Effective Church Communications
Effective Church Communications provides Timeless Strategy and Biblical Inspiration to help churches create communications that fully fulfill the Great Commission
Business and invitation cards can be used for so many things during the Christmas season: invitations, gift enclosures, links to website explanations about your church or Facebook or Twitter encouragements, cards to encourage people to come back to church, gift tags, or whatever else you can think of. [Read more...]
As we go into the holiday season, your church will be holding many events that will attract visitors. You want these visitors to become regular attenders and you can help make this possible not only by the quality of your holiday event, but by the follow-up publications you send out.
Successful follow-up publications DO NOT mean a mass generated “so glad you were here….” letter. Instead, try these ideas:
Sending out a “so glad you were here” publication is OK to do if you have the time and money, but there is nothing usual or memorable about that. People expect churches to be glad they came and of course a church wants them to return.
What might be a bit more surprising is if your church, instead of asking for something, gave something away. For example, what if you sent out a series of postcards or a series of one-page newsletters and tips that would give people ideas that would help them get through the holiday season. What if those publications didn’t ask for anything, but were genuine servant publications with the motive of honestly helping the people they were sent to.
This would put your church in an entirely different place and a very positive one that would cause people to want to return. Following are some specific publications that could do this:
Depending upon how far back from Christmas you start this, let’s assume you have a list of families who attended your Fall Harvest Festival. You make up a series of perhaps five post-cards, tri-fold flyers, or follow-up emails in bright colors with topics like this:
Week #1—some inexpensive, creative, and alternative ideas on how to plan Christmas shopping and gift exchanges, drawing of names, deciding to give to charities in the name of family members, what charity opportunities are available in your community, if any churches (your church?) sell third world gift items.
Week #2—some favorite recipes from your congregation: a favorite fudge, a hot cider mix, a special grandma cookie recipe. Many families today don’t have family members close by and many young families don’t know how to prepare holiday items. Make sure your directions are simple and easy.
Week #3—the meaning of advent and some ideas on how to help families celebrate it. Perhaps offer an advent booklet for free by simply calling your church or requesting one from your church website.
Week #4—Offer to pray for people during this busy and sometimes stressful time of year. Have a prayer line where they can leave requests or an email address. Assure them it is confidential and is a gift from your church to them.
Week #5—An invitation to take part and the times your church offers free baby-sitting so busy parents or especially single parents can shop, locations where your church is doing totally free gift-wrapping.
On all these postcards be sure to clearly give the address of your church, your service times and times for children’s church or education programs, contact phone number and web site. Be sure also to always say something like “Your Local Community Church is there for you and your family, not only at Christmas time, but any time of the year. Please contact us if we can serve you in any way.” If you say something like that, be sure there is a team in place and ready to respond.
You could also do electronic versions of the postcards by creating electronic postcards or emails with the same content. The holiday postcard templates at www.constantcontact.com include wonderful designs that can be very useful in this way.
Another option would be a series of cards explaining the meaning of different traditions at Christmas. If you do a Google search on the web you’ll find dozens of pages with explanations of various Christmas traditions.
You could choose one tradition a week and again send out a series of cards. Again, many people today don’t know why we celebrate the traditions we do and you can give them a Christian explanation. Be sure to always remind them, that in addition to the reasons we have candy canes or Christmas trees (both with very Christian historical traditions) the “reason for the season” really is that Jesus, who was fully God, became fully man to grow up and become our Savior.
The most important thing about either of these communication/church marketing projects is not how fancy your clip art is or how stunning the type face that you choose. What is most important is if you create these and send them out with lots of love and prayer for the visitors to your church, you have a tangible way to let them know you care.
Templates are one of the best resources on this site because they will save you HUGE amounts of time when you need to create many church communications. Though the foundational work is done--many have artwork, text, design and much more done for you, you can change them to suit your tastes and for your church.
There has been some confusion about what makes a file a Template and what makes a file a PDF? What can be edited and what can't be? This video will help answer your questions. Below the video are notes for it and a LINKS & RESOURCES sheet in PDF format that has all the links talked about in the video. Just download the PDF and you can click on the links or if you would prefer to go a website and link directly to the templates shown in the video, CLICK HERE.
Just click on either image to download the PDF.
Warning, this article is very depressing at the start, but it's written to give you hope and solutions. Tragic facts: almost 16,000 children die every day from hunger-related causes—that's one child every 15 seconds. The famine in Africa worsens with 29,000 deaths so far—at the same time, hunger-fighting groups have their lowest balance of resources in recent years. How do we wrap our minds around facts like these? What can we do? As Christian communicators using computer technology, we can do a lot and this article will get you started . . . .
Every church office that has a somewhat new computer has a more powerful computer than NASA had when they put a man on the moon. Any church that has a copy machine has print production capabilities that Reformers and kings could not imagine. Every church with an internet connection has communication abilities with a reach and low costs unimaginable a few decades ago.
