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.

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.

 

An inexpensive, easy and effective outreach tool for holidays and church special events—Door-hangers

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Door hangers are great outreach tools!
Door hangers are great outreach tools that are inexpensive and can involve your entire congregation.

When considering community or neighborhood outreach for Easter, Christmas, Fall events, and other special occasions, many churches first think of postcards. Postcards do have many advantages and they are a proven tool for outreach, but there is another tool that can be equally effective and can cost little to produce—that tool is a door-hanger. The article here gives you an overview of how to use them and a resource list, on the TEMPLATES section you can find door hangers for various holidays.

One advantage a door-hanger has it that, unlike a postcard, which can get lost in a large pile of junk mail, a household seldom gets more than one door-hanger at a time. When a person picks it up and carries it inside, chances are that person will read at least some of it.

No postage required—how to get them out to the neighborhood

The distribution of door-hangers is not only cost-effective, because you don’t have to pay postage, but it is a way for your congregation to be involved in outreach. I have described this method in the past as a way to get your congregation involved in outreach to their communities using postcards, but it also works well for door-hanger distribution, here it is: [Read more...]

PLEASE be clear about the finances of Christmas events

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Christmas events should be completely joyful without any hidden agendas or costs, no matter how well intentioned.
Christmas events should be completely joyful without any hidden agendas or costs, no matter how well intentioned.

I hope I am not being too harsh in this and the related article. The true situations that have inspired both are quite upsetting to me. I want to just shake the folks who made the decisions in both instances and ask, "Don't you realize we are in a recession? Don't you realize the extreme financial distress many people are in?"

I don't know if the decision makers in either situation have ever had to decide whether to feed themselves or to feed their child; whether they have been in a situation where they have no idea how a medical or dental problem will be taken care of, or if they will live in a home of their own for another month—but many people in our churches today are struggling with these issues. The financial amounts may seem small to whoever made the decisions, but no financial amount is small to many people today.

I imagine the decisions were made in an unthinking way, with no intention to hurt anyone and with that hope in mind, the following situation (and the article that follows) is shared so that no one in your church will unintentionally hurt anyone else. Read on for the specifics.....

Be very clear about financial obligations in Christmas invitations

True situation here: a church created a ticket for a Christmas concert. It stated that the event was free. That's great. However, on the back, it listed the "Benefit Charities" for each performance.

What does that mean? Is it free or not? Will they be taking up an offering? Will that feel awkward?

After checking into the situation some more, I discovered that:

  • The event was free.
  • Each performance the featured charity would be highlighted.
  • The refreshments served at the event, coffee, beverages, and cookies would be for sale and the proceeds would go to the charity.

The church was also strongly encouraging church members to invite unchurched friends.

Beyond clarity, think through the possible outcome of your decision

Please consider what might happen if:

  • A church member doesn't know about charging for goodies, he has only seen the tickets.
  • The church member has been laid off work, but could really use a night out.
  • The church member invites a neighbor who has several kids because he knows they also really need a night out because the dad has been laid off and mom's salary barely pays for the house payment. Special times or treats aren't in the budget.
  • They show up at church and the kids see the goodies and rush over to the table. "Not so fast.....those cookies are $1. each. It is going to charity you know," says the person entrusted with the cookie table.
  • The church member has no cash with him, since his layoff  he intentionally doesn't carry any so he won't be tempted to spend foolishly. The neighbor has a dollar in his pocket. The kids don't know what to do.

Hard to say how this will end.

May the Lord help us be sensitive to needs

I imagine somebody thought it would be a really nice way to help out some charities because giving is down and that is a good thought.

But there might be alternative ways to do that such as donation baskets by the goodie tables.

Charging for goodies at special events is not a good idea no matter what the motivation. Even many people who can afford it don't always bring cash in these days of debit cards. At best, charging for goodies is being an unthinking host and at worst it might mean causing embarrassment and pain to someone already in the worst financial situation of their lives.

People are hurting today, please please pray and think through sensitivity and how you might give,  not only to charities but to the people closest to you who are in need.

A Christmas bait and switch, sad but true

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Jesus freely gave to us at Christmas, and we should follow his example in our Christmas outreach.
Jesus freely gave to us at Christmas, and we should follow his example in our Christmas outreach.

True story here. A big advertisement on a church website (full color, fancy splashy boxed ad) read: Welcome the Christmas Season with the Messiah. A Christmas Concert and a Christmas Sing-a-long.

A believer who lost a long-term job, who had scrounged enough part-time work to barely pay basic bills and buy minimum food for his family, was wondering how to get through the Christmas season without allowing sadness to overwhelm him. He loved music, loved to sing, though had no time with work demands to sing in a choir. He saw the advertisement about the Messiah and a bit of joy bubbled up as he thought, "This is something I can take my wife and kids to."  In his heart, he blessed the church for providing this opportunity. He clicked on the link to find out more.

The link led to the information page where he found the church was charging $10 a person for tickets. His children were too old for the free ones. In addition, if you did not have your own song sheet for the sing-a-long, the advertisement informed you that you would need to buy a score sheet of the music and that would be an extra $10.

A very quick calculation told him that the total cost of that evening would be more than his family had budgeted for groceries for the week. He closed the computer, thankful that he hadn't shared his initial excitement with his wife or family

His situation is not unique

There are  many brothers and sisters in Jesus who are out every week looking for work and being turned away. There are families who don't know what they will do to feed their families decently in the coming week, let alone how to provide any sort of Christmas celebration. The church could have chosen to give a free concert for anyone in the community. It is a very rich church, one of the largest in the community. But far worse than the selfishness of charging  is what they did in the bait and switch of their advertising.

The church may not have thought of their advertising as bait and switch, but it was

[Read more...]