation Cards, Production, Web-based printing companies Tagged With: church business cards, church printing, Communications, on-demand printing for churches, yvon prehn video

MS Publisher Templates: Church Business & Invitation Cards

5 December, 2010 By Yvon Prehn Leave a Comment

Image of Templates of Bus cardsTo make it easier for you to put into practice what you just learned (if you attended the Webinar or watched the video) about Church Business and Invitation Cards, we have some MS Publisher Templates for you. You need to have MS Publisher, but the images you see are all templates ready for you to edit, personalize and use.

Click on the image to download a larger PDF full-page preview of the images.

To be able to use and edit them, they are in a zip file below

Just click to download, save to your hard drive, open and enjoy!

For more information on Church Business & Invitation Cards, to watch videos about them and read more articles, click here.

Click here to download the zip file.

 

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Filed Under: Church Business Cards, Church Invitation Cards Tagged With: church business card samples, church business cards, church invitation card samples, Church Invitation Cards, church invitations, church marketing

Video: How to create resizable maps for Church Invitation Cards and other communications

5 December, 2010 By Yvon Prehn 2 Comments

Church Business and Invitation Cards can be powerful outreach tools, but to accomplish all they can and should for your church you need to pack as much useful information in them as possible. One key piece of information is a map to your event.

Even in these days of Google Maps, Mapquest and GPS, a simple, paper-based map is invaluable to give people an immediate and practical way to get to your church or event. It is a challenge to provide one because if you try to use one of the maps from the Internet they have too much information to shrink down in size.

You need to create your own simplified version. This is very easy to do with MS Publisher and the short video below will show you how.

IMPORTANT NOTE before you watch the video:

This video shows you how to take a screen capture of a map and then use it to easily create your own map in MS Publisher. I used Snagit, my favorite screen capture program and one I highly recommend to do the screen capture. If you do not have Snagit or any screen capture software, here are two options:

  1. Get a free trial of Snagit at www.snagit.com
  2. Go to this excellent article about free screen capture software and download one of the products. I have not used these (keep wanting to try one, but love Snagit so much....), but this is a trustworthy site just click the URL and it will take you to the site: http://www.techsupportalert.com/best-free-screen-capture-utility.htm

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Filed Under: Church Invitation Cards, Skills Tagged With: church business cards, church communication basics, Church Invitation Cards, church maps, Communications, outreach communication for churches, yvon prehn

video test

29 June, 2010 By Yvon Prehn Leave a Comment

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Filed Under: Misc. Advice and Articles Tagged With: Children's ministry, Christmas, Church Bulletins, church business cards, church communication basics, Communications

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