I realized, following after night after night of crying every time I saw the news or read about what is happening. I gave what I could, but I knew my tears and meager donations weren't enough. After more tears and prayers, I remembered the power of Christian communicators and how by using the tools we have; we could make a big dent in the needs of the world. I decided to write this article and in addition I've created a section on the Effective Church Communication website called the Micah 6:8 Communication Project.
In case you can't immediately call to mind the verse, here it is:
He has shown you, O mortal, what is good.
And what does the LORD require of you?
To act justly and to love mercy
and to walk humbly with your God. Micah 6:8 (NIV)
Following are some ways we can use technology to make the most of the resources. In addition to the ideas here, on this website, is a permanent link on the home page that will take you to a section of Micah 6:8 Communication Project resources. All of the resources in that section will be free for anyone to download and use. These resources will be updated week.
I have received some resources from people that will be added this coming week, but we need lots more. I am also researching resources from various groups and I'll be adding new things as I find them.
The most important tool you have is your ability to communicate continuously for almost no cost.
It is vitally important to teach your people that "doing justly, loving mercy and walking humbly with our God" is not something we do only for a once a year, at a special event, or only on a mission-emphasis Sunday. Though special events are great for extra giving and focus, hunger and desperate needs are a constant in our world today.
We have the technology to continuously push out ideas, education, tools, resources, stories, links, to our people to keep a lifestyle of giving always in front of them, if we will take the time to do it. Though we no longer have the excuse of cost, we do have the personal emotional cost of a constant focus on difficult subjects. Hunger, poverty, and human trafficking are not pleasant topics to communicate. But one day we will meet Jesus face-to-face and we don't want to be like the man in the story about the Good Samaritan, who didn't want to look at a bloody, beaten man, so he turned and walked away on the other side of the road.
We want to face these issues, communicate about them and encourage our people to take action. Here are some reminders of what we can do:
How easy it is to forget what it took to create church bulletins, bulletin inserts, postcards and brochures before the days of desktop publishing. If your church wanted to put out a publication that encouraged people to give to hunger projects or any kind of compassionate project, and if you wanted it in full-color, you were looking at a major expense.
Today, all it takes is a little time in MS Word or MS Publisher to create it and a color printer or copier to reproduce it. The list of links on my website or any of your denominational websites will give you materials you can download or modify to provide a continuous stream of materials that remind people of needs and ministries meeting them.
You don't even have to spend money on paper if you don't want to—you can create your communication, save it as a PDF and then either email it to people or post it on your website.
Speaking of your website, you can easily create a list of links, call it the Micah 6:8 connection and have a place where people can immediately link to organizations that serve hungry people.
Feature one a month; tell people about the group. Go to a website such as the Charity Navigator: http://www.charitynavigator.org/ and give people the background, statistics and evaluation of the various charities. Some of the statistics you'll find show what various groups, even highly rated ones, spend on administration and other costs. That makes even more amazing the work of the World Hunger Fund, which is supported by the Southern Baptists and administered by them, that gives 100% of donations to the hunger projects. To see one of the most beautifully simple and clear hunger related websites ever go to: http://worldhungerfund.com/
Many of the aid organizations have videos, stories and other educational materials that you can link to. Screen these ahead for what is useful and denominationally appropriate for your congregation and then make the links clear and easy to access.
You can't preach or teach every Sunday about hunger and world needs, but you can create devotionals, short articles, devotions and similar content on your website or blog consistently. I'm working on materials to help with that if your creativity in this area is weary.
On a consistent basis, tweet and mention on Facebook what aid groups are doing, the status of current needs, success stories, images or pictures. There are a lot of great things happening—share those stories with quick summaries and links.
For example: one of the most wonderful is a little invention called Plumpy Nut (Google it for pictures—fantastic ones available). It is an incredible nutritional supplement in little packets that tastes like sweet peanut butter and is revolutionizing the ability to restore health to starving children because it needs no refrigerator or reconstituting. A Plumpy Nut picture of the week with links to groups who are distributing it is just one idea of the kinds of things you can do. Here is one story: http://www.worldvision.org/home.nsf/pages/home.htm#/home/main/hunger-drought-horn-africa-1-1374
Technology has given us incredible tools to use to alleviate world hunger and other pressing pains in our world. The ideas above are only a start of what we can do.
PLEASE send your ideas (bulletin inserts, PowerPoints, how you communicate about hunger or other needs) with permission for me to use them to: yvon@effectivechurchcom.com.
Finally, no matter what organization you give to or what you do, pray lots, give sacrificially, and always: "do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with your God."
From our Great Ideas & Samples Swap this brief video shows some of the Image and Training Resources sent in. The video gives you a preview of the sites and some tips on how to make the most of them. The video links, plus additional tips and resources can be accessed by CLICKING HERE.
