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.

How to write visually to reach today’s audiences

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To touch hearts and change, lives it takes more than a list of facts. We want people to see an image  in their mind's eye that will cause them to feel an emotion they can respond to.
A PDF of the article: How to write visually. We want to do more than convey information, we want to create images in the mind's eye so our readers can see the lessons we want to share.

It is not difficult to this, but you have to be intentional about it in your writing. This PDF article will help you.

To download the PDF of the article, click here or on the image.

note: this PDF is from Yvon Prehn's archives and is the only format of this article available presently. Not the greatest quality to be sure, but shared with the belief that the content is useful.

Little details are the most important part of your communications

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PDF of an article on the importance of the little details in your church communications
PDF of an article on the importance of the little details in your church communications

The little things are the most important part of your communications because they are the links that actually connect people with the events and ministries of your church.

They are also the most boring, tedious, and difficult parts to include in a communication piece whether it is on paper or online. We'd much rather work on fun illustrations or polishing our catchy marketing slogans or brilliant headlines. As important as these parts of communication creation are, you can have the most brilliant headline and the most appealing images ever, but if people don't know when something starts, how to get there, and if child care is provided—chances are they won't show up.

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And don't expect anybody today to "call the church office for more information." Folks don't take the time to do it and even if they do after being shuttled around through voice mail, they may leave not thinking nice things about the church and certainly not planning to come to an event that might have changed their eternity.

Include the little details in your communications, it can have an impact well worth the hard work it takes to get the details gathered up and put into your communications.

To download the PDF, click here or on the image.

Also look at the article and PDF on REPORTER FORMS. It will give you a practical way to collect all the information you need.

note: this PDF is from Yvon Prehn's archives and is the only format of this article available presently. Not the greatest quality to be sure, but shared with the belief that the content is useful.

Captions define what we see, never publish a photo without them

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Captions define what we see, never publish a photo without them
Captions define what we see, never publish a photo without them

We've all heard the saying: "A picture is worth a thousand words."

That is one of the dumbest statements ever because without a complete and clear caption, the question is, "which thousand?" No picture is self-explanatory. We have to tell people what to see in a photograph.

This PDF illustrates how a variety of captions can give completely different meanings to a picture.

Keep the lessons here in mind not only when you create print communications, but when you create PowerPoint and web pieces where you use a lot of images. You can never be sure that your images will mean the same thing to your audience as they do to you.

Sometimes (especially on websites with lots of little pictures) the images don't add clarity, but sometimes distraction and confusion. The addition of unnecessary little images to websites reminds me of the early days of desktop publishing when people were so excited to be able to use clipart that they often added lots of little clipart images to every church publication whether they were needed or not.

So many of the websites and blogs where people seem compelled to add an image (and many templates come with "thumbnail placeholders") results in many images that have little to do with the content of the text and sometimes result in a "what does that have to do with anything?" distraction for the reader. Your readers are not little children to have to be entertained by pictures if you have content worth reading.

Click here or on the image to download the PDF.

note: this PDF is from Yvon Prehn's archives and is the only format of this article available presently. Not the greatest quality to be sure, but shared with the belief that the content is useful.

Mother’s Day church bulletin inserts or jpgs for evangelism follow-up

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When unchurched family members come to your church you don't want them to leave without something that directs them to further research of the gospel and what it means to have a relationship with Jesus.

This bulletin insert was created to give them something to take home and using the websites on it, it gives people an opportunity to explore on their own.

PLEASE NOTE: this free sample is NOT a PDF like the other free samples publications  in this series of communications for Mother's Day. It is a jpg file--a graphic file that you can use as is or resize to fit into another publication. Click on the image to download it, when it opens in the other window you can either save it or copy and paste it into a publication like MS Publisher.

If you would like to see  an example of how a church communicator used an image like this in her church bulletin for Easter, click here.

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This Mothers day bulletin insert Version #2is the second bulletin insert.

The Download section has both images, plus the MS Publisher files and PDFs of both that are ready to print and use. It has:

  • All four Mother's Day Bulletin inserts (there are actually two versions of each one)
  • MS Publisher Original files (you must have MS Publisher to use this file)
  • PDF Files
  • Resizable jpg files

CLICK HERE to download the  ZIP file all the materials above

After you download the file, SAVE it to your computer, then click on it to "unzip" it and the files are ready for you to use.