Effective Church Communications

The Effective Church Communication ministry from Yvon Prehn provides inspiration, training, and resources to help your church create communications that fully fulfill the Great Commission. It focuses on Bible-based and timeless principles and strategies that work no matter what digital or print channel you use to create your communications. The site has links to many free TEMPLATES and other resources, plus links to free TRAINING VIDEOS, and a RESOURCE LIBRARY for church communicators. 

The Effective Church Communication ministry from Yvon Prehn provides inspiration, training, and resources to help your church create communications that fully fulfill the Great Commission. It focuses on Bible-based and timeless principles and strategies that work no matter what digital or print channel you use to create your communications. The site has links to many free TEMPLATES and other resources, plus links to free TRAINING VIDEOS, and a RESOURCE LIBRARY for church communicators.
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Summer seasonal PR for 4th of July and Summer Events

16 June, 2021 By Yvon Prehn Leave a Comment

This entry has a number of materials that are useful for connecting with people for special summer events.

One is a bulletin insert that takes the line from the song, "America, America, God shed his grace on thee," and turns the word GRACE into a prayer. It is useful for our American audience, but we haven't forgotten the members and visitors to this site who do not live in America.

In addition is a Postcard for summer outreach and a fantastic brisket recipe. The Summer outreach postcard will work for any summer event (personalize with your own details on the back); the Brisket recipe is a great handout or give-away card for any time of the year.

This entry also contains a download link for a zip file of the jpg images and ready-to-print PDFs for all three of the publications illustrated below. It also contains editable MS Publisher files for both the Summer postcard and the Brisket Recipe. It does not have an editable MS Publisher file for the 4th of July insert because I did not have permission to do that with the artwork I used.

You can download just the PDF of the 4th of July Bulletin insert, by clicking here or on the flyer image.

Below the images is the link to the ZIP file of all the publications:

Here are the images in the file:
4th of July imageRefreshing postcard imageBBQ recipe card

To download the ZIP file that contains all the jpgs, PDFs, and MS Publisher Files, click on the link below.

 

 

Click here to download the ZIP file. Save it to your hard drive and click to open it and use the files.

 

to download the ZIP file. Save it to your hard drive and click to open it and use the files to download the ZIP file. Save it to your hard drive and click to open it and use the files.to download the ZIP file. Save it to your hard drive and click to open it and use the files.

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Filed Under: Fourth of July & Summer celebrations Tagged With: 4th of July flyer, church marketing, church outreach, Communications, recipe cards, yvon prehn

An incredible example of speaking to YOUR audience, of tailoring a message to a specific group

19 February, 2020 By Yvon Prehn Leave a Comment

Focus on YOUR people when creating communications
We need to get our audience in focus and clearly see them before we can successfully create communications for them.

One piece of advice I frequently give church communicators when creating their materials is to always keep in mind their specific church, location, audience. Templates can be useful, and this also includes the templates I create for you, but no matter what the design, if it does fit for your people, either modify it or use something else.

I know my templates won't fit for every church and though I try to do things in a variety of styles, for some churches I'll totally miss the mark. For others, they will be exactly what they need.

With the strategy of always designing your communications with YOUR audience in mind as background, on one of the church communication groups, I'm part of had one of the BEST examples of designing with a particular audience inside that I've ever seen and I wanted to share it with you.

Without further babbling on my part, here it is:

The question to the group was to share an example of church advertising. Here is one reply:

Michael Tuszynski Here in Utah, there's a church that runs roadside billboards (yes, they still work if they are done right). The two ads simply read:
"church with coffee?" - picture of someone with a coffee
{church website}
"church without a tie?" - someone in a dress shirt, sans tie
{church website}
For context, in Utah the dominant religion is Mormonism. They don't drink coffee, and they wear ties to their services every Sunday.
Both of the ads do SUPER well for that church and it doesn't say much of anything. However, because of its simplicity, it was brilliant.

It was brilliant because it cut to the heart of issues near and dear to its intended audience.

The challenge to all of us

What is it that we can do that will speak to the HEART of our audience?

The deeper question, of course, is how well do we know our audience? If we want to invite or minister to a particular group of people, how well do we know them, their needs, fears, wants?

What style will appeal to them or repulse them? What media channels do they frequent?

Before you answer, be sure you aren't simply designing in a style or in media channels YOU feel most comfortable using.

It might be a little uncomfortable to be honest in your outreach. We might think the above example is brilliant, but I imagine it was somewhat scary to put that out there the first time.

Brainstorm, pray, ask someone in the group you want to reach how they react to your creations.

If you come up with something unique to a particular group, please share it with us. Send it to me at yvon@effectivechurchcom.com.

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Filed Under: Blog, Church Outreach and Marketing, Outreach Samples Tagged With: church outreach, design for your audience, example of advertising, personalized outreach

A new look at Lent—baby steps to Christian walking worthy of our salvation

2 February, 2020 By Yvon Prehn 1 Comment

Lent reminds us to live for Jesus
Lent reminds us of the cost of our salvation and challenges us to live for Jesus.

