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.

A tourist brochure provides design inspiration for a church information brochure

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Tourist brochure provides inspiration for a church information brochure
Tourist brochure provides inspiration for a church information brochure

Ed. note: This is from our archives and it still represents one of the best examples of a newcomer brochure that I've ever seen. It's based on a tourist brochure, is incredibly creative, and should provide some great inspiration for newcomer materials you create for upcoming fall events.

We know that for people to come to our churches who may have grown up without going to church that it can be a very scary experience.

This PDF shows a wonderful way you can make them feel welcome. Think about how visiting your church might be like visiting and entirely new country (which is what it is for many people). Think about how you might do up a tourist brochure  and in an upbeat way show them around.

Our traditions and sometimes the language we use, can be very confusing—so have fun and help out your guests!

To download the PDF click here or on the image.

PLEASE —if you do up something like this for your church, send me a PDF of it  and I'll share it on this site so others can be inspired. Send it to yvonprehn@gmail.com.  Thanks so much!

note: this PDF is from Yvon Prehn's archives and is the only format of this article available presently. Not the greatest quality to be sure, but shared with the belief that the content is useful.

The One Goal of Effective Church Communications

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5 Steps of Effective Church ComThere is one goal and one foundational purpose in all we do in church communications and that is to make disciples.

Then Jesus came to them and said, "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age." Matt: 28:18

These verses are our marching orders, what we are supposed to be about as representatives of Jesus here on earth-that seems obvious. The actions required by these verses also seems obvious-go, baptize, teach-with the end result of making disciples.

Why discipleship is essential for the church to survive—and why your communications are essential to develop disciples

What is  painfully obvious in America today (and most of North America) is that as a whole, we aren't doing a very good job [Read more...]

What customer service confusion can teach us about communicating the gospel

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Customer service can teach us to listen I just finished a customer service interaction after several days of frustration, phone calls, incomplete information and finally a satisfying answer. At the end of this process, I realized that my interactions with the customer service representatives had some valuable lessons for church communicators as we share the gospel. We may not like to think of ourselves as customer service reps for Jesus, but consider. . . .

What happened and how it applies to us

The typical customer service phone call goes something like this:

  1. We call "customer service" because we don't understand something.
  2. The person we call totally understands the issue—they were trained in all aspects of it —they probably had to pass a test on their knowledge of the product before they were allowed to answer the phone.
  3. When we ask our question, it isn't new to them. It is issue #3 on the list, or however they categorize it, and they know the answer, even before we are finished asking.
  4. The customer service person rattles off the answer.
  5. We have no idea what they are talking about—we haven't been involved with the product for years and it makes no sense to us—that's why we are calling.

At this point, one of two things can happen:

  1. We ask for clarification and the customer service person is kind, listens, and takes the time to explain what we don't understand and makes sure our question is answered in a way that makes sense to us.
  2. The customer service person lets us know subtly or blatantly that if we don't understand, that's our problem. Sometimes, they act insulted that we don't understand.

For my recent customer service interaction, fortunately my call ended with option #1--the person realized I had no idea why they couldn't do what I needed their company to do. She courteously explained what was going on, the options, and finally, though I wasn't happy with the answer, why what I wanted was not possible.

In this instance, I was calling because my charge card processing company couldn't process PayPal for someone who wanted to buy a membership in my church communication training site. I had been trying to get an answer on this for two days. I talked to fairly nice people who told me it should be possible. They said someone else would check it out. They said they would work on it. They said they would get back to me. None of this happened.

The final person I talked to listened, explained, and though her answer was finally that what I wanted wouldn't work, I now knew what I had to do next.

Why this is like communicating the gospel

[Read more...]

Christmas Holiday visitors—how to turn them into regular attenders

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Christmas invitations and how to keep them
Here are ideas to keep your Christmas visitors coming back.

