Category: Ideas For Churches

Podcast: How to create an experience for both new visitors and your church goers

Post author By Adam McLaughlin
Post date February 27, 2017

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This week’s tool:

Display your PDF like a digital magazine (with page curls and everything) using issuu.com. Ryan Holck from Rad-Ideas.com uses this for multiple church clients, but recommends paying the $35/month for the premium version, since there is no control over the ads on the free account.

Check out my latest project for Life Church in Fort Myers, Florida where I oversee Marketing & Communications. This is our yearly ‘missions’ magazine: ATK 2017 Magazine.

On this week’s podcast, Marco asks about how to appeal to both church goers and non-church goers, and we talk about the 4 reasons someone comes to your church (Read the full blog post here).

Marco also asks what we can do to encourage our people to invite their friends to church. There are a few ways but the biggest is to BE CONSISTENT! Let people know exactly what to expect at your church so they can set the expectations for the friends they invite.

Have a church communications question you’d like answered? Ask it here. We’ll reply to all of them and pick a few for our podcast!

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Advertising Marketing Podcast Tools Website

Podcast: Is my church’s website for new guests or our congregation?

Post author By Adam McLaughlin
Post date February 20, 2017

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This week’s tool:

Unsplash is a growing library of “do whatever you want” photos from all over the world. For a quick hit of inspiration, sign up for their email newsletter where they’ll send you 10 new photos from their library every 10 days. This is one of our go-to resources on the fly to grab a photo to overlay a quote or a quick promo image with text. Most of our blog post featured images are generated from Unsplash content!

Today’s question comes from Dan:

How do you decide if your church’s website content should be focussed on guests or on regulars?

A few thoughts:

Keep your home page content targeted to new guests, especially what they will see before they scroll.
New guests need to instantly get a sense of what your church is about and if they want to connect with you.
Use your subpages of your website for information your congregation needs: Upcoming events, registration forms, membership information, etc.
If possible, choose real photos of your church on your website over stock photos.
If you need to use stock photos, make sure they accurately represent what someone will experience when they visit your church.

Check out my ebook: TrustGlue: 11 ways to create a first impression that sticks and look for the section on making a first impression for new guests using your website.

From Brady Shearer at Pro Church Tools, here are 11 things your church website needs based on an eye-tracking study from new visitors. Read more…

Have a church communications question you’d like answered? Ask it here. We’ll reply to all of them and pick a few for our podcast!

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Advertising Podcast Social Media Tools

Podcast 9: Which Social Media channels could you use for your church plant?

Post author By Adam McLaughlin
Post date February 13, 2017

This week’s tool:

More than a backup storage mechanism, dropbox is a great way to share files between departments, send proofs to other team and get their feedback on the sidebar next to the document itself. For live collaboration, have a shared dropbox folder to save images, quotes and videos from your phone, tablet, laptop desktop or all of the above. Click here to sign up for free trial account!

Nicole asks about how many social media channels her church launch needs. Here are a few ideas:

Get intentional and successful on one channel before expanding to other channels. You’ll be more engaged with your audience if you do one channel well, rather than a few channels poorly.
If you’re not sure which one channel to start with, I would recommend Facebook: It’s already got the largest audience, and the most versatile options for what you can post.
If you’re not sure if you need a Facebook page or Facebook group, read this info here!
You’re going to have a lot of decisions to make in your first 30 days managing your Social Media. Here is an article about what to expect and what conversations to have with your team.
When you’re ready to move to a second channel, consider instagram. You can do live ‘stories’ like snapchat, video and image posts with longer status than twitter.

Have a church communications question you’d like answered? Ask it here. We’ll reply to all of them and pick a few for our podcast!

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Advertising Podcast

Podcast: How to target advertising to people who are ready to hear the Gospel

Post author By Adam McLaughlin
Post date February 6, 2017

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This week’s tool:

Katie Allred (KatieAllred.com) joins us to share about sip which allows you to grab the hex code for any color on your screen.

Micheal asks about how to reach people in your area who are ready to hear about the Gospel:

Ryan Holck from Rad-ideas.com joins us to answer Michael’s question. Using targetted Facebook and Google ads, direct invitations to learn more about the gospel based on these 4 ideas:

Keyword
Topic
Location
Type of Audience

Build ads to target those people. If you’re not sure where yo start, start with Facebook with $5-10/day for a few days. If you’re seeing results, continue the campaign. If it’s not getting the results you’re looking for, adjust and retarget.

Focus on sending those people to a specific ministry, not just generally “come learn about us” but “come connect with this group that is addressing the issues you’re looking for more information about.

Looking for more information? Here are a few blog posts from Ryan about Facebook and google advertising:

Have a church communications question you’d like answered? Ask it here. We’ll reply to all of them and pick a few for our podcast!

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Marketing Podcast Tools

Podcast 007: What to ask during a Church Communications Interview

Post author By Adam McLaughlin
Post date January 30, 2017

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This week’s tool: Backup Buddy

Schedule and save your wordpress website backup to a secondary server (Backup Buddy subscription includes space on their own “Stash” storage server) and seemlessly duplicate or migrate your wordpress website from one domain to another.

Kyler asks about what questions to ask at a church communications interview. Here are a few ideas:

Cross reference our post on creating a communications job description and ask any questions that aren’t covered in the job description.

