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.

Editable Halloween MS Publisher materials plus a preview PDF for all

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Cover of Overview of the Editable MS Publisher Files
Click here to download the PDF. It is an overview of the editable MS Publisher files and how to use them for effective Halloween Outreach.

Ed. note: This is an older collection and the artwork on a number of the pieces could use some updating, but still some very useful ideas and resources for Halloween Outreach. The publications illustrated here cover every aspect of preparation for, what to use during and follow-up for effective Halloween outreach including:

***Motivational bulletin insert
***Invitation Cards
***Case-study, volunteer recruitment brochure
***Sign-in cards
***Cards to give out as people leave your event

Click on the PDF for a free overview of all the communications with ideas on how to use them.

Below you can click on the links below to download the two ZIP files that has editable MS Publisher files for the outreach publications illustrated. The first file has all the PR, invitation, outreach, sign up and follow-up cards. The second file has a PDF of the brochure.

Just download and save the ZIP file on your computer, click to open it and then you can open and edit any MS Publisher file there. You must have a copy of MS Publisher on your computer for this to work.

Click here to download the ZIP file

Click here to download the Brochure for Trunk or Treat File

How Connection Cards improved visitor and prayer request response—true church story

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An encouraging email about connection cards
True story: how connection cards helped a church connect with visitors.

None of us do the work we do in communications without great concern for how it actually impacts the people we want to reach. That's why I appreciate it so much when I hear back from any of you on what worked in your church. Following is an email from Rona Heenk, a church communicator in Washington state. Thanks so much to Rona for her encouraging words to me and all of us—what you do DOES make a difference!

She inspired me to do an ECC training video on Connection Cards, click here to go to it.

PLEASE send me any stories you have of what has worked in your church so I can pass it on to others. Email to: yvon@effectivechurchcom.com.

Here is Rona's story (no editing, all her words):

Yvon,

I wanted to give you some feedback on something unrelated to the webinar, which I thought would be encouraging to you:

Based on the advice in your booklet on Connection Cards, I presented to the senior pastor the idea of a new Connection Card, putting it in the bulletin as an insert, and asking everyone to fill one out each week. He discussed it with the other pastors, and they agreed to the new card, but were reluctant to ask everyone to fill it out, so we continued to do what we were doing, which was to ask visitors to take one out of the chair back and fill it out and turn it in with the offering.

After a few months our response rate hadn't changed--maybe one visitor card turned in per month, and at most one or two prayer requests each week. About half the time we had zero cards turned in. I just kept praying about it, and waiting for a good opportunity to re-visit the idea.

 

Then, the week after Easter during our staff meeting, I mentioned that we had an attendance that was about 70 over our average attendance, yet NOT ONE visitor filled out a card. Our senior pastor sat up and paid attention, and asked if I had any ideas to improve that.... open door!! I "happened" to have the booklet and your latest article from Christian Computing Magazine with me, and presented the idea again, quoting your statement that basically said, "The Connection Card is the only real link we have to reach out to newcomers, and to be able to respond to questions and needs." That seemed to cement the idea that it was time to try something new, and he put into the minutes that our current way of handling the Connection Cards is NOT working, and suggested to the elders that they come to their meeting the next night prepared to discuss it.

Next thing I knew, they came to me and asked me to make it happen!

So, we began by sending out some email communication to the congregation about what we would be doing, and most of all, WHY. Last Sunday, May 2, we tried it for the first time, and guess what? No one complained, we got lots of responses, including TWO that were filled out by people who were first-time visitors. We got more prayer requests and people asking for information than we usually do, and I got three email addresses I didn't already have on file.

I even had a couple of cards come back with notes of encouragement to me, thanking me! (In the emails I had used a statement something like "Remember what it was like when you were the new person somewhere? The last thing you wanted to do was something that would draw attention to yourself, as if to say 'look at me, I'm a visitor!'" and I think that is what resonated with them.)

Anyway, I thought you'd be encouraged to hear how your communication ideas have been put into action! Feel free to quote me on anything here if you want to. I feel so strongly that we who are in the church need to do everything we can to learn to communicate EFFECTIVELY, and your material is one of the few resources I've ever seen that is up-to-date, thorough, and specifically addresses the unique needs of a church communicator.
Blessings!!

