Categories
Stage Announcements

All things Church Announcements: Talking with Church Training Academy!

Recently, I had the opportunity to talk with Justin Nava and Dave Curlee from Church Training Academy. 

At the core, CTA is all about creating a smooth presentation to remove distractions from people experiencing your service at your church, so naturally, we talk about the mechanics of your church’s announcements, and how to use them as a tool to talk about who you are as a church, and not as much what you do.

I give an example of a helpful vs unhelpful announcement (around minute 11) and at the end, Justin throws me a curveball and asks me to evaluate his announcement from Sunday. Check it out:

Categories
Preparation Presentation Stage Announcements

Church Announcement Prep Worksheet

We have a challenge as church communicators that few other departments have. While other departments need to know what’s going on in their area, we need to know what’s going on in everyone’s area.

In light of that challenge, and my ongoing focus of bringing practical ways to help you communicate with your church and community, below is a worksheet that you can print to help you organize your thoughts about what you communicate for your announcements and how you’ll present it based on my ebook: SnorkelFork, this book title is confusing. Your church’s announcements don’t have to be.

While this worksheet is nothing fancy, my hope is that by giving you this tool, you’ll be able to focus on creating your announcements and get the task out of the way to focus on the hundreds of other things on your plate. Eventually the questions on this page will become second nature to you, but feel free to print and use this page as may times as you’d like.

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Post Evaluation Preparation Presentation

Evaluating Live Announcements

Whether live or video, printed or digital, your church’s announcements are asking people to respond in some way, like come to an event, register for something, sign up for a team.  In business, this is called a ‘call-to-action.’  and in order for your call-to-action to be successful, it needs to have 3 components, and often in this order:

  1. Attention
  2. Inspiration
  3. Information

I’ll explain each of these 3 items, then below an example of a live announcement I did from this past weekend and how it worked, plus a few things I noticed that I’d like to work on moving forward.

 

1. Get Your Audience’s Attention

If you have inspiration and information, but you don’t have your audience’s attention, it’s worth nothing.  We’ve all had an experience where we had a technical difficulty and a video didn’t play in service.  At that point, it doesn’t matter how much inspiration and information is in that video if no one sees it.

How to get your audience’s attention: Ask a question, mention something that everyone is experiencing and tie it to your announcement, or start with an interesting fact.

Keep your audience’s attention by only talking about things that are relevant to them (Here’s how we determine what to include in our announcements).

While you may switch the other 2 around, I would suggest that getting attention needs to be first on the list.

 

2. Inspire Your Audience

Make them laugh, make them cry, make them feel  hopeful or make them experience someone else’s hopelessness.  Trigger an emotion that makes them want to respond.  This is your WHY.  (side note: Here’s an article on communicating your WHY… not just how to respond but WHY.)

 

3. Give Your Audience Information

This is possibly the easiest piece of the puzzle, but so often done poorly.  The 2 extremes are too much information (too much to remember) or too little information (the person is walking away wondering how to respond.)

Find the middle ground, and this takes some practise – enough information to get someone interested, but not more than they need.  Then give ONE way to respond. On campus, we’re pointing people to the horseshoe (our Guest info kiosk that because of its location is shaped like a horseshoe) and online, we’re pointing people to our website.

A mistake in the response that I’ve seen is saying “Visit our website example.com/adults/women/prayer” or “Go see John Smith after service to sign up.” (You’re basically saying “If you know who John Smith is, you’re welcome to get involved. If you’re new, we know you don’t know who John Smith is, so we don’t want you to be involved.)

Multiple ways to respond isn’t helpful either. Stop by guest services, or sign up on our website, or join our Facebook group, or call the office this week, or send an email to PastorJohnSmith@example.com… Overload…

 

Here’s my opening announcement on January 8, 2017 at Life Church in Fort Myers, Florida. I’ve made some notes below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkZ_lL6GkBc&feature=youtu.be

 

1. Attention

I started by talking about the cool breeze this morning.  In south west Florida in January, we don’t often have a morning where it’s down to 50 F. People are pulling out warm clothes or jackets that they may only wear a few days each year, so it was a common thread everyone could identify with.

I kept the attention with a couple of jokes that led me to New Years Resolutions.

 

2. Inspiration

We’ve created a way for you to reach people who may have decided on a new years resolution, and here’s a way the you can connect them to Life Church and God.

 

3. Information

The business cards are simple for you to carry around and hand out. You can pick them up at the horseshoe in the foyer (our Guest Info kiosk is shaped like a horseshoe).

