Church Bulletins Ideas – Most churches still use bulletins. But with that being said, when was the last time you examined the true purpose of your church newsletter – and whether or not it is achieving its purpose? In this video, we’ll outline a series of principles we believe church newsletters should follow, and even give you a free newsletter Photoshop template to help you create your own.
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Church Bulletins Ideas
Brady Shearer: Most churches still use newsletters. With that said, when was the last time you examined the true purpose of your church newsletter and whether or not it is accomplishing its purpose? In this podcast, we’ll lay out a series of principles we believe church newsletters should follow, and even give you a free newsletter Photoshop template to help you create your own.
Church Bulletin Inserts
Alex Mills: Well, hi, and welcome to Pro Church Tools, a plan to help you share the message of Jesus as we navigate the biggest change in communication in 500 years. I’m your host Alex Mills, joined as always by Brady Shearer.
Brady Shearer: I asked a follower of my Instagram story yesterday, Alex, does your church have a newsletter? Yes or no? That’s a total of 759 responses from the last 15 hours, so we didn’t let this story last 24 hours. We had to go into the booth and start shooting. But of the 759 total responses, 64% of these churches and church leaders said yes, 36% said no.
Brady Shearer: The majority of our churches still use church bulletins, and I’ll make this disclaimer at the beginning of this episode. This isn’t an episode about how church newsletters are stupid and you should get rid of them, even though some say that’s a brand for us. Let’s start with three principles that we believe should guide your newsletter design and also guide your newsletter strategy. Principle number one, we believe this wholeheartedly, as much as we love digital, there is value in physical materials over personal experiences.
Brady Shearer: We go to a lot of restaurants, you and I, because we love to eat. I think there was one restaurant, a sushi place we went to, that gave out iPads or tablets to order our food. Also, every other restaurant we went to handed out physical paper, cardboard laminated menus. [crosstalk 00:01:47] back to normal. There is value in owning a physical substance for a personal experience.
Printspiration: 5 Easy & Time Saving Young Women Bulletin Board Tips For You
Alex Mills: Yes, there definitely is. I know this from personal experience. I am one of the few people in our church who find no value in that piece of printed paper. Most of our church members, if the printer runs out of toner or something and we can’t print a newsletter, what kind of newsletter are they? I’m looking forward to X, Y and Z in this week’s newsletter. I will use it for message notes. Now what am I going to do? People really find a lot of value in that print material, so this episode will help us judge hey, people like this. There is value in this. How can we ensure that what we do with our newsletter is on brand and mission for the larger value system of our church?
Brady Shearer: Principle number two, your church newsletter should align with your overall communications strategy. The problem with so many church newsletters is that they exist in a vacuum. You’ve been doing newsletters for 25 years and you’ve done it one way, and you’re still doing it that way. You’ve updated your website, you’ve updated a lot of your communication strategy. You do all this work and good work on social media. You might point everyone to one destination for all your next steps, but then your newsletter is living in the dark ages. Again, nothing wrong with physical materials. This episode is more about optimizing and improving and developing your newsletter to fit your overall communication strategy because we think it needs to be aligned with everything else. It shouldn’t be this thing that you still do for a small group of people, but that doesn’t really apply to anything else. That’s when it can actually be harmful.
Principle number three, the fewer content changes, the better. This is quite the opposite principle of how the newsletter has existed for the last 25 years, but we think there is a lot to be gained by having a newsletter that might be distributed monthly instead of weekly, and I actually have two DMs from pro-church members. countries that volunteered to contact when I published this survey. The first one says we have a welcome guide, in parentheses. It’s a newsletter. But I will say, we put a little bit of focus on the weekly posts. Make it a first impression tool. The content hardly changes, so it’s not as stressful as before when we updated almost all the content every week. Others said we went from weekly to monthly and it actually allowed us to be more creative with our newsletter.
Newsletter principle number three, the less content changes, the better. We actually ask, this is a while ago, I ask people how much they pay for their newsletters about paper costs, printer maintenance, do you do it in house or do you send it out [crosstalk 00:04:33]
Church Clip Art And Images
Brady Shearer: Yeah, we asked about 150 churches and it’s pretty broad. The average is about 25 cents per newsletter. So if you are a church of about 100 people, like Alex, and you print 100 newsletters per week, that would cost you $109 per month, which for a church of 100 people is not a small expense. . That’s important. This episode is also about finding ways to make your newsletter more cost effective. Those are the three principles we think your newsletter should adhere to. The principle, the second, which is the newsletter, should work in your overall communication strategy, what is our overall communication strategy? We taught it for a while. It’s called a central hub and it’s very simple. The idea is that you should have one destination for each next step in your church. Instead of sometimes directing your church to your website, sometimes to your extension desk, sometimes to your app, and sometimes to emailing the pastor or calling the church office or talking to Betty’s leader after the service, only has one seat. Ideally a website so that it can be accessed 24/7, not just on Sunday mornings during services. We believe that your newsletter should be alive and well and help contribute to this overall communication strategy.
Alex Mills: Yeah, and that’s an important distinction to make because some people might watch or listen and say well hey Brady hey Alex you guys keep talking about having an online central hub for online card networks, say, or online registration for your lady conference. So why print and materials? Well, this is not another chance to register something or take the next step. Your newsletter will serve to point to that central hub, the one location you have for every next step. Whether it’s your website or the way you communicate in your church, your newsletter will not serve as a medium in itself, but rather as a messenger to show you, this is where you will take the next step. Your central hub.
Brady Shearer: The newsletter template we’re going to give you really plays a role in this hub’s communication strategy. Separated from that, it would be useless. If you want to learn more about the hub strategy, we’ll link the full guide in the show notes and YouTube description. In this guide, you can see real churches, how they do it and the results they get. At this point, if you’re watching, we want to show you what our newsletter template looks like. This is freely available for download. If you’re listening to a podcast, it will be in the show notes. If you are using a YouTube video, you can click the download link, no login required. This is a Photoshop template, so you need that type of software to edit it. What we’ve done with this template is we’ve tried to take the hub strategy and create a complementary newsletter template
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