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.

Marketing is not inherently evil–and why content makes all the difference

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You don't have to do crazy things to involve people in ministry
You don't have to do crazy things to involve people in ministry and church activities.

Marketing is not inherently evil any more than talking is inherently evil. The content makes all the difference.

We can talk in a way that exaggerates, misleads, and is obnoxious or we can talk in a way that is gentle, kind, and informative.

This morning I received two emails that illustrated this difference and I want to share them here and then comment on their implications from them ministry marketing in our churches.

Editorial clarification: I published this initially a couple of years ago and just found it again and thought it might be useful as so much marketing on the web continues to be of the overly pushy, loud, in-your-face type. This isn't necessary and we shouldn't copy it. I don't know if the obnoxious site still exists, but Lightstock still does wonderful work, check them out.

Here is a short video of both video links and after the video, my commentary on them. Please remember Effective Church Communications does not take advertising or take part in affiliate programs. If I like or dislike something it is my opinion related to ministry usefulness, not to any monetary agenda. Check out the video below and then read the commentary:

 A tacky and obnoxious marketing example

The link below is an example of the now overly popular squeeze or landing page.  If you are not familiar with these communication tools, here is a good definition:

Landing page is pretty much synonymous with sales letter. It's a hard sell page that pitches a product with several calls to action.

from: http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.phpf?857520-Squeeze-page-vs-landing-page

The link here is attempting to sell some software that will automatically link content on your websites to various social media sites. There are many problems with this approach including that though automatic linking to social sites can be useful. I use a tool that links the headlines of the articles on this website I write to my Twitter account (http://www.twitter.com/yvonprehn) but that tool is free and bundled in WordPress, the system I use to build my website. Given the skimming nature of Twitter (and I don't check it often and seldom interact through it), I feel like this is an honest representation of the level of involvement I want with it and feel is useful for the ministry at present.

In addition, the basic premise of the pitch for this product is faulty—automatic links, if solely used, come across as phony, automatic links and they often don't make sense.

People aren't stupid and Google isn't stupid. Automatic spamming of anything no matter how efficient, isn't a useful communication tool.

A tasteful and helpful advertisement

This example is from http://www.lightstock.com. I don't have the link to the specific ad because that came to me via email (that's why I did the video above) but here is what I like about this advertisement:

  • No hype, it simply presents what the company has to offer
  • It is beautiful and restful to look at
  • It makes the product offerings clear and links to the products if you want more
  • It both has material that is free and material for sale
  • It respects the viewer—if their product is something the viewer wants, he or she will click-through and buy. If not, they have given the viewer a few minutes of visual inspiration.

If you didn't look at the video, please do visit their site http://www.lightstock.com and take advantage of their free weekly images and video clips.

Ministry communication implications

When you want people to attend an event at your church or take part in any ministry opportunity, don’t feel like you have to pressure them or hard sell them.

Be clear, be concise, be kind, be complete in your message. Do the best you can to tell about the ministry truly and from a Biblical perspective. Having done that, get your message out in as many channels as you can, as many times as you can and trust the Lord to speak to the people He wants to draw to your church.

 

 

 

Church Invitation Cards, business cards with an eternity-altering purpose

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Free church invitation.
Make up cards like this for your church members to invite others to church. Links to a FREE copy of this one and others is at the end of the article.

How do you get unchurched people into your church?

Despite all the high-tech and expensive advertising methods available today, one method remains the most effective way to get new people to come to your and that is a personal invitation. Your members inviting their friends to church beats any advertising campaign at any cost.

While it is sometimes sadly true that once someone becomes converted, they soon have few friends who are not believers, no one totally withdraws from the world. Most people still work at secular jobs. Everyone has many contacts a week with people in the business community: the waitress or waiter at the coffee shop, the Starbucks employees, the clerks at various stores, the person standing next to them in lines at the grocery store, airports, or the driver’s license bureau, the person sitting next to them on the bus or subway. [Read more...]

Don’t be guilty of bait and switch in your communications

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Presenting one image on-line but being very different in reality isn't what you want to do as a church communicator. Always be who YOU are where God placed you.