Ask for clarification on any items that may be vague. Words that are descriptive could mean something to you that means something different to them. “Flexible hours” – Could mean I can work 30 hours this week and 50 hours next week, or could mean that I work 40 hours every week, but I get to choose if that’s mornings, evenings, weekends, work from home, etc. Are the flexible hours my choice (I can set my own schedule) or are you meaning that at the beginning of each week, the employer will tell you which evenings and morning you’ll be working and the employee has to be flexible with their hours?
Why is now the time to fill this position? Is it the first time the position is open? Has someone been promoted?
Before your interview, secret shop the church, and bring some ideas to the interview.

Have a church communications question you’d like answered? Ask it here. We’ll reply to all of them and pick a few for our podcast!

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Advertising Podcast Tools

Podcast Episode 6: The future of Print vs Digital in Church (with Ryan Holck)

Post author By Adam McLaughlin
Post date January 23, 2017

This week’ tool:

Use ChurchIpsum to generate hilarious cliche church text content to use as placeholder text when working on print or web projects for your church. The cheesiness will be extra incentive for that person to get you the proper text content you’re looking for…

Theresa asks about the future of print and digital in your church.

We had Ryan Holck from Rad-ideas.com to answer Theresa’s question. Here are some of his thoughts.

Different generations will best retain information in different ways – some in print and some in digital. Some people would miss content if print is entirely removed.

Use both as a tool to be redundant and get important information out in multiple ways. Print can become a smaller dynamic, but during that process, be strategic with how you use it.
Use print as an introduction and point people for complete information to a digital resource (like your website).

How to transition some of your print to digital:

Use Email as an alternative to your church bulletin, and use email as a reinforcement for what you put in print.
Start by converting your print to a PDF and make a download link available.
Convert your PDF to a digital magazine format using a service like issuu.com
Design an email with MailChimp.com and print it for pickup as needed.

More ways to connect with Ryan Holck from Rad-Ideas.com:

Have a church communications question you’d like answered? Ask it here. We’ll reply to all of them and pick a few for our podcast!

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Advertising Podcast Social Media

Podcast: How to create a Social Media strategy with Katie Allred

Post author By Adam McLaughlin
Post date January 16, 2017

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This week’s Social Media tool:

If you’re wanting to make a major decision that will affect your church, feedback is your friend. There are a few ways to get that feedback, whether by posting a poll on Facebook, sending out an email and asking for a reply, or handing out a piece of paper at a service.

Better than anything else, we’ve found that using an anonymous online survey, like Survey Monkey gives us our fastest and highest quantity of results. Learn more about Survey Monkey…

Here’s an awkward screen shot of Katie and Adam on Skype during our podcast interview!

Connect with Katie Allred:

Have a question you’d like answered on a future podcast? Ask here!

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Podcast Tools

Podcast: Ways to effectively use your email list

Post author By Adam McLaughlin
Post date January 9, 2017

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This week’s tool:

Create email newsletters that blow text emails away with Mailchimp’s drag and drop builder. Add pictures, your logo, texts, links to blog posts and Social Media sharing buttons, and allow them to look after your list administration.

Add a button on your Facebook page or website where people can sign up, and then when someone unsubscribes, Mailchimp looks after your list.

I recently wrote a post on ThatCC.com community blog on 5 ways to maximize the effectiveness of your email list.

Have a church communications question you’d like answered? Ask it here. We’ll reply to all of them and pick a few for our podcast!

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Advertising Branding Marketing Podcast

How to create a winning church communications strategy

Post author By Adam McLaughlin
Post date January 2, 2017

https://youtu.be/cCKycHY_lMg

This week’s tool:

Slack:

Slack is a chat app on steroids. If you’re using a Facebook group or text message thread to communicate with your team, imagine being able to group your chats: communication projects, personal needs, funny comments, feedback, stage design ideas or communications about your upcoming volunteer banquet.

Slack includes different “channels” – chats based on topics. When you upload a file, like a proof for instance, other users can comment on that proof so you know how to make revisions.

Slack also comes with multiple add ons, so you can find an app for finances, expense tracking or communication integrations.

Dan asks a great question about how to build a communications strategy. For us, we’ve built our strategy based on 3 concepts: Branding, Marketing and Advertising give us the opportunity to build trust in every interaction. We call this TrustGlue that makes people stick around when they see we’re living out our values. Download our free ebook here:

Have a church communications question you’d like answered? Ask it here. We’ll reply to all of them and pick a few for our podcast!

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Podcast

How to spread information to all of the groups in your church

Post author By Adam McLaughlin
Post date January 2, 2017

https://youtu.be/SOWPzc3bb0s

This week’s Social Media tool:

Hootsuite is great for pre-scheduling posts for a specific date and time, but what if you have content that you want to automatically be re-posted? Recurpost.com allows you to build a library, and determine when and where those posts are shared.

The content you’re looking for is ongoing content (sometimes called Evergreen content): A blog post from your Pastor about what it means to be baptized, a reminder to download your podcast, an invitation to sign up to join a volunteer team, or an image that people can share to invite their friends to service. This type of content could be as relevant on a Monday in December as it is on a Thursday in April, or anywhere in between.

Build a library on this content, and RecurPost will put it on repeat at the frequency you choose – Let’s say you have 20 posts and you want to post once a day to twitter and once a week to Facebook. After 20 days, twitter will start back at the first piece (while Facebook is still on it’s 3rd post). If you add 3 new posts to the library, your daily twitter post would now only repeat every 23 days.

Your Recurpost free account will allow you to build a library of 100 posts, and connect up to 3 social networks.

Some ideas on how to communicate information across groups at your church:

• Create tools like print material and digital assets that can be used by your small group and team leaders as invitations.

• Place the information strategically around your campus where people who will be most interested in getting involved will see the information.

Have a church communications question you’d like answered? Ask it here. We’ll reply to all of them and pick a few for our podcast!

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