______________________

For more information about the book mentioned in this article: Connection cards: connect with visitors, grow your church, pastor your people, little cards, big results, click here.

Resource collection: How to effectively recruit the volunteers you need for fall outreach and always

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With all the fantastic opportunities fall provides for church outreach, no doubt your church calendar is filling up. But as your calendar fills, your worries also grow as you wonder how you will ever staff all the events. Will you get enough volunteers? Or will you be so tired as the holiday season approaches you can barely drag yourself through it?

Be encouraged! I've put together a number of resources for you that will help you recruit all the volunteers you need. Some are free for everyone, a number of them are for Effective Church Communication members only--and these are so useful, the ones offered this week alone are reason enough to join! Before we talk about the specifics of recruiting volunteers, I'd encourage you to consider this....

Providing help isn't the most important reason to work hard to get church volunteers

Recruiting volunteers is an extremely important ministry in the church, that's true. You may have primarily thought about recruiting volunteers primarily as something you needed to do so you'd have enough people to help at your upcoming event. But it is so much more than that.

As Christians, we know that one day we will stand before Jesus to be evaluated on the work we've done while we are here on earth (2 Cor. 5:10, 1 Cor. 3:8-15). We remember how the Apostle Paul reminded the Ephesians in Eph. 2:10 that they were created to do good works. In reality, when we make it possible for people to volunteer, we are helping them grow to spiritual maturity and to do the works Jesus wants them to do.

Though we may have lofty and true spiritual goals we want to achieve with our outreach events, to accomplish them takes detailed, focused earthly communication work. The following resources will help you do what it takes to have the volunteers you need for the ministry God has called you to. The result will be that you and everyone you work with will be blessed.

Video: How to be more successful in recruiting volunteers, a case study

This on-line video will take you step-by-step through a real life example of what a church did to try to recruit volunteers for a fall outreach event (and failed miserably) and what could be done for success. The principles taught here will work in any volunteer recruiting situation.

This ECC Training video (and many more like it) is one of the benefits of this website You can use these videos to train yourself and you can also project them and use them to train your church staff and church communication volunteers.

Click here to go to the online webinar.

PDF Book: How to be more successful in recruiting volunteers for church events, a case study

Many people have told me that a step-by-step PDF really helped them carry out what was taught on the video. I put together a 17-page booklet that takes you step-by-step through all the processes, plus has extra articles on how to recruit and retain volunteers. This article has the FREE link for ECC Members and links to how to buy it (only $5.00) for non-members.

Click here to go to the book overview.

Free article: Communications for a good continuing relationship with your volunteers

Getting volunteers to sign up or help you once is one thing, getting them to continue is another. this free article will give you some ideas on how to form lasting and productive relationships with your volunteers.

Click here to go to the article

Effective Church Communication MEMBER LINKS:

Membership in the Effective Church Communications website certainly DOES have its privileges and this month they are incredible. Not only do you have 24/7 access to the training webinar, but you get the following (click on the title area of each entry below to go directly to it):

PDF of the PowerPoint notes

That go along with the Video, so that whenever it would work out for you to show it to your staff or volunteers you can print out this PDF for them to take notes with.

An e-book copy of the book

On how to be more successful in recruiting volunteers for church outreach events. In addition you have permission to make as many copies of it as you need for volunteers and church staff members.

PDFs of Samples of Church Volunteer Samples from churches

THIS IS INCREDIBLE--you really have to see the sample materials here to understand how valuable it is. These are copies of volunteer recruitment samples from real churches. There are four pieces here including a 25-page handbook: Community is Contagious, that is an instructive and inspiring volunteer, church team guide. There are also volunteer recruitment booklets and one of the best ministry brochures I've ever seen included.

ECC Member Article: Clear communications help you create effective volunteer recruitment and retention

This article goes into more depth on how to actually write recruitment material for volunteers than the video has the time or format to do. No matter what the communication channel you use to recruit, web, print, bulletins, brochures, whatever, this will be helpful.

Be encouraged and keep working at equipping and involving volunteers

Doing the work needed to recruit and train volunteers effectively is not easy, but may the Lord use the samples and ideas here to give you inspiration and strength. When you, along with your volunteers and the people who came to know Jesus because of the events you held meet Jesus face to face it will all be more than worth it.