As we go into the holiday season, your church will be holding many events that will attract visitors. You want these visitors to become regular attenders and you can help make this possible not only by the quality of your holiday event, but by the follow-up publications you send out.

Successful follow-up publications DO NOT mean a mass generated “so glad you were here….” letter. Instead, try these ideas:

Position your church positively

Sending out a “so glad you were here” publication is OK to do if you have the time and money, but there is nothing usual or memorable about that. People expect churches to be glad they came and of course a church wants them to return.

What might be a bit more surprising is if your church, instead of asking for something, gave something away. For example, what if you sent out a series of postcards or a series of one-page newsletters and tips that would give people ideas that would help them get through the holiday season. What if those publications didn’t ask for anything, but were genuine servant publications with the motive of honestly helping the people they were sent to.

This would put your church in an entirely different place and a very positive one that would cause people to want to return. Following are some specific publications that could do this:

Countdown to Christmas Postcards/flyers or emails

Depending upon how far back from Christmas you start this, let’s assume you have a list of families who attended your Fall Harvest Festival. You make up a series of perhaps five post-cards,  tri-fold flyers, or follow-up emails in bright colors with topics like this:

Countdown to Christmas

Week #1—some inexpensive, creative, and alternative ideas on how to plan Christmas shopping and gift exchanges, drawing of names, deciding to give to charities in the name of family members, what charity opportunities are available in your community, if any churches (your church?) sell third world gift items.

Week #2—some favorite recipes from your congregation: a favorite fudge, a hot cider mix, a special grandma cookie recipe. Many families today don’t have family members close by and many young families don’t know how to prepare holiday items. Make sure your directions are simple and easy.

Week #3—the meaning of advent and some ideas on how to help families celebrate it. Perhaps offer an advent booklet for free by simply calling your church or requesting one from your church website.

Week #4—Offer to pray for people during this busy and sometimes stressful time of year. Have a prayer line where they can leave requests or an email address. Assure them it is confidential and is a gift from your church to them.

Week #5—An invitation to take part and the times your church offers free baby-sitting so busy parents or especially single parents can shop, locations where your church is doing totally free gift-wrapping.

On all these postcards be sure to clearly give the address of your church, your service times and times for children’s church or education programs, contact phone number and web site. Be sure also to always say something like “Your Local Community Church is there for you and your family, not only at Christmas time, but any time of the year. Please contact us if we can serve you in any way.” If you say something like that, be sure there is a team in place and ready to respond.

You could also do electronic versions of the postcards by creating electronic postcards or emails with the same content. The holiday postcard templates at www.constantcontact.com include wonderful designs that can be very useful in this way.

What it’s really all about

Another option would be a series of cards explaining the meaning of different traditions at Christmas. If you do a Google search on the web you’ll find dozens of pages with explanations of various Christmas traditions.

You could choose one tradition a week and again send out a series of cards. Again, many people today don’t know why we celebrate the traditions we do and you can give them a Christian explanation. Be sure to always remind them, that in addition to the reasons we have candy canes or Christmas trees (both with very Christian historical traditions) the “reason for the season” really is that Jesus, who was fully God, became fully man to grow up and become our Savior.

What’s most important

The most important thing about either of these communication/church marketing projects is not how fancy your clip art is or how stunning the type face that you choose. What is most important is if you create these and send them out with lots of love and prayer for the visitors to your church, you have a tangible way to let them know you care.

Video: Church & Ministry Business & Invitation Cards

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These tiny, but powerful tools can be used for PR, outreach, information and caring. This 12-minute video will give you the motivation for doing them, an overview of how they can be used, plus a number of how-tos for easy creation and production.

Any size church or ministry, on any budget can use these to can equip your people to effectively reach out to their friends and neighbors with them.

For additional articles, templates, many more materials and how-tos related to business and invitation cards, CLICK HERE to go to the listing of additional materials.

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Handouts for Bus card seminarTo download a copy of the notes that go with the video, click here or on the image.