Effective Church Communications
Effective Church Communications provides Timeless Strategy and Biblical Inspiration to help churches create communications that fully fulfill the Great Commission
Print is still one of the most powerful ways to communicate because if you do up a print piece, such as a postcard and it is placed on the refrigerator--you can't help but see it many times!
The US Postal Service reminded us of that in a little video they did, and a clip of that is in the very short video that follows. At the end of the video is a link that will take you to the template page shown.
To see the video full-screen, click on the little square at the lower, right-hand corner. Enjoy!
note: it's never too early to start planning for Christmas and though this article is specifically related to Christmas, the overall strategy is useful for all holidays and lots are ahead!
As we were discussing promotion for the Christmas Eve service at our church, our worship pastor said, “Yeah, even I came to church on Christmas Eve before I was a Christian.” His words are a reminder of the incredible opportunities we have to connect people with Jesus through the events we host during the holidays. Read on for ways to make your holiday outreach communications successful.
You cannot create any one holiday outreach communication that will be effective in involving people in your holiday activities.
It doesn’t matter how great your outreach marketing piece looks, how flawless the printing, how inspired your slogan, no one piece can carry the weight of assuring a good turnout for a Christmas event. This is not to say that these things don’t matter, because they do, but the key thing to remember is that no one printed or emailed piece will do it.
It takes a team of efforts both in publications and in preaching. One message from a variety of sources, repeated a number of times in a number of ways is what results in effective turnout. Here are some procedural tips on how to go about achieving success in your holiday outreach marketing efforts.
1. Spend time in prayer first of all asking God to impress on your heart the seriousness and the privilege of our opportunities this time of year. Remember, this might be your one opportunity to share the gospel of Jesus with visitors and relatives. The eternal destiny of people can be decided at your church this holiday season.
Challenge yourself to go beyond a nice little devotional thought to make your congregation feel good at Christmas—pray for fire in your soul as you prepare and motivate your people. Jesus is the reason for the season, not because we needed a reason to buy stuff, but because at Christmas we celebrate Him as God who became flesh to save us from our sins. What prophets and people anticipated for millenia, as they looked forward to the Messiah, we must be careful not to trivialize.
2. Based on your time with the Lord, as a ministry team, decide what you want your Christmas message to be. Come up with one overall theme and a slogan that summarizes it. This is key because you want all of your advertising, publications, and preaching to reflect that one theme. You will change the medium that you use, but your core message must stay the same for maximum retention and response.
3. Select graphics, colors, images to portray that theme and use them consistently throughout all your advertisements. People often say to me, “If I keep saying things the same way, my audience will get bored.” Wrong. Audiences don’t get bored, audiences get confused. Great advertising campaigns always keep a core message the same for a lengthy period of time for it to have impact. Think about the “Got Milk?” or "Just do it!" or any other marketing campaign that is successful for illustrations of this.
4. Decide on a variety of ways to communicate your message; use and repeat as many as you can. We live in a time of multi-channel communication where we need to use different ways to reach different age and interest groups. Communicate your message through postcards, bulletin announcements and inserts, invitations, web page entries, email blasts, verbal reminders, phone calls, social media, Facebook, Twitter, whatever you can.
5. You’ve got the team tools, now recruit the rest of your team: your people. For any holiday outreach to be really successful, every person in the congregation has to be convinced that THEY need to be the ones inviting their friends, praying for them and working hard to get them there. Remember it isn’t your job to get folks there, your job is to equip the saints so they can do the work of the ministry.
Not only is the best way to get a large group of people to your events this way, but even more important, your people will grow in their understanding of outreach and commitment to it.
1. Space out the message in your preaching and comments. Starting as soon as possible, I am recommending to our music pastor, based on his comment, that he start saying things like, “As I look ahead to Christmas, I remember what it was like before I knew the Lord,” and then follow up with comments on how important it is to think about the people in their circle of friends who are in a similar situation.
2. Continue to encourage and challenge your people to invite their friends. Remind them to pray for their friends and remind them to attend. Give them the tools you’ve prepared, postcards, invitations, door-hangers, digital invitations and suggestions and have them get them out there.
3. Be sure to prepare materials that you give out at the Christmas events themselves that explain everything that is going on at your church. It will have a very negative effect on the gospel message if guests can’t find the bathrooms, coffee, or are confused as to where to take their kids for child care.
4. Don’t forget that this is a fantastic opportunity to let guests know about what else will be going on at your church following the holidays. In addition, ALWAYS include a gospel presentation, either one written by the pastoral staff at your church or one of the tasteful tracts by the American Tract Society, from your denomination, or written by your pastor. If you need ideas, CLICK HERE for a number of articles with examples of Gospel presentations.