Volunteer recruitment, a how-to booklet that will help you this fall and for all events

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CASE STUDY BOOKLET
This booklet is FREE for ECC Members along with the many other ebooks and templates  available to them.

This booklet not only goes along with the video on recruiting volunteers, but it is also an extremely useful guide for any time of the year when you need advice on how to successfully recruit volunteers.

Yes, it would be wonderful if people just showed up whenever we announce we need them, but real life in real churches doesn't work out that way.

To get more volunteers churches sometimes think they need to attend conferences, read huge books, follow complex plans and while some of these things can be useful, try a far more simple and extremely effective solution: tell people what is going on, what you want them to do, and how to get in touch with you so you know they want to be part of it.

That sounds so easy, but I cannot tell you how many "volunteer" announcements, flyers and brochures I see that don't do this. This book walks you through step-by-step the kind of information you need to include for truly successful volunteer recruitment. It is available in three ways:

For Effective Church Communication Members it is is a free download. If you are not a member, check out becoming one so you can receive this and many other resources like it for free 24/7.
Click here to go to the free member download.

 

Fall event strategy: just because a lot of people show up, does that make your church special event successful?

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How do you measure success in a church outreach event?

Is it about the number of people who showed up? Is it about what a fantastic time they had at the event? Is it about how many volunteers you had show up to help and how many stayed around to help clean up? Though all of these things are important and satisfying when they happen,  in our churches we should always look beyond the immediate as we measure success.

As we head into fall, we need to review how we look at and evaluate success in church events. We need to look beyond initial attendance and evaluate church outreach events for lasting effectiveness, no matter how well it seemed we did at the event itself.  As you'll find, in this article, many of the things we think are successful aren't when looked at in how they impact long-term church growth.

A great turnout doesn't equal great results

I recently looked at a church website that celebrated the great success of their fall outreach from last year by listing the number of hot dogs served and ice cream bars given away. Though I understand they were celebrating that they got a great turnout for their event, a great turnout alone does not make for a successful church event, especially for this kind of event.

This was a neighborhood church many people could walk to. Even with the most minimal advertising, it would have been difficult not to get a great turnout when they were giving away free food and ice cream.

To give away goodies is not the purpose of the church

The church exists is to fulfill the Great Commission—to introduce people to Jesus and to help them grow into mature disciples. An fun event and food give away might be the start of that process, but it won't be any more than that if you don't spend some time in prayer and careful strategic planning. The rest of the article will help you do that.

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Strategy and planning is not the most fun thing to do, but it is the most essential

You are not putting on the seasonal event for the sake of having a fun party. Your goal must be to begin a relationship with people that will grow your church and change lives. You want to represent Jesus so people will come to know him.

To help you plan for events coming up this fall, it can be helpful to look back at events from past years and honestly evaluate them. Following are some questions you need to discuss in your church staff meetings as you look to the future:

Event evaluation questions

  • What made this church event different than the similar events hosted by the local mall or downtown merchants?
  • What did people learn about the church from attending the event?
  • How many people came back to church the following week because of the event?
  • Did the attendees learn anything about Jesus from the event?
  • Did the attendees leave with any follow-up information that invited them back to the church or gave them information on how to find out more about the Christian life?

We've got to get honest with ourselves about the results of what we have done if we want to make an impact on our world. If your answers to the previous questions aren't all you want them to be, take some time to think about how you can make your upcoming events produce the results you want. The following ideas might help.

Effective communication suggestions for your fall and other outreach events

In church staff meetings everybody (trained or not) has an opinion about what makes for effective church communication. With all respect, sometimes those opinions are neither valid, correct, or useful if we are trying to win our world for Jesus. It's sad that we have to be reminded that our primary goal is evangelism, not just having a good time, but it seems like so many churches today focus so much on having a good time in the futile hope that if we show people how friendly Jesus is they will eventually get around to considering him as something more than the host of a party.

Such an attitude (and it is far more prevalent than we'd like to admit) is not worthy of you who have been called to fully fulfill the Great Commission. It is also not a professional way to use the people and resources that have been entrusted into your care.

Fortunately it isn't difficult to evaluate what works and what doesn't in outreach communications. Just as in a basketball game, it doesn't matter if you don't like the team colors or their strategy. Only one thing counts—the final score. There is a similar way to determine the success of church events.

