Of course one of the greatest benefits of our Great Idea Swap is the inspiration you get from looking at what other church communicators create, but even better is when you can take it and modify it for your own church communication uses. That's what you'll be able to do with this wonderful little conference notebook sent in by Vicki Coulter of Christ United Methodist Church.

It is made up of 8 1/2 x 11 in. pages folded in half, which is easy to print in small quantities at your church office. The sample was sent in as a PDF, which you can see the from pages illustrated below ( just 6 of 12 are illustrated). It's hard to see from the illustrations alone what a wonderful file it is, but you can immediately see how useful a layout like this can be for anything from Advent booklets to devotionals.

To make it useful for you, I then took the PDF and converted it to MS Word to see if that would work out so that you could edit it for your uses. That worked out well. CLICK on the first image and that will bring up a larger image and gallery you can scroll through to see the pages better.

However, when doing a conversion to MS Word, the tricky part is always making sure the pages print correctly double-sided and it does work! I also played around with creating a couple of alternate covers just for fun and that worked great also. The examples of them are below.

Everyone gets access to the ideas in our Great Idea Swap, but for Effective Church Communication Members, I also have a short video that shows how to be sure you have the correct print settings to print out the modified template, plus the PDF file and the MS Word file if you want to create your own booklet.

Two more fun samples sent in with the booklet [Read more...]