Don't be guilty of bait and switch in your communications wherein you send out some slick, fancy printed piece, or display an over-designed, glitzy website if you're a little church plant meeting in a basement. Big, glossy and professional is not always more appealing—many people are looking for a real, intimate, and honest interaction about God. They might miss you if you come across looking too slick and professional. Worse, if they come expecting a big, fancy church and find you meeting in the church basement, they might assume that if you lied about who you are in your advertising and outreach, you might be presenting a false picture of God, Jesus, or salvation.

This is especially important for church plants. YOU DO NOT need to spend a lot of money on slick advertising. One of the best outreach pieces you can do is a simple business card that describes your church, tells people when you meet, how to get there and that displays your website, and social media info. Give them to your current members and tell them to share with their friends and the people they contact as they go about their daily lives. Every invitation becomes a personal one and is far more effective.

Keep in mind the parable of the talents

Jesus did not expect a person with one talent to do the work of the five talent person, but Jesus expected the one-talent person to make the most of what he or she had. If you are a tiny church with few resources, don't feel you have to create publications or a website like the ones you saw at whatever big church conference the staff most recently attended.

You could be burying your talent in a purchased design because it would not be an honest reflection of your church. Be who YOU are, communicate to your people with the resources you have, and the Lord will bless your efforts.

Variety is standard in professional communication

Contrary to what some communication companies want you to believe, there is no ONE perfect way to create any one communication piece. There is no ONE way to do any communication that is THE PROFESSIONAL way to do it. There is tremendous variety in all professionally created communications depending primarily on the target audience they want to reach with their message.

An excellent example of this is the variety in magazines. Go to your local Barnes and Noble or other big book store and look at the magazines. The design, style, and even the paper used, for example, is very different for Architectural Digest than it is for Car and Driver. Both are professional, well-designed publications, but both serve different audiences and their style reflects that audience, not some absolute, unrealistic standard.

For the editor of Car and Driver to think he'd be more professional or cutting edge if he created an issue of his magazine in the same style as Architectural Digest would make about as much sense as it makes for the pastor of a small neighborhood church pastor of a 250-member church in a farming community to attend a mega-church creativity conference in Dallas, come home and decide the church needs to create publications that look like the ones the mega-church in Dallas created. That is just goofy. [Read more...]

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...]

3,000 on your membership list; 350 on Sunday? It may be a problem with your internal marketing

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Don't forget internal marketing in your church
When creating your outreach plans, remember it's just as important to plan INTERNAL marketing for people already attending your church.

A common challenge for many churches today is that they may have 2,000 to 3,000 people listed on the church rolls, but only a fraction of them show up each week.

Though there are many reasons for this, one key reason for is that many churches do little to no internal marketing. If a business never followed up with customers, but simply greeted them warmly when they came in the door, but never contacted them again, never sent a sale flyer or had any other contact with them, the customer would probably not return. A church is not very different.

Most churches put the majority of their church marketing and communication efforts on getting people outside the church to come to the church. Though this is important, we shouldn't stop there and just like the customer above, if a church doesn't work on communicating with current members, they may not see them often.

We also have more reasons to do internal marketing than the local business. Remember, Jesus commanded us to make disciples, not simply worship and special event attendees. We need to learn to use every tool of technology available to get people involved in the activities and ministries of our churches that will take them to the next step of Christian maturity. To do this we need to plan out our internal marketing and it works best if you have a coordinated approach using both social media and print.

Internal marketing defined

Internal marketing includes all the communications you create for people already attending your church to get them involved in the activities of your church or ministry that will help them grow to maturity in their Christian life. Not only is this important when people come to your church after a special event, but it is important on a continuing basis.

Far too often this aspect of marketing and communications does not take place in the church and if it does, it is done in an often haphazard and spotty way. This lack of attention to this aspect of marketing is seldom intentional. It happens because:

  • The church staff does not see the importance of need to do this kind of marketing because of the unspoken assumption that people will automatically attend small groups, training times and other activities of the church.
  • Because it is important to the staff, they think it is important to the congregation, but this is seldom true.
  • Church staff is too stressed out and overworked to do one more thing in communications and marketing than they are already doing.
  • There is no intentional plan for internal marketing and no way to measure the effectiveness of the program.
  • Internal marketing is only done through one channel—if that's social media primarily (as much is today) this doesn't have a an impact on people who prefer print or don't have access to digital channels.

Following are suggestions on how to begin to remedy this situation: [Read more...]