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.

Don’t be a Secret Saint—a better way to do outreach and connect people to your church!

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Don't be a secret saint
When we do outreach or acts of kindness in our communities, we need to let people know who is doing them so they can find out more about Jesus and connect with our church.

Have you ever been in a situation where you do outreach activities or acts of kindness as part of your church, but you never see anybody come to church because of it? Well, I've got some ideas for you that can change that.  That's the topic of this podcast. You can either listen to the podcast here or on many aps listed HERE.

For FREE templates that you can use to create communications that will help identify your church and bring people to it after your event, check out the templates for the holiday or special event you are celebrating. You can reach the overall Template section by CLICKING HERE.

Welcome to a Better Way for Church Communicators! I'm Yvon Prehn and our topic today is “Don't be a Secret Saint, a better way to do outreach on the holidays or anytime to effectively reach people for your church and Jesus.” 

Below are the show notes, a transcript of the podcast

Here's a true story about a lost opportunity in a situation just like this in our area. One church often does a compassionate outreach at a laundromat in an area of town where many homeless people do their laundry. My husband was recently talking to a young man who had taken advantage of it and he heard him talking about “some guy who paid for my laundry.” My husband asked him asked him who did it and what they talked about, and the young man responded “Well, the guy didn't say anything. He and his wife just sat in a corner for two hours. I would have talked to him, I would have talked about anything with him. I kind of waited for him to come over, but he never said anything to me! But the guy put in 10 bucks for my laundry.”

Now, my husband and I both thought how sad to pay for washer and dryer use for people who must choose sometimes between clean clothes and a decent meal is a fantastic way to demonstrate caring in the name of Jesus, but only if people know that you're doing it in the name of Jesus.

You see it really isn't fair to them or to your church or ministry if you are a secret service Christian. [Read more...]

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...]

Sample of seasonal jpg file in a church bulletin, and how you can use the ones on this site for your publications

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This is a wonderful example of how a church communicator took one of the jpg images, available to Effective Church Communications Members for all the holidays, and how she took the one for Easter and used it in her bulletin.

Some churches prefer not to have loose bulletin inserts (either way works, it is matter of what your church prefers) and so this church communicator emailed and asked that I do the inserts in a graphic file format. I was every happy to do that and don't know why I hadn't done it before! The RED arrow points to the jpg graphic from Effective Church Communications. If you click on the image you can download a PDF where you can see the entire bulletin. It is very nicely done and I'm sure you'll get some great ideas from it.

Many of the Template files now have images included with them for you to use either in print or social media. Many have a line drawn around the images so they will stand out from background. If you want that removed, you can go to the original MS Publisher files, remove it from the Master Page and resave that page as an image file.

Not only does this illustrate an idea of how to use an image, but two other things:

  1. I really appreciate and try to carry out your suggestions when possible on what you would like on the site and what might be useful for you, so do feel free to send them to me at yvon@effectivechurchcom.com.
  2. It is great to have samples of how people are using materials from ECC in their publications. Please send them to me with your permission to use them.  These GREATLY help your fellow church communicators. For information on our Great Idea Swap, CLICK HERE.

 

Effective Easter Outreach: Door-hangers, an invitation you can’t ignore

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Door hanger about hope
A person is usually alone when they read the message on a door hanger.  It can be an effective way to help them consider the meaning of life, Easter, and personal salvation.

You can't ignore a door-hanger—you literally have to do something with it and even if you toss it, chances are you'll glance at the message. One of the most powerful reasons door hangers can be effective Easter outreach is because often the  person reading them is alone and may not be thinking about anything else.

In addition to this quick glance, I recently read an interesting article about the impact of tangible, touchable marketing. It is from a study done by the Centre for experimental Consumer Psychology at Bangor University in the United Kingdom and used MRI brain monitoring to measure response between ads printed on a paper flyer and ads viewed on-screen. Here are their comments:

The ads that could be physically touched as well as viewed stimulated the most activity on the brain. . . By having something physical in front of them, the brain placed more authority and emotional resonance to that ad versus the one the participant could see only via a monitor. The takeaway from this experiment was physical involvement versus just visual involvement equated to a deeper connection. . . . . . It's also an important reminder that effective marketing needs to integrate all faces of the tools available, from print media to email, display ads to social media, and word-of-mouth to influencer marketing campaigns.
http://bit.ly/2ieEhkU

Here is one more reason door hangers can be effective Easter outreach—often the  person reading them is alone and may not be thinking about anything else.

Finally, there isn't anything magical about print or door hangers, but in addition to the reasons above, their low-cost and the ability to involve your congregation when you give them out (discussed in the article here) make them a useful addition to your Easter mix of outreach.

As the following images illustrate, we have a selection of door hangers for you to choose from for Easter. Some have room on them for church information on the front, others you can put it on the second side. One has a message for you about hope and that is below the images illustrated.

Message on the back of the door hanger about hope:

[Read more...]

An inexpensive, easy and effective outreach tool for holidays and church special events—Door-hangers

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Door hangers are great outreach tools!
Door hangers are great outreach tools that are inexpensive and can involve your entire congregation.

When considering community or neighborhood outreach for Easter, Christmas, Fall events, and other special occasions, many churches first think of postcards. Postcards do have many advantages and they are a proven tool for outreach, but there is another tool that can be equally effective and can cost little to produce—that tool is a door-hanger. The article here gives you an overview of how to use them and a resource list, on the TEMPLATES section you can find door hangers for various holidays.

One advantage a door-hanger has it that, unlike a postcard, which can get lost in a large pile of junk mail, a household seldom gets more than one door-hanger at a time. When a person picks it up and carries it inside, chances are that person will read at least some of it.

No postage required—how to get them out to the neighborhood

The distribution of door-hangers is not only cost-effective, because you don’t have to pay postage, but it is a way for your congregation to be involved in outreach. I have described this method in the past as a way to get your congregation involved in outreach to their communities using postcards, but it also works well for door-hanger distribution, here it is: [Read more...]