Effective Church Communications

Effective Church Communications provides Timeless Strategy and Biblical Inspiration to help churches create communications that fully fulfill the Great Commission

Effective Church Communications provides Timeless Strategy and a Biblical Perspective to help churches create communications that fully fulfill the Great Commission. Our tools constantly change; our task doesn’t; we can help.

Do more than celebrate! A Free eBook: Strategy for Father’s Day and preview of all resources

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Fathers Day Strategy ebookOn Father's Day, we naturally want to celebrate Dads and we should!

But we can also use this holiday to do more. In Ephesians it tells us to "make the most of our time," and on Father's Day, we also use it as a time to encourage the men in our church to grow spiritually and to connect with resources that will help them become the Father and the disciple Jesus wants them to be.

This eBook is an overview of the strategies and resources that can help you do this. It is available as a free download at this link:  https://payhip.com/b/N4M9n

And here is a quick overview video of it:

This link will take you to the Effective Church Communications Library, a FREE (or Pay-What-You-Want) resource that has an ever-growing library of eBooks and training videos that will help you become a more effective church communicator. This free eBook is an example of some of the materials that are and will be on the site.

What I am doing with eBooks like this is taking a topic, in this instance, Father's Day, and pulling together both new and past materials on it, plus the resources I have for you in one easy-to-access downloadable resource.

Already on the site are class materials from the Effective Church Communications ministry such as the eBooks, The Five Steps of Effective Church Communications and Marketing, Successful Seasonal Celebrations, and Challenges for Church Communicators (formerly Devotions for Church Communicators). [Read more...]

An important reminder for Father’s Day that not all the men in your church are married Dads or Dads at all

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One of the Good Guys Printable from the Bibleverse Shop
A graphic like this is a reminder that all the men in your church can be celebrated on Father's Day, not just the ones who are fortunate enough to be Dads. CLICK on the image for a free download of it.

Similar to the reminders that Mother’s Day can be a very difficult time for women who are not biological Mothers, Father’s Day can be a challenging time for men.

There are two categories that you want to be sensitive to, men without biological children and single fathers, a group often almost completely ignored in the church. First I’ll talk about them and then I'll give you some ideas for how you can positively address this situation.

Remember Single Fathers

When my husband and I led a single adult group, one of the core operating principles of the group is that children were welcome at all events. We often had babysitting or separate activities for the kids, but singles knew they could always show up with their children and they would be welcomed and cared for. And the childcare was free. [Read more...]

5 things that don’t work and 5 that do to start a Men’s Ministry at Father’s Day or anytime

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Like Father Like Son True story here: a growing church of 1800 (from 300 only three years earlier) decided to start a Men's Ministry with a Bible Study for men. Lots of prayer and encouragement from the pulpit, plus a splashy PowerPoint show, encouraged men to come. The night of the study the staff set up 200 chairs in anticipation. Three men showed up.

What went wrong? Following are five staff assumptions about their advertising approach to this even and why they didn't work.

#1 The staff assumed men would do what the Power Point® told them to do.

The colorful, eye-catching PowerPoint® slide show ended with a call to "sign up in the church lobby." What they wanted to be a call to action was in reality the kiss of death to any event sign-up.

After church is over, does any man to say to his wife (please forgive any implied sexism in this illustration), “Honey, would you please wait for me in the car while I find out where to go sign up for the men’s Bible study?”  It doesn’t happen. I know my own husband’s most pressing thought after church is–where are we going for lunch? Following the thought of food is football, basketball, or hockey, depending on the time of year. Most men I know, godly guys that they are, are similar in their after-church priorities. Trying to find a table in the church lobby to find out information about something that you may or may not be interested in simply is not a priority, even if by chance a man remembers he was told to do that.

Any time you require people to take a second step (call the church office for more information, sign up in the lobby, etc.) to find out essential details that they need to show up for any event, you will drastically cut down attendance.

#2 The staff assumed that men would remember the connecting details from the PowerPoint® announcement presented every Sunday.

Most men don’t. PowerPoint® is great for song lyrics, to set a specific mood for worship, or for graphics to reinforce a story or theme, but few men (women or teenagers) sit in worship, pencil in hand, ready to take notes off of a PowerPoint® presentation. A bulletin insert, ready to post on the refrigerator with all the details on it, would have been much more useful. Wives and girlfriends post it and remind the significant men in their lives about it. Yes, it might seem retro, old-fashioned, a bother to produce, but it works.

#3 The staff assumed that having the pastor encourage the men to come to the event meant something to the men and would make them want to come.

It usually doesn’t. Pastoral leadership doesn’t have the influence it once did. We live in an irreverent age, an age that doesn’t admire authority. A personal invitation can be powerful, but pleas from the pulpit to attend events that aren’t particularly appealing to uninvolved church members, men or women, are seldom heard, let alone acted upon. [Read more...]

Word Cloud Overview, featuring Tagxedo

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Word cloud websites are great ways to create colorful interesting graphics that have lots of impact but are not much work to create. Though many programs are available to do this, this video gives you a brief overview of Tagxedo, a program that not only creates colorful Word Cloud, but makes it easy to save them and use them in other programs, something many of the other programs don't do. For ECC Members, the video also previews some of the free tag clouds and seasons postcards available for you by CLICKING HERE. For information how to become an ECC MEMBER, CLICK HERE.