 

A few things I would like to work on when I present Live Announcements:

  • Our media team expecting whoever is speaking to be standing on the grey carpet you see on our stage (that’s simply an indication of where that first camera shot is positioned.) I need to wait until I’m on that carpet to start speaking. (This is a cut from our Live Broadcast feed, so this is actually what was broadcast online that morning.)
  • I walk back a forth more than I’d like to. A little is fine so it feels conversational, but I don’t want it to be distracting for the message.
  • I didn’t hit the inspiration part as well as I’d like to.  I don’t often script my live announcements, so in this case, I would have like to help create more of a sense that people are looking for the information and our people can help connect them with it.
  • I have some verbal static (repeating myself talking about resolutions, I say ‘Actually, Believe it or not, typically, umm, ah…’) Verbal static is when you say words that offer no value to the conversation while you gather your thoughts to say something meaningful. Slowing down a little would allow me to vocalize those thoughts without the static.

 

If you’re interested, here is my full announcement clip from that Sunday:

https://youtu.be/I5pPqNxz7Xo

 

Brady Shearer from Pro Church Tools has a great way to integrate stories into your announcements (more than 35% of the time Jesus was teaching, He used stories!) Check out Brady’s 2-part formula here!

 

I’d love to hear your thoughts, or if you have a clip of your live announcements, post it in the comments!

 

 

 

Categories
Preparation

To Announce or Not To Announce… that is the question.

In conversations I’ve had with other communication teams, this really breaks down into 2 questions:

  1. What do you decide what to announce from the stage during service?
  2. How do you tell someone that you’re not going to announce their event?

I’ll answer each one individually as far as the filters that we use at Life Church.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGdZmtVqIT0

What do you announce from the stage?

We filter our announcements based on 3 criteria:

  1. Does it apply to 75% of people or more? (this could be service schedule change, guest speaker, holiday hours at the office, upcoming church-wide event, etc.)
  2. Is it something new or outside of the usual schedule? (a ladies conference, a new small group, VBS, a change in online giving, etc.)
  3. Do we have less than 5 things to announce this service? (We have a saying: “If everything is important, then nothing is important.”  If you announce 8 or 10 things, it’s very likely the people who need to hear important information are tuning you out because it’s mixed in with information they don’t need to hear.  Recently I visited a friend’s church. The person doing announcements read everything in the bulletin for the week and month as their announcement time.  I don’t remember any of it, except he started with a joke.

We usually do 3 announcements during the “Mid-Service” announcements (sometimes live and sometimes video) and then 2 at the end.  The 2 at the end are usually the “immediate response” information – ie. register in the foyer on your way out, see you for a special service this Wednesday, etc.

If we have less than 5 things that meet criteria 1 or 2, then often we’ll fill those slots with things that are important to our core values, but don’t meet 1 & 2.

If we have more than 5 things that meet criteria 1 & 2, then we cut down to 5… this leads perfectly into question 2:

 

How do you tell someone you’re not going to announce their event?

The easiest way to tell someone that their event won’t be in the announcements is to let them know ahead of time what your criteria is (so they can figure out for themselves if it’s worth asking) and then paint a picture for them of all of the different ways they can still spread the message about their event without it being in the announcements.

Paint the picture that their event is important and we don’t want it to get lost in the shuffle… I use the example that if I go to the grocery store and my wife asks me to pick up more than 3 things, I need a list.  That 4th thing may be really important, but I’ve probably forgotten. That’s why we stick with 3 announcements in the middle of service.

love is in the airSo, the married couples over 70 sky diving weekend may be a really important event to someone.  It may be the way that a couple connects with someone who leads them to salvation.

I’m not down-playing the importance of the opportunity by not announcing it from stage, but I’m saying there are better ways to connect directly with the people who may be interested.

(…and by the way, if we only have 4 things to announce next weekend, I would be happy to make this the 5th announcement.)

In the mean time, here are some other promotion options that you can choose when you submit an event request form:

 

  • Image on the 20 minute countdown clock pre-service in the Foyer, Worship Center & Duplicated on the digital signage rotating for 30 minutes after service
  • Facebook / Twitter / Instagram Scheduled Posts
  • Information printed in the Church Bulletin
  • Website Calendar
  • Add it to “Upcoming Events” TV above the Information Kiosk
  • Weekly email newsletter to all members

 

Opportunities you can utilize directly to connect with your group:

  • Provide handouts to your current group members and those you meet in church that may enjoy your event
  • Use your personal email address to send out an image and event information to people who may be interested in your contacts (include people who may not attend our church who may be interested).
  • Post information on your personal social media channels
  • At this event, hand out information for your next event

What is your experience with announcements and alternatives? Let us know in the comments below!