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.
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The disappointing results when you jump into church communications without planning and how to change them

15 January, 2010 By Yvon Prehn 2 Comments

Planning is vital for success
Planning is essential if you want success in your church communications.

We have extraordinary tools available to create church communications and to wow people with our multi-media technology creations. Churches of every size can create can challenge members with video, media-rich websites and colorful print graphics. Dedicated church communication teams work hard to turn church leadership vision into reality. So what happens when we create these great communication pieces, but few people show up or volunteer for our ministry event?

Often the reason we don’t get the results we want is because we rushed to PR communication creation without doing the planning needed to assure that the PR communication we were able to create would result in concrete ministry results. This article shares two true stories of situation like this and follows them with suggested solutions to make certain your ministry goals are accomplished. [Read more...]

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Filed Under: Planning, Planning and Managing Tagged With: church communication planning, church leadership, church marketing, church PR, communication planning, communication results, Communications, small group communication, volunteer communication, yvon prehn

VIDEO: Church Communication FORMS: to help you plan, measure, and evaluate communication effectiveness

14 January, 2010 By Yvon Prehn Leave a Comment

This video goes over a set of forms that will help you be more effective in your church communication ministry. It shows you step-by-step how to use them and explains why they are useful for ministry.

Many problems in church communications planning and management can be solved if the church uses forms because forms take opinions about communications and helps you effectively evaluate the validity of your opinions.

For example, if someone says: "The web is the best way to advertise!"  and another person on staff responds, "No, nothing beats bulletin inserts and postcards!" the use of forms puts this discussion into an objective evaluation of what works best.

Below the video are links to the PDFs of the notes for the video presentation and for a PDF of the forms used in the video presentation. Though the video is free for everyone, the notes and forms are only for Effective Church Communication Members. CLICK HERE for ECC Membership information.


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Below are the notes for the presentation as well as reproducible PDFs of the Forms shown

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Click on the image of each form below to go to the PDF file.

PDF for FORMS video cover of handoutsPDF forms cover

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Filed Under: Planning, Planning and Managing Tagged With: church communication forms, church communications video, Communications, evaluation of church communications, planning church communications, yvon prehn

Newsletter, some basic advice and layout samples

7 January, 2010 By Yvon Prehn Leave a Comment

Newsletters remain one of the most useful ways to effectively communicate. This PDF will give you some simple, foundational help to create them.
Newsletters remain one of the most useful ways to effectively communicate. This PDF will give you some simple, foundational help to create them.

This PDF is an excerpt from my basic book on church communications. It consists of both overview materials and then a collection of  sample newsletter layouts.

In this PDF, the instruction section reminds us, newsletters are made up of primarily two parts:

1.  News    2.  Letter

News: no lengthy, fluffy writing, all the facts, dates, times, locations. People read church newsletters to find out information, not for recreational reading.

Letter: letters are personal, be yourself, let the personality of your church or ministry come through.

The most important thing about newsletters, whether you ultimately mail them out, post them as a PDF on your website or use an online newsletter to create them, is the CONTENT in the newsletter. People do not read church newsletters to check out the great graphic design skills of the church—they read them to find out connecting facts and inspirational updates:

  • when and where the youth group is meeting
  • if the church event has a cost and/or childcare
  • how to become part of a small group
  • they read the pastor's column to learn more about him or her as a person
  • they scan the updates that head of the ministry in which they serve to see has to share this month that affects them

Bottom line: if your newsletter provides relevant, timely, useful content for the people of your church it is effective and successful.

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Filed Under: Church Newsletters Tagged With: church communication basics, church newsletter, church newsletters, Communications, yvon prehn

Newsletters: from boring and bragging to outstanding outreach

31 December, 2009 By Yvon Prehn 2 Comments

Whether you create your church newsletter on paper, in electronic format or both, periodically, take time to restructure it in ways that turn it from an often dreaded publication chore into one of your most powerful outreach tools. You can do this by evaluating your mission and then identifying your niche ministry targets and creating newsletters specifically for them.

Evaluate your mission

Creating and producing newsletters is extremely costly both in terms of people hours and the money it takes to create, reproduce and send them out. With this in mind it is important to take time to evaluate why you are producing your ministry newsletters.

