Come join us at the special communications track during the NACBA’s national conference!

NACBA is pleased to announce the FASTTRACK-–COMMUNICATION program for 2013, bringing specialized training to church professionals in communications. This day-long intensive held during the NACBA general conference is focused on bringing education, resources, and networking opportunities to communications professionals.

What is your area of interest?

Advertising
Creative Design
Marketing
Signage
Social Media
Web Design

No matter your area of communication in the church environment, this FASTTRACK is for you!

Join your fellow communicators to learn the latest and best ways to communicate.

FRIDAY, JULY 12, 2013
8:00am – 4:00pm
CHARLOTTE CONVENTION CENTER
CHARLOTTE, NC

Cost: $199 (includes FASTTRACK–COMMUNICATION sessions, lunch, and Trade Show)

Come and meet with other communications professionals and learn what is needed to connect with your congregation through technology and printed media. There will be an informal networking reception with light hors d’oeuvres on  July 11th, the night prior to the meeting. Make your travel plans to arrive early enough to pick up your registration packet (You must be registered for FASTTRACK and join this evening’s gathering.)
Sessions:

7 Deadly Communications Sins
Evan McBroom

Evan is founder of Fishhook, a marketing communications and creative services company. He is dedicated to serving as a communications partner and resource with churches and Christ-centered organizations.  He combines the passion of his faith journey with the expertise he gained during his 14-year career with one of central Indiana’s largest corporate communication and marketing companies to provide clients with senior-level communications consultation.  Evan is a guest lecturer, presenter, emcee and trainer for numerous organizations.  He and his wife are active in adult and children’s worship arts at The Church at the Crossing in Indianapolis.

What If Your Ministry Disappeared
Mark MacDonald

Mark MacDonald is Senior Brand Strategist and Creative Director at PinPoint Creative in Winston-Salem, NC. He exhibits a teacher’s heart, assisting churches across the country to understand who they are, converting that information into a “brand” that can be used effectively through print, web, and social media. Simply put: The local church will “be known for something” so compelling that their congregations will grow.

Getting the Info You Need from Your Minisitries
Terrell Sanders

Terrell Sanders is the president of Main Street Enterprises, a web development firm with extensive experience helping churches use Websites and social media to improve communications. Past clients have ranged from the US Air Force and the FAA, to local small businesses, churches and non-profits. In 2005, Terrell founded MinistryCOM, the first national organization specifically focusing on church communications. Since then he has produced six national conferences across the US, and over a dozen more regional and local church communications events.

Shop Talk Roundtable – Small Table Discussions and Solutions Revealed
Questions WITH Answers

Communicating in Crisis
Stephen Drachler

Stephen Drachler achieves common sense, real-world solutions to communications challenges. An expert crisis communicator, he leads organizations through difficult situations. He believes the most important work should take place before a crisis occurs, by identifying vulnerabilities and fixing trouble spots.

He founded Drachler & Associates after serving as the chief media strategist and spokesperson for the Untied Methodist Church and its worldwide Council of Bishops.

Creating Effective Conversation Online
(Social and Web)
Natalie Aho

Natalie Aho works in a contract position to share ABPnews content with the online community. She connects with audiences through abpnews.com, social media platforms and other media tools, working out of her office in Mobile, Ala. She was the staff point person for planning and executing the overhaul and redesign of the ABPnews website launched in May 2012.
Before joining the ABPnews team in 2011, Natalie worked as communications manager for the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship of North Carolina.

Hotel Reservations
There are four conference hotels. For hotel information and NACBA room rate make hotel reservations through Visit Charlotte! here.

Highlights of the Day

• 7 Deadly Communication Sins
• Shop Talk Roundtable – Small Table Discussion and Solutions Revealed
• What If Your Ministry Disappeared?
• Express: Getting the Information Your Need from Your Ministries
• Lunch: Rules and Challenges for Golden NACBIES
• Trade Show
• Communication in Crisis
• Creating Effective Conversation Online

More information at nacba.net.

For almost two decades, I have helped churches across the US and Canada with communications consulting and training. I work with churches that have incredibly effective communications, and others that struggle to publish the sermon notes each week. From this experience, I have discovered one easy, free technique that is guaranteed to improve the quality and effectiveness of your church communications. Here it is:

Give your communications team at least two weeks lead time.