To fully fulfill the Great Commission (which is what this ministry and website wants to help you do) here is a way to determine the score

To keep peace in the body of Christ, this can be very helpful in that the bottom line for evaluating the effectiveness of any piece of communication or church marketing is not whether someone likes it or not. It's not how many people had fun or not. If the goal of effective church communications is to fully fulfill the Great Commission, the measure of success is whether this goal is being fulfilled or not.

Remember at a basketball game the success of the team is not determined by how many hot dogs were sold or how many people filled the stands—it's who won, who had the highest score.

We evaluate success in church events in a similar way as we do in basketball—we look at the score and in the church that score is dependent upon how well we fulfill the Great Commission.

To determine our our score in fully fulfilling the Great Commission we need to look at two actions we can count:

1. The people who come to know Jesus as Savior, in a word: salvation.

2. The people who grow to maturity in their faith and become disciples, in a word: discipleship.

Keeping score starts by simple counting

This is not rocket science. Score-keeping in church communications is determined by first of all by attendance, the simple numbers of people that respond (or didn’t) after you created and distributed your communications.  You can't start either one of the processes of either salvation or discipleship until people show up.

What is the attendance score at your event?

The attendance score is determined by asking questions such as these:

  • Did you do a mailing? Send a postcard?  An email? Web announcement? Pulpit announcement?
  • Did you equip your people with communication tools? Connection cards, postcards, website links?
  • How many people attended event? How many were new to the church?

Making up a simple chart of what you did to promote an event and then the results of it moves discussions of church effectiveness away from personal opinion to objective numbers.

The simple numbers of how many new people attend the church event, why and what brought them there is important because you cannot start the road toward sharing the message of salvation without people getting inside the church and becoming part of the process. Whether your church accepts individuals as believers with a simple confession of faith after one visit or whether becoming a Christian is defined by a series of explorations and classes,  followed by a decision and baptism, or any combination of these events, whatever your tradition, it must start with simple attendance.

Be honest in record keeping and evaluation

For example, if you put on a Christmas outreach event and you spend thousands of dollars, what was your return on investment? Again ask the questions above: how many are now attending the church because of the event? How many have become Christians because of the event?

I suspect far too many churches do Christmas and other holiday events because the people currently attending the church really like to put on the events. To determine if this is the primary motivation—track the results. To repeat: how many new people are now attending the church because of the event? How many have become Christians because of the event? What did it cost and what was your return on investment in the lives of people?

If you aren’t tracking costs and results, why not?

Even without tracking it, if you know the answer is something along the lines of “We didn’t do a very good job of communicating it to people outside the church and we can’t honestly point to anyone who is now attending or who has come to know Jesus because of it,” you then have two choices:

1. You can learn to communicate more effectively so that your holiday events will yield measurable results in the future.

or

2. Quit spending all that money to entertain yourselves and give it either to a mission group or church that is successful in outreach or give it to feed hungry children.

Track more than holiday events; track all ministry events

Tracking our communications and the results of them will keep us honest in church programming and evaluation.

It can keep us from over spiritualizing. What I mean by that is that it is easy to conclude that people aren’t interested in something such as spiritual growth, when in reality we simply didn’t advertise it very well.

Honest evaluation can also keep us from false excuses. You can create many communication pieces today for little or no cost and that will keep you from the current popular excuse for not advertising church events which is that “We just can’t afford to advertise church events because of the recession.” There is a lot of marketing that doesn’t cost much: web-based, email-based advertising, creating websites and blogs with WordPress.com; making sure what you do create has complete details, involving your people instead of buying mailing lists, e.g. equip them with inexpensive postcards to mail to friends—all these ideas can generate lots of church marketing for little or no money.

In print marketing, I'm encouraging churches to look at publication techniques such as digital duplicators which enable you to create communication pieces for a fraction of the cost of color copiers. Print is still one of our most powerful communication tools and equipping your people with inexpensive printed invitations can be one of your most powerful tools.

Finally, it's too important not to be honest

The eternal destiny of people is what is at stake as you plan your outreach events. In addition, the temporal growth of your church and all the spiritual and emotional benefits it can provide to the people who become part of it are important considerations.

In addition, putting on special events is a lot of work and usually costs quite a bit of money. If you take the time to carefully plan and then commit to honestly measure the results all the hard work and money will be worth it.