To illustrate the importance of these pieces, let me share a story. Some church leaders were asking me how they could get more of a follow up response from people who attended their huge Christmas outreach. They did a fantastic job and yearly put on an almost Broadway quality Christmas play—but seldom had much follow up response from people, in terms of coming back to the church, nor did they know what effect the play actually had on people coming to know Jesus.
When I asked to see what they gave to people at the event to both explain the gospel message in printed form, how they got information to follow up, what they gave out to let people know what their church did on a regular basis and to invite people to events the coming week, all I got was a blank stare.
“Uh….we don’t give them anything,” was the reply.
“What?” I said, rather incredulous, while wondering if they lived in a community where perhaps mind-reading chemicals were distributed in the water, because if you don’t tell people these things in print, digitally and verbally, there is no way other than mind-reading for them to find out.
“We don’t give them anything because we don’t want to be pushy at a festive event.”
I wanted to ask if they would rather be pushy or allow people to spend eternity separated from God, but I thought once I got started, I knew I might not be able to quit yelling or crying and I knew neither wouldn't teach anyone anything.
“Oh, my,” was my reply and we then went on to discuss more effective communication methods. Here is the reality of the situation.
And it isn’t pushy to let them know the valuable events hosted by your church that will help them grow in their Christian faith and live a meaningful life. Many guests who come to holiday events do not know what churches do on a regular basis. A simple insert or invitation that says something like: “We hope you enjoyed our Christmas program and we would love to have you come back for……” and then list your regular services and programs. People are looking for ways to find friends and meaning in life—but they won’t know about what your church offers if you don’t tell them.
The holidays are a demanding time, but a great time to welcome people into the kingdom of God. Be sure to spend time daily praying for strength to everything the Lord wants you to do as we celebrate His birth.
As often happens, marketing is currently taking a bashing in some ministry magazines and blogs. Though I am one of the first people to decry the evils of untrue church marketing—in my mind epitomized by the commercial website headers of mostly white, all thin, happy folks—when few folks at the churches I know look anything like that—especially when you look at the church universal and the tragedy of hunger domestically and worldwide...but I digress.
As I was saying, though marketing can be used in untrue, unworthy of the gospel ways, to bash "marketing" with a broad brush as evil is like saying because Jim Jones of Jonestown massacre was a preacher that all preaching is evil.
Intro note: The following material is from the book, Ministry Marketing Made Easy, by Yvon Prehn. A PDF of this material is available as a download, by CLICKING HERE and at the end of the article. You have permission to make as many copies as you need for your staff, congregation, or volunteers.
Some church people are genuinely concerned about marketing and wonder about the appropriateness of marketing in the church. This is a valid concern and an important one to address. This chapter presents a biblical view of respectful marketing and provides biblical and practical examples of appropriate uses of marketing in the church.
I strongly recommend you take time to go over this chapter as a staff and with the leadership of your church. If you don't and people in your church have concerns that are not answered, you can be certain they will come out and often, not in pleasant ways.
You want everyone (as much as is possible) in the church to be of one heart in your communication and marketing efforts. Yes, it takes time to explain why you are doing what you are doing, but the oneness of heart that should be the result is worth it.
Marketing misconceptions defined and defused [Read more...]
Welcome to the Video: Foundation: The Uniqueness of Church Communications, including the Five Steps of Effective Church Communications and Marketing and why marketing is not evil
If you are serious about wanting to create communications that will not only look professional, but will make a significant impact on growing your church in numbers and your people in spiritual maturity, this video and the other videos on this site will enable you to do that. It is not quick or easy, but it will be effective. This video sets up the important foundation for what we do and why we do church communications.
Below the video is a PDF of notes and one for more resources.
Click on the image to download the PDF
Welcome to the first of our Online Video, Foundation: The Uniqueness of Church Communications, including the Five Steps of Effective Church Communications and Marketing and why marketing is not evil
If you are serious about wanting to create communications that will not only look professional, but will make a significant impact on growing your church in numbers and your people in spiritual maturity, this video training series will enable you to do that. It is not quick or easy, but it will be effective. This video sets up the important foundation for what we do and why we do church communication
Click on the image to download the PDF
The title of this article is a trick question. There is no BEST way to market anything to everyone. However, video is obviously an extremely powerful medium as the current advertising campaign by the Mormon Church illustrates. Some comments about that project, some suggestions for creating your own videos, plus some suggestions on how you can combine video with other communication resources follow for an effective multi-channel outreach.
