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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Your people, your church greeters–your most important communication tool

15 June, 2012 By Yvon Prehn Leave a Comment

Negative visitor card
This is a copy of a very negative visitor card--this is not how we want visitors to respond. Chris Walker's site will help your church avoid comments like this.

Sometimes we work so hard on our printed and digital connections we forget about the most important one of all--our people. Chris Walker, aka, the Evangelism Coach has a great article here about people who were so upset with the rudeness of church greeters, they wrote it down on a response card. Studies show that for every complaint someone actually takes the time to write about, there are many more upset people, who don't take the time to write.

Check out the article here
as well as many resources on Chris' site.  He has excellent training and resources for church hospitality and evangelism. In addition, he's a thoughtful, insightful writer--I highly recommend his material.

CLICK HERE to go to this site: http://www.evangelismcoach.org

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Filed Under: Church Connection Cards, Evangelism & Outreach Tagged With: Church Connection Cards, church hospitality, church visitor cards, church visitors

Connection Cards for Mother’s Day–essential tools for follow-up

8 May, 2012 By Yvon Prehn Leave a Comment

Mother's Day Connection Card, free card
Click on the image to download a free, ready-to-print PDF of this card.

Connection Cards are vitally important for your Mother's Day outreach success, because if visitors don't give you their contact information, you won't be able to follow-up with them. You might have a huge attendance on Mother's Day, but if the next Sunday is back to your usual numbers, you've missed a great opportunity to connect.

If you give church visitors an opportunity to share a question or a prayer request, you will be amazed at how many people will share with you. If you follow-up promptly and compassionately, you will make a significant connection.

To save you time in this important task, I've created some cards that are ready for you to print and use. The files below are part of a ZIP file below.  For each of the cards illustrated below it has:

  • A PDF ready-to-print file
  • Editable MS Publisher file
  • PNG image (perhaps you want to add it to a PowerPoint announcement and encourage people to fill it out)

Additional designs of Mother's Day Connection Cards

This file is FREE and the link is at the end if the article.

The additional designs: various styles, clipart, photo images, spot color of the Connection Cards that are in the ZIP FILE:

Mother's Day Connection Card, free card

 

 

FREE DOWNLOAD OF ZIP file:

CLICK HERE to download your file.

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Filed Under: Church Connection Cards, Mother's Day, Seasonal Tagged With: Church Connection Cards, church visitor cards, connection cards, Mothers Day Connection Cards

Connection Cards for Christmas

13 December, 2011 By Yvon Prehn Leave a Comment

FREE Christmas Connection Card
Click on this image to download the FREE PDF file; all the other images below are part of a file for Effective Church Communication Members.

After all your hard work to get people to come to your Christmas events, you want to make sure you make a connection with them so that they will return to your church after the holidays. To do that you need to capture names and contact information.

These Connection Cards  for Christmas are a simple-to-create, but very useful tool. The one to the left is free for everyone, just click to download the PDF, print and use.

At the end of this article is a link to a ZIP FILE that has ready-to-print PDFs of all the images below, including  two versions that can be printed with color separations if you have a digital duplicator.

In addition  the ZIP file contains editable MS Publisher files of all the cards plus hi-res images of them. The ZIP FILE is free also. [Read more...]

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Filed Under: Christmas, Church Connection Cards Tagged With: Christmas Connection Card, Christmas Visitor Card, Church Christmas Connect Card, Church Connection Cards, Church Visitor Card, church visitor card template, connection cards, Free Church Connection Card

Special Event Connection Cards: Samples, Examples of MS Publisher Editable files, PDFs, JPGs

19 October, 2010 By Yvon Prehn 1 Comment

For your Outreach or Bridge event to be truly successful, you need to connect with the people who come to it on an ongoing basis. These Connection Cards are one of the most effective ways to do that. Click here or on the image to download a PDF Preview of the Connection Cards that are in this file.

Below is the link to a ZIP file that has for the cards:

A PDF that is ready to print

If you like the images and wording, the all you have to do is open the PDF and print it out. Each of the images is one-quarter of an 8 1/2 by 11 inch page.

An editable MS Publisher File

Just open the Publisher file and you can edit the Connection Card in any way you like—change the wording,  image, or the color. If you are going to be doing a two-color printing of a Connection Card using a digital duplicator, I've found the easiest way to do it is to do a "Save As" of one color, e.g. for the Christmas one, Save a GREEN MASTER. Then do a "Save As" of black, e.g. a BLACK MASTER and then print each pass using each of these. This is makes it really simple. Be sure to save the combined file first if you ever want to print it on a copier or as one color.

