Challenges, commentary, and free templates to help churches create communications that help people come to know Jesus as Savior and grow to mature disciples.

In other words, to fully fulfill the Great Commission.

Effective Church Communications

Timeless training from Yvon Prehn to help churches create communications that will enable them to fully fulfill the Great Commission.

Valentines for Church Communication Creators, what church leaders need to do

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Valentines Day, a reminder of God's love
Gifts are wonderful, but at Valentine's Day the most important thing is how we treat each other.

Valentines for Church Communication Creators, what church leaders need to do

(For pastors, church business administrators, church communication directors, and anyone else who oversees people who create church communications--this is addressed to you)

by Yvon Prehn, www.effectivechurchcom.com

Valentine’s Day is a wonderfully Christian holiday in that it is all about love and loving is what Christians are to be about. We celebrate it by giving gifts, often flowers and candy, to those we care for—but flowers fade and candy adds on pounds. For those you in a leadership position, who want to show caring to the people in your communications ministry, whether paid staff or volunteers, below are Five Valentines you can give that will have lasting, positive results. Print this off and discuss it during a staff meeting for a Valentine's Day that is a real gift for growing our relationships with each other.

Gift #1—Give them authority

In church communications, the church leadership should decide on basic themes and messages and perhaps even the overall look of publications, but seldom on layout, or the final editing of articles or announcements. The people actually doing the creative work need the final authority in these areas. Have a meeting to discuss and clarify these issues and then publicly announce and print your decision. You might say something like this:

"Jenny Smith, our communications coordinator has final editing authority on the layout, deadlines and content of materials that go into the bulletin, newsletter, website and church social media (and whatever else you want to list). She has posted her guidelines and submission deadlines on our website. Please support her decisions and deadlines."

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Complete details in all church communications are essential for people to connect with church events

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The importance of each link
If only one link is broken, the entire chain fails. The connecting details in our church communications work the same way.

UPDATE editorial note: I've recently downloaded software that was attractively and appealingly advertised. Then I tried to use it and found that the creators apparently used all their energies in selling the software, but almost no time in the hard work of showing how to USE it. We can do the same if we have a splashy advertisement for a church event, but don't do the work to put in the connecting details that will get people to the event. This article from our archives will help you to avoid that mistake. We always must remember that our task is not to simply wow people with our witty, brilliant designs and catchy phrases about upcoming events, but to simply get them there so God can help them grow in their spiritual lives.

"He that is faithful is that which is least, is faithful also in much," (Luke 16:10), is a biblical principle we are all familiar with. It is also an important principle to remember in your church communications when you want people to respond to your church communication with concrete action. We don’t do church communications for people to think they look fantastic or to impress them with our technological prowess—we do them so lives and eternities will be changed. The details must be included for people to be able to respond.

If you don’t include the little details (time, date, location, duration, contact information) completely and consistently in every church communication you produce, the great design, writing, typography choices, and graphics will not mean anything. All of these design issues that many church communicators work so hard on, are virtually useless if you don’t have the details included that will actually connect people to the church events. This not to discount the importance of good design. Good design is important, but similar to James reminder that "faith without works is dead," so too, great-looking design is useless if it doesn't result in actions.

In the rest of this article I’ll talk about why we leave out church communication details and then I’ll give you a list of the details that are essential to include. PLEASE  take time to read/review this article for maximum results from the hard work you do in your church communications. Pass it on, make copies of it for your staff to discuss.

Why we leave out the details in our church communications

Our default mode when creating church communications is to leave out connecting details. We do this for a number of reasons and here are some of the most common reasons why we leave out essential details in church communications:

Over-familiarity

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Triage, a model for responding to connection cards

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Triage your connection cards
In a medical emergency, the first responders immediately triage victims to see who needs immediate care. That's a great examples to follow on processing connection cards.

Ed. intro: When you host a special event or seasonal celebration, you'll have lots of visitors and you'll be collecting lots of visitor cards from them. But you've got to do more than just collect them if you want them to make a difference in your church. You'll learn what to do from this excerpt from the book: Connection Cards, connect with visitors, grow your church, pastor your people

It is critically important to respond to the connection cards received each Sunday and all special occasions, but not every card needs the same timeliness or intensity of response, but how do you decide what needs what? The concept of triage can help.

First, here is the history and definition of TRIAGE from Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia:

TRIAGE
The term [triage] comes from battlefield or natural disaster situations. When the wounded are brought in there are three categories in which the wounded are immediately placed:

Red / Immediate
They require immediate surgery or other life-saving intervention, and have first priority for surgical teams or transport to advanced facilities; they “cannot wait” but are likely to survive with immediate treatment.

Yellow / Observation
Their condition is stable for the moment but requires watching by trained persons and frequent re-triage, will need hospital care (and would receive immediate priority care under “normal” circumstances).

Green / Wait (walking wounded)
They will require a doctor’s care in several hours or days but not immediately, may wait for a number of hours or be told to go home and come back the next day (broken bones without compound fractures, many soft tissue injuries).

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triage

How to apply triage to connection cards

Though you aren’t dealing with actual battlefield situations, this model is useful in responding to the connection cards you will receive from those fighting spiritual battles each week. Following are suggestions for how to apply the three levels of triage in how you respond to the people turning in connection cards:Continue Reading

Church connection and prayer request cards—the foundation of all other church communications

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Connection Card book by Yvon Prehn
Prayer request cards and connection cards are a great way to connect with visitors and the needs of your congregation.

In church communications, we are often like Elijah-we expect God to speak through the thunder and storm. But what God often uses is similar to how he ultimately spoke to Elijah—through a still small voice.

The place of connection cards and prayer request cards in your church communication ministry is similar. They appear tiny and unimportant in the great scheme of multi-media communications available, but if you don't use them correctly, your church will probably not connect with visitors as well as you could if you used them.

Yes, there are lots of things churches do and communications churches create that connect with visitors, but helpful as most of them are, they fall short in one area. Churches have visitor centers, visitor pads, friendly people but......

Their short-coming is that all of them require the person to reach out to you.

You can't reach out to many visitors because you won't even know they are there. The ability for people to reach back to you, to share their contact information, their needs and questions is the function of  connection cards. The book Connection Cards, connect with visitors, grow your church, pastor your people goes into detail on how to make the most of these essential ministry tool,  but this article will give you a good starting overview of their usefulness.

The purpose of these connection and prayer request cards

We don't create these cards to wow people with great graphic design or to give something for kids to scribble on during the church service. They are created to make a connection and connecting people to God and each other is what the church is all about. We must keep this importance in mind, because having people fill out connection cards is often viewed as an unnecessary interruption to the Sunday morning service and recording and dealing with them is often a bother on Monday. In contrast to these attitudes, if used properly, connection cards and prayer request cards can:

  • have a HUGE impact on growing your church
  • connect people to the life of your church
  • care for and address spiritual needs in practical ways
  • and help your people grow to spiritual maturity

You must move past looking at these cards as merely ministry routine paperwork and see them as essential tools to grow your church and change lives, if you are to make the most of them.

Why this is so important

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