I confess I was scared into becoming a Christian.—

As a little kid, I heard about hell in church, and I knew I didn't want to go there.

I had a Grandma who loved Jesus, the Bible, and who demonstrated every possible Christian virtue at home and to her neighbors. But wanting to be like my Grandma (which I did) wasn't my overwhelming concern regarding a relationship with God. Every night before I went to bed at the end of my prayers I would always add, "And please God, let me go to heaven when I die and not to hell."

Though we went to church every Sunday, that prayer tormented me until a Good News Bible Club teacher explained if you trusted Jesus as your Savior, you didn't need to worry about going to hell. Jesus' death on the cross paid for the sin that sent people to hell, and by accepting Him, by asking him to be my Savior, I wouldn't ever need to worry about it. I did ask Jesus to save me and never prayed that fearful prayer again.

What this has to do with Lent

As I was putting together the communications for Lent I realized the current public image of Christianity is a happy, happy one complete with the promise that if you become a Christian, life will always go well for you. Even those who don't subscribe to the crassness of the health and wealth gospel (if you give God money He will give you back much more), are shocked if someone in the family gets sick or loses their job. Any disappointment with what we think God owes us provides grounds for walking away from the faith or at least is a justification to be mad at God.

Lent gives us a corrective to that view. Lent reminds us that there are things about the Christian life that are difficult and costly. It challenges us to say “no” to ourselves in minor areas of life to strengthen our spiritual muscles for larger challenges. [Read more...]

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Filed Under: Blog, Easter, Lent Tagged With: church outreach, how Lent challenges us, Lenten Meditation, why observe Lent

Follow-up after a church holiday outreach event: speed dating or relationship building?

13 May, 2019 By Yvon Prehn 2 Comments

Church visitors, speed dating or relationship building?
How do we treat our visitors? Like speed dating or do we work to build a relationship? This article will help you see the difference. Image from Flicker, Gangplank HQ

What kind of relationship do you have with someone, if you meet them, have a great time, and then walk away, never to call, talk, or see the person again? Not much of one is it?

In contrast, what about a relationship where two people meet briefly but then keep in touch through letters, emails, phone calls, and other get-togethers? What if they take time to interact and get to know each other? We’d label that a meaningful relationship.

If we want any kind of relationship, friendship, or romance to progress, we know we’ve got to expend some effort to grow the relationship.

As a church, we begin relationships with the people in our communities when we host outreach or holiday events. Sometimes they develop into a meaningful, long-term relationship with visitors, but in the majority of cases, they don't. Take time to consider some of the following thoughts and evaluate how your interactions with visitors.

Make your church outreach events more than Speed Dating

Unfortunately, instead of taking time to develop relationships with the guests who visit, many church outreach events are similar to the Speed Dating popular today. If you are unfamiliar with Speed Dating, this is where single people spend a few minutes with a potential romantic interest over coffee, dessert, or some shared activity (one recent speed dating event for farmers had folks weeding a field together) and then they move on to the next person, spend a few minutes with that person, and on to the next one.

Though lasting a bit longer, some churches offer a sort of speed dating experience to unchurched members of their communities. With fall events as an example, the church invites the community to a Community Thanksgiving Service and Christmas Caroling and Hot Chocolate. The visitors are hustled through the event and then leave, hopefully with a nice feeling about the church. The church staff breathes a big sigh of relief to have that activity over for the year. [Read more...]

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Filed Under: Seasonal communication strategies, Strategy #8: Evaluate and innovate—measure changed lives, modify for more Tagged With: church followup, church outreach, church visitors, Communications, yvon prehn

TWO of FIVE TRENDS that will reshape media in 2019

6 January, 2019 By Yvon Prehn Leave a Comment

2019 a new time to try new things
The start of the year is a great time to challenge assumptions and do new things!

MarketingWeek.com, a marketing group from England just published an article on their Five Trends that they believe will reshape media in the coming year.  Amid rather obvious ones like e-commerce will grow, so will video, and Instagram is becoming more useful than Facebook for marketing, were two interesting quotes with implications for church communications and marketing in the coming year. Below are the quotes, my comments, and implication and ideas for church communications that were inspired by them:

First QUOTE:

Consumers will call brands out if they think they are driving them to a social platform just to transact.

Darren Campbell, Dr Martens

IMPLICATIONS & IDEAS:

When a church uses social media in their outreach, how does it come across to people outside the church (assuming they see it)?

This quote got me wondering how much of what churches put out there comes across as simply selling something— “Come to this event!, Bring your Kids HERE!!, Don’t miss out on this!!!

We may protest that we aren’t asking them to spend money (not yet, they must become more involved to be approached with that), but we are asking them to spend time and attention in exchange for our message. We want them to buy into what we are selling.

The bottom line is that is what we want, for them to buy into what we are selling—we want them to come to know Jesus as Savior, have their sins forgiven and live a life serving him. But what if our audience has no idea this is of benefit to them? Or why they should even come to a place that has a pre-packaged life-plan for them to accept?

What is the alternative?

[Read more...]

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Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: church marketing, church outreach, servant outreach

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