JPG image

This is included for you to use if you want on your PowerPoint presentations, in your bulletin or however else you want to use them. You may want to tell your entire congregation via PowerPoint or in your church newsletter or website  that you have these cards and want people to encourage others to fill them out. You may want to use the images to do training of your volunteers for the event itself--whatever you need it for these images are there for you!

Below is a ZIP file that has all the materials described above.

How to open a ZIP file

Click on the link below and a box will come up asking if you want to "Open" or "Save" the file. You want to SAVE it. I recommend that you save it to your desktop so it is easier to find. The download will take a couple of minutes or more depending upon your Internet speed. Once the download is complete, double-click on the file. If a dialog box comes up, follow what it says, if not just double-click on the files and that will open the file that has all three forms of each Connection Card ready for you to use.

CLICK HERE to download the ZIP file that has the editable MS Publisher Files, JPGs, and ready-to print PDFs of these Special Event Connection Cards.

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Filed Under: Church Connection Cards, Connection Card Templaltes, TEMPLATES Tagged With: Christmas Connection Card, Church Connection Cards, special event connection cards, Valuentines Connection Card

How Connection Cards improved visitor and prayer request response—true church story

16 September, 2010 By Yvon Prehn Leave a Comment

An encouraging email about connection cards
True story: how connection cards helped a church connect with visitors.

None of us do the work we do in communications without great concern for how it actually impacts the people we want to reach. That's why I appreciate it so much when I hear back from any of you on what worked in your church. Following is an email from Rona Heenk, a church communicator in Washington state. Thanks so much to Rona for her encouraging words to me and all of us—what you do DOES make a difference!

She inspired me to do an ECC training video on Connection Cards, click here to go to it.

PLEASE send me any stories you have of what has worked in your church so I can pass it on to others. Email to: yvon@effectivechurchcom.com.

Here is Rona's story (no editing, all her words):

Yvon,

I wanted to give you some feedback on something unrelated to the webinar, which I thought would be encouraging to you:

Based on the advice in your booklet on Connection Cards, I presented to the senior pastor the idea of a new Connection Card, putting it in the bulletin as an insert, and asking everyone to fill one out each week. He discussed it with the other pastors, and they agreed to the new card, but were reluctant to ask everyone to fill it out, so we continued to do what we were doing, which was to ask visitors to take one out of the chair back and fill it out and turn it in with the offering.

After a few months our response rate hadn't changed--maybe one visitor card turned in per month, and at most one or two prayer requests each week. About half the time we had zero cards turned in. I just kept praying about it, and waiting for a good opportunity to re-visit the idea.

 

Then, the week after Easter during our staff meeting, I mentioned that we had an attendance that was about 70 over our average attendance, yet NOT ONE visitor filled out a card. Our senior pastor sat up and paid attention, and asked if I had any ideas to improve that.... open door!! I "happened" to have the booklet and your latest article from Christian Computing Magazine with me, and presented the idea again, quoting your statement that basically said, "The Connection Card is the only real link we have to reach out to newcomers, and to be able to respond to questions and needs." That seemed to cement the idea that it was time to try something new, and he put into the minutes that our current way of handling the Connection Cards is NOT working, and suggested to the elders that they come to their meeting the next night prepared to discuss it.

Next thing I knew, they came to me and asked me to make it happen!

So, we began by sending out some email communication to the congregation about what we would be doing, and most of all, WHY. Last Sunday, May 2, we tried it for the first time, and guess what? No one complained, we got lots of responses, including TWO that were filled out by people who were first-time visitors. We got more prayer requests and people asking for information than we usually do, and I got three email addresses I didn't already have on file.

I even had a couple of cards come back with notes of encouragement to me, thanking me! (In the emails I had used a statement something like "Remember what it was like when you were the new person somewhere? The last thing you wanted to do was something that would draw attention to yourself, as if to say 'look at me, I'm a visitor!'" and I think that is what resonated with them.)

Anyway, I thought you'd be encouraged to hear how your communication ideas have been put into action! Feel free to quote me on anything here if you want to. I feel so strongly that we who are in the church need to do everything we can to learn to communicate EFFECTIVELY, and your material is one of the few resources I've ever seen that is up-to-date, thorough, and specifically addresses the unique needs of a church communicator.
Blessings!!

______________________

For more information about the book mentioned in this article: Connection cards: connect with visitors, grow your church, pastor your people, little cards, big results, click here.

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Filed Under: Church Connection Cards Tagged With: church communication basics, Church Connection Cards, church visitor cards, church visitors, Communications, yvon prehn

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