That’s the distinguishing factor between churches with great communications, and churches with poor communications. Teams that regularly get to work on promotions at least two weeks in advance almost always have better results. The number of people on your staff or the amount of money in your budget doesn’t affect quality as much as lead time. A mediocre volunteer with two weeks lead time can outperform a talented artist who is only given a couple hours.

With two weeks of lead time a creative person can do incredible work, but even if your team isn’t super creative, with two weeks lead time they can research other churches and steal good ideas from them. Even in the commercial world, many of the best marketing campaigns are “borrowed” from others and reskinned for a new client.

With two weeks of lead time your communications team can collect all the details and creative elements they need to properly promote the event. They have time to find great stock photos (often free), instead of using old, dated clip art. They can dig up photos from last year’s event – which are often the best way to visually tell the story. They have time to get a writer to craft some catchy copy and titles.

With two weeks of lead time they can brainstorm new and creative ways to promote your event. They can play with other ideas – signs, banners, postcards, email, social media graphics. These are all inexpensive and highly effective, but take time to do properly.

With two weeks of lead time they can prepare multiple communications resources. Not just a bulletin announcement, but also some nice posters, a story on the website, and event announcement and photos on the Facebook page. By using multiple media you reach more people, and repetition makes the message stick better than one impression. Most of these aren’t expensive, and none of these require extreme creative talent. They just take time.

If you come in on Thursday afternoon and need a new promotion piece for the weekend, you have already seriously limited the effectiveness of the promotion. I’m sure your team will do their best, but many of their best options are already impossible.

I challenge you to try this test:

Pick an event at least three weeks away. Spend a week locking down all the details you can (you can let your communications team listen in, they may have good ideas). Then brief them on the event – purpose, audience, details, theme, etc. (We have a worksheet you can use to make sure you have all the details they need.) Now give them two weeks to brainstorm, research and develop some effective ways to promote your event. I think you will be amazed at the results.

The church is tasked with communicating the most important message in the world. It seems that we should do everything possible to communicate that message as effectively as possible.

Terrell Sanders

Terrell is president of Main Street Enterprises, a web development and consulting firm that specializes in church communications. He is also founder of MinistryCOM.org, a free resource site for church communications professionals. He can be reached at tsanders@MainStreetOpen.com.

Don’t miss my personal favorite: Designing Usable Websites, aka. Everything I know about good web design I learned from the airport. (sorry, shameless self-promotion).

Want to make your life easier, save time and money, and maybe even improve the quality of your communications? Then next time you redesign your website or publications — try to standardize your image aspect ratios.

What is an aspect ratio?

The aspect ratio of a photo (or any graphic) is the ratio of the width to height. Common aspect ratios are 4:3 (standard definition TV), 16:9 (high def TV) and the classic 1:1 (square). Once an image is cropped to a particular aspect ratio it can easily be resized larger or smaller without losing any of the image or doing any weird stretching.

The problem comes when you want to put a square picture (1:1) in a widescreen layout (16:9). Now you have chop off a bunch of the top and bottom to make it fit, or create a new graphic with more “stuff” on the sides to completely fill the wide slot.

If you have to publish the same information in multiple locations, this aspect ratio can cause headaches. You may need a 4:3 image for the TV screens in the hall, and 16:9 for the website feature story, a 10:4 for the skinny enews masthead, and a square one for the Facebook icon. Since they don’t resize well, you may end up creating 4 or 5 different graphics to meet all the needs. One graphic designer we know has a client that requires all graphics to be 10 different aspect ratios. This takes more time, and costs more money.

So how do we fix this? Try standardizing your aspect ratios on all the media that require recurring graphics or photos. If you have to create 4:3 graphics for the announcement slides, can you change the website to use the same ratio? Instead of creating fancy graphic banners on the enews, can you use a standard banner and put 4:3 images in the stories?

