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.

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: [Read more...]

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

[Read more...]

What not to do in connection card ministry, part one

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What not to do with Connection Cards, part 1
PLEASE don't do these things if you really want to connect with visitors!

note: this is an excerpt from the book: Connection Cards, connect with visitors, grow your church, pastor your people

I’ve been teaching church communications for over twenty years and have looked at many communication cards and discussed their use with many church communicators during that time. From my experience, and many years of personally using them in a variety of church settings, I’ve found the following activities and tools don’t contribute to maximum communication success in getting either initial contact or continuing ministry information from people.

I also realize that, though not the most successful, many of the following practices have been done by many churches for a long time and it is difficult to imagine doing things a different way. If that is your situation, please suspend defensiveness or judgment until you’ve finished this entire publication to see the recommendations that might replace these actions.

Change is always challenging and difficult and if your church does some of the things listed below, I appreciate your willingness to consider alternative ideas. After each suggestion of what not to do, I’ll briefly list the alternative action as “A better idea,” and after this section, the alternative actions will be discussed in more detail.

#1 Don’t use “Friendship Pads/Booklets”

In some churches, much more so in the past than today, the procedure for capturing contact information from visitors and members involves a booklet with lined pages inside that is passed down the pew for people to fill in and then passed back down the pew to be collected by ushers.  As it is passed back, the leader often recommends that people “Notice who is a visitor.”

This tends not to work very well for visitors today. There are a number of reasons why, one of the main ones being the current privacy concerns of people. To many, this is simply too public a way to give out personal information.

Perhaps I am more sensitive to this because I work with single adults, but to a ask a single woman who visits your church to write her name, address, phone number, email, and then pass it down a row of strangers, while adding that people make note of new people in the pew beside them—she probably won’t do it.  Most likely you don’t have people in your church who will stalk or take advantage of a single woman alone, but the trust level towards the church or strangers, for many people today, men and women, is quite low.

These “Friendship Pads” may have worked well years ago when the world at least seemed to be a safer and more friendly place, but our world has changed.  In addition to personal safety issues, privacy concerns and concerns about identity theft cause many visitors to pass them on without filling them out.

A better idea: a card that can be filled out, folded over, and personal information handed in without being made visible to others.

#2 Don’t use a tear-off piece

There are several reasons for this—consider them carefully  before discounting my comments, because this method is used in lots of churches and it seems like such a simple and easy way to do things.First of all, if you primarily use connection cards to find out about visitors, keep in mind that study after study shows that visitors do not like to stand out. Being the one person in your row tearing out a piece of paper in an otherwise quiet church service is a rather loud operation and one guaranteed to turn heads in the visitor’s direction. Few people want that to happen.

To avoid that situation, some churches have everyone “tear it off all together.” That seemed like a good solution to me (it’s what is done at the church we now attend) until we brought to church a dear woman who had recently become a believer in her late 60s. As everyone was tearing off their form in church, I was watching her out of the corner of my eye and noticed she was having a rather difficult time grasping the flimsy paper. The arthritis in her hands made it difficult and after several tries, obviously embarrassed, she glanced around and tried to unobtrusively put the bulletin down beside her. Her connection card did not get turned in; no follow-up came from the church, and though she wouldn’t really tell me why, she didn’t want to come there again.

My heart hurt watching her and I thought if it makes one little lady embarrassed, if she can’t communicate to the church her visit, her recent spiritual decision or perhaps a prayer request, perhaps there are better ways to use a connections piece. There are lots of little ladies in our world. People come to know Jesus and visit at church for the first time at many ages and with disabilities of varies types  and we don’t want our method of paper handling to get in the way of connecting with them.

A better idea: a separate connection card made of card stock that does not need to be torn out and that is easy to write on. Specifics on how to create the card are discussed later.

____________________________

Church Connection Cards

.......for more read the rest of the book:

This 8 1/2 x 11 book connection cards has 111 pages of instruction, samples and detailed how tos. It is FREE for ECC Members and can be bought for immediate download. CLICK HERE to go to it. To go to the Kindle and paperback versions, CLICK HERE.

What not to do in connection card ministry, part two

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What not to do with Connection Cards, part two
Connection Cards don't work automatically--and here are some reasons why.

note: this is an excerpt from the book: Connection Cards, connect with visitors, grow your church, pastor your people

#3 Don’t tell people about connection cards without giving them time to fill them out.

This is probably the single biggest reason churches do not get connection cards turned in. In most churches, either the pastor or another church leader will mention the connection card very quickly in passing, often when people are still standing up after singing a song. Sometimes it will be mentioned when people are sitting down, but often then it is part of a long series of announcements and no time is given so people can actually fill it out. [Read more...]