That “WHY” comes out loud and clear in every issue you produce whether you intend to or not.

For ineffective church newsletters the biggest WHY that often comes out is that the church is doing the newsletter for what I call “family bragamony” purposes. These are publications that only make sense to you if you are part of the current church family. They are primarily focused on how great the people are who are already attending the church and have the effect of saying (even though this is never intended) “this is an insider group, newcomers aren’t welcome.”

If you doubt that is true, look at your newsletter. Do you have contact phone numbers or emails by every event? Do you have announcements like these:  “Men’s Bible study at our usual location.”  “Youth Group, same time, same place!” “The Pot Luck will be great as always—ya’ll come!”

A newcomer has no idea what you are talking about.

While reporting on church family news and giving updates is important, we might want to add evangelism and outreach as additional reasons WHY we do the publication.

This isn’t difficult to do. We can add an outreach emphasis simply by adding an invitation to newcomers. For example, just add something like:

All events of  Our Church are open to EVERYONE!

Please join us if you are new or perhaps have been around a long time, but mostly just attended Sunday mornings.

Each event has a contact phone number and email address and we welcome your questions and would love to tell you more.

One powerful outreach tool— be sure each activity from children’s and youth events to home Bible studies has a contact phone number and email for more information. It’s simple, but essential and sadly, so often left out.

Identify your niche targets and create publications specifically for them

One of the most exciting trends I have seen as I travel around North America teaching communication and marketing seminars to churches is the creation of niche newsletters.

All successful marketing theory tells us that the more narrowly we can niche (divide, segment) our audience into parts interested in the same thing, the more successful our marketing will be. The way this translates into the church is that it can be helpful in addition to doing an overall church newsletter to decide what more narrow audience you want to focus on and reach in your community. Then do a newsletter specifically for them.

Examples of niche newsletters

I have seen some great examples of this in especially in niche newsletters designed for PARENTS of teenagers and children. Note I said PARENTS, not the kids themselves. You still need newsletter to tell the youth group what’s going on, but most churches do something like that. These are a separate publication because the churches who do them  realize that parents need lots of help today. The best ones target a specific age area: parents of grade school kids, high schoolers, etc.

The church creates a newsletter that reaches out to parents, encourages them, gives them helpful tips and ideas. In addition the church also offers resources from the church to help them: youth and children’s programs, mom’s morning out, whatever. It clearly invites everyone in the community to take advantage of these programs.

Another great niche newsletter I saw recently at a large church conference I was teaching at was a newsletter for married professional couples. It was full of chatty tips on how to find time for romance, how to communicate when both of you have a crazy schedule, etc. To be honest the graphics, the layout, the whole “design” of the publication was pretty bad if I was evaluating it from a “design” standpoint. Did I care? NO! I snatched one right up and read every word.

These sorts of publications can be incredibly powerful outreach tools. They position the church as a resource for help; the pastors as resource people and they provide solutions to real-life problems. Which is easier to invite someone to church or to say, “I really found this article helpful with my kids. I think you’ll enjoy it”?

Think through the niche groups in your church—parents of  kids and teens and married couples at all sorts of life stages, seniors—then find some of the spiritually mature folks in that group and ask them to put together a newsletter to help others. Don’t worry about layout (though Microsoft Publisher has great newsletter templates that are easy to use), the content and heart in the publication is what is most important.

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Filed Under: Children's ministry, Church Newsletters Tagged With: church newsletter, church newsletters, church outreach, Communications, Email newsletters, niche newsletters, yvon prehn

Sample Gospel Presentions

26 December, 2009 By Yvon Prehn Leave a Comment

Sample Gospel Presentations
Sample Gospel Presentations

It does not take much space to include a  gospel presentation (how to become a Christian, what it means to be a Christian) in your church bulletin or special event handout.

This PDF contains a few examples.

Feel free to modify them in a way that would suit your church.

Though these are a good, brief summary, I strongly recommend that you also add a link to your website where you explain what it means to be a Christian in much more detail. Include links to questions about the Christian faith so people can carefully explore the Christian faith before they make the most important decision of their lives.

To download the PDF, click here or on the image.

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.

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Filed Under: Christianity defined Tagged With: Communications, evangelism, Evangelism resources, gospel presentations, yvon prehn

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