Maybe you can’t get everything to a single standard, but even getting down to 2 or 3 will help the designer as they create new graphics. If they know every graphic has to be delivered in both 4:3 and 16:9 format, they can create designs that easily crop both ways. They design the graphic, create two cropped versions, and you have everything you need. All your materials can be consistent and you’ll save hundreds of hours per year by not trying to cram a square peg in a 16:9 hole.

by Terrell Sanders

tsanders@MainStreetOpen.com

But your customers do see it, and even more frightening, your prospects more than likely viewed your site before contacting you the first time. Your old site may be scaring off more business than it is bringing in.

Here are five things you need to look for when reviewing your site. If you have them, you need to get them off. They will hold you back.

1. Splash pages

Splash pages are full pages, often with animated content, that display before your site’s main page. Splash pages usually have a link at the bottom that says “Continue to site”.

Splash pages were never a good idea, they were created at a time when graphic designers and advertising folks created most websites and thought any chance to run a commercial was good. The truth is that people are already at your site, they don’t need a commercial, they are ready to know more. Making them go through a splash page is like telling customers they can’t be seated in your restaurant until after they wait in the lobby and watch your commercials. It was a bad idea then, it still is. Modern website don’t use splash pages.

Additionally, splash pages often kill your search engine ranking. Much of your site ranking on Google comes from the first page. If that page has nothing but a flash video or slideshow, then Google has nothing to read. Hence your site is basically empty in their view. That’s not what you want Google to think.

2. Flash animations

Another carry over from the advertising-agency-built sites is the gratuitous use of flash animations. The theory was that websites needed to be engaging, an experience, and entertaining to attract visitors. Maybe that was true in the early days when there were more websites than web users, but today content is king. People use the web to get information, they don’t need shiny flashing things to hold their attention. Additionally, as more sites are viewed on mobile devices, these intense animations often don’t display at all, or download so slowly that they make the site unusable.

Apple mobile devices don’t display flash at all, so even if you have a tasteful use of flash, it still can’t be seen by anyone on an iPhone or iPad. Again, any content inside flash animation can’t be seen by search engines either.

3. Old news

Years ago we signed a contract to build a new website for a church. The first thing the business administrator wanted us to do was immediately remove the featured news story off the current website. The feature story was the birth announcement of the pastor’s child, and notice saying mother and daughter were both doing fine. He said that “baby” is now 4 years old and the story just reminds everyone how long it’s been since they updated the site.

It’s hard to impress new prospects and existing clients when your most current news story is several years old. If your last news story is years old, people may even get the impression you aren’t in business any more. Get some fresh news on your site to prove you are still in business.

4. Autoplay music

Unless you are a musician, you shouldn’t have music that automatically plays on your site. Even if you are a musician, the music should only play when it’s selected. As web surfing has become mainstream, more users are visiting website from offices, schools, and other public locations. They don’t want to hear your music automatically playing. Trust me on this one.

5. Font frenzy

Too many font sizes, too many font styles, too many colors. These are usually the sign of an amateur developer, or someone who has the ability to edit their own site. Just because the average computer has 200 fonts and can display 65 million colors, it doesn’t mean you should have to use them all on the same page. Moderation is good. Most professional sites only have 2 or 3 fonts, and usually only 2 or 3 colors. If everything is BOLD ITALIC RED and BLINKING then nothing stands out.

The exterior of your office probably doesn’t include every architectural feature known to man, your website shouldn’t either.

That’s the list. Getting these five items off your site will help make it a positive tool in your marketing efforts. Your website can be a great first impression tool for new prospects. It just needs a fighting chance.

by Terrell Sanders

tsanders@MainStreetOpen.com

Check out our Youtube channel at http://youtube.com/ministrycom. Many of our older resources are only available in audio format. We are working to get those online soon.

We need profiles from as many churches as possible for our book. Size, location, and denomination aren’t important, we are just looking for churches that do communications well and are willing to share their processes and organization with others.

If you are interested in providing a profile for our book, please email me at tsanders@MainStreetOpen.com and ask for the Church Communications Profile Questionnaire. The questionnaire will take about 30 minutes to complete and return. After I receive your data, I will schedule any followup that is required.

All churches profiled in the handbook will receive everlasting fame — and a free copy of the book.

Details are online at http://mainstreetopen.com/oklahoma-church-communications-seminar/

If you are in the OKC area, mark your calendar and stay tuned for details. If you are interested in helping get a sponsored event in your area, contact Terrell Sanders @ tsanders@ministrycom.org.