{+}
Most likely you’ve seen some of the “I am a Mormon” videos on television or on the web. If you haven’t, I encourage you to look at them at www.mormon.org. I must admit to a bit of trepidation in referring you to the site because it is very powerful in advancing the Mormon religion.
My trepidation comes from the fact that I am not a Mormon and that I do not believe it is a Christian faith that correctly represents my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ (for excellent apologetic resources about the Mormon Church, go to www.equip.org).
That being said, you cannot help but greatly admire the overall campaign and the extraordinary production quality of the videos and the site. They have taken a large cross-section of people and through video and text have them tell their story. The stories are from women, single fathers, people of various races. The cynic in me notes the somewhat excessive attempt to break from the stereotype of Mormons as primarily white males, but cynical or not, the message comes across that all sorts of people, people like you and me, are Mormon.
The videos are short and though they focus on people telling their story, each story is a very carefully edited view of life that emphasizes Mormon values without much detailed information about theology. In short, they have perfectly captured the spirit of the age where relationships are primary and asking deep questions is pushed aside for warm feelings and the appeal of being part of a caring, loving group such as this.
This is not the time or place to critique in depth their theology, but as an example of extraordinarily well-done videos to advertise a church, they are brilliant.
Few churches have the resources to create videos of this quality—though some do and of course this magazine has a sister publication that is filled with great information all about video ministry. Be sure to sign up for it if you don’t get it at: http://www.christianvideomag.com.
A resource that I personally cannot recommend enough is www.webvideouniverity.com. There are lots of video training programs out there that, in my opinion, were too over the top to be really useful to the average person (not video ministry unit in a large church), who simply wanted to do some videos for teaching and ministry.
The person who runs the site, Dave Kaminski is an excellent, teacher who knows his topic extremely well and can explain it effortlessly. I personally highly recommend that you sign up for his video tip of the week and you can do that on his site, www.webvideouniversity.com. He offers an excellent, professional training course, plus training on specific topic including How to do Screencasts and How to use your flip-style camera to create videos. Please remember my ministry does not participate in affiliate programs or take advertising—I recommend what I genuinely like. To read a more detailed article on how his training helped me, go to this link:
Once you have created videos, you need to let people know they are available. You can do this in a variety of ways.
Social networking is an obvious one. You can upload videos to the numerous video sharing sites available, but if, like the Mormon videos, you may want to drive people back to your primary site, don’t upload all of them to YouTube or Vimeo or whatever else you use. Upload only a few teaser ones with links to your primary site.
Putting up links to short teaser videos, announcements of them, and links to a complete video site are obvious content choices for your church’s Facebook, Twitter and similar sites. We have recently assigned a person in our adult education class at church to be our “internet evangelist.” Her job is to continuously update our Facebook and Twitter accounts, plus interact and link with the main church site and the various members Facebook pages.
If you’ve done some things online that you and your people love, follow the lead of many national advertising companies and use print to inform people that the online material exists and to link them to it. Check out your snail mail this week and note how many advertisements, especially in the form of postcards, are created to get you to a website.
You can either do a postcard mailing from your church or you can create postcards in church office, and make up enough of them for every person in the congregation to have 3 of them. Put them in the church bulletin and then on Sunday morning, have the Pastor ask everyone to give or mail them out to friends or neighbors who might like to look at your videos.
We’ve found business cards with a condensed message are a great way to get people to our church and ministry websites. Make up a large number of them for the members of your congregation, give them out and encourage people to pass them on to friends. In the midst of life, we have lots of conversations and if your people are excited about some videos you have produced online, maybe even if they are part of it, they will want to tell their friends about it. Always having a business card with you that has the URL is a great way to share and connect with friends.
Creating print items for your people to give out accomplishes lots more than simply adding another communication channel. You are also involving your people in outreach in an active, hands-on way.
Outreach is the task of everyone in the church—not just of those whose job it is to create professional communications while the people in the pew sit quietly and wait for new people to come. When you have invitation cards or postcards and everyone is involved in handing them out, they will most likely talk to the person to whom they are giving the card and nothing beats a personal recommendation for great marketing, whether it is for coffee or churches.
When the church is growing because people are involved in inviting, it also helps them be more welcoming when newcomers arrive—they are expected and prayed for.
Yes, it is more work to create the print communications and involve your people in using them, but remember when Jesus gave the Great Commission, he didn't pull aside a select group of marketers or pastors to go and share the gospel message. He gave the challenge to everyone listening. Sharing, marketing your church is everyone's job.
Video may not be the most powerful way to advertise your church, but if you create them yourself with honest, true content and use combine your use of video with other channels of communication; you will have a tool in the never-ending challenge of ministry to powerfully communicate your message.
