Showing posts with label publicity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label publicity. Show all posts

Monday, November 12, 2012

Christmas & Advent - ideas, resources and donkey rides.

One of todays tasks is putting together a Christmas leaflet for the neighbourhood. Even though Advent isn't upon us yet, there are over 20 Christmas 'specials' to start getting ready for. Here are a few places I go for help, and a few ideas to keep things fresh:


1. Cartoon Church has a Christmas section, pay Dave Walker the very reasonable license fee and use can use his cartoons in publicity, on service sheets etc. Far Side inspired Inherit theMirth is more pricey, but some of them are superb

2. Beatbox Bible's reading of Luke 2 did a lot of service last year as a Christmas reading in services

3. For a fresh stock of visuals, it's worth repeat visits to the Nativity Factor site. The competition is running again this year, for 2 minute interpretations of the Christmas story. All of last years shortlist are on the site, and the Christmas Channel on Youtube has all the entries. 

4. Christine Sine's website at Mustard Seed Associates is packed with advent reflections, art and poems, you may need a bit of time to browse it, but there's lots of good stuff there. 

5. If you need an Advent Calendar, try this one from Beyond Church, featuring the Beach Huts used in their 'live' Advent calendar. If you're anywhere in the Hove area, they're repeating it this year. There might just be time to organise something like this, and there are plenty of ways to do it - using shop fronts, garages, garden sheds etc. 

6. Or try a Posada, where Nativity figures are taken from one house to another throughout Advent, and each host household can mark the evening by doing something special (party, carols, decorating). There are some resources for this at Church Army, including a family board game, cut out and make Nativity set, scripts and resources for all-age Christmas services etc.  

Some local ideas, and things that have worked:
 - our 9 Lessons and Carols was uncomfortably full last year, so we've got an 'alternative' on this year, on a Friday night featuring our new Community Choir. The set list will mix traditional carols with choir pieces (Lean on Me, Fix You, Price Tag) to tell the Christmas story. There's more wiggle room over poems and readings too.

 - donkey rides. A variant on 'Get in the Picture', which gives people the chance to dress up and have their photo taken. If you've some nativity dressing up clothes and a local Christmas fair going on, do donkey rides for the children, a chance for folk to take pictures of the Mary/Joseph/Donkey combo, and have something to give away that explains what Christmas is all about.

 - Christmas services in 'secular' venues. Local garden centres have been a regular feature for several years, and they've often rung us to get the date in the calendar. Christingles seem to work well, and we get people to make their own, which is great fun for the kids, and saves a lot of prep work!!

 - Leaflet drop. Boring, boring, but if you're not going to let local folk know what you're up to now, then when are you? Nothing quite so good for the soul as pushing leaflets through snappy letterboxes in the cold. We use 160gsm card - easy to fold but robust enough to survive most letterboxes. Or you can use CPO's nice publicity materials and overprint your details.

 - Chocolate Christmas - a very popular idea for a talk I used a couple of years ago, here's the original, some other ideas (see the comments), and an absolute monster. It works best if you've got the actual chocolates, and there's usually a queue (mostly boys) at the end who want to help you eat them.

 - giveaways: Why Christmas? is a good one, and the Philo trust have several from J John, including What's the Point of Christmas? If you like Adrian Plass's writing style, try this. Some childrens ideas here, or several booklets/ideas on the CPO site plus childrens themed comics, and more comics,

Finally, if you're after a few good Christmas jokes and stories, J Johns Christmas Unwrapped message is a great place to go, very funny.

Update: got to add this superb DIY Advent Calendar from the Mothers Union.

Tuesday, November 20, 2007

Ditch the Day-Glo


This is the title of a new website authored by Phil Creighton, to tie in with his book 'How to be heard in a noisy world'. It's a very helpful book on all aspects of church publicity, covering things like

- noticeboards

- how to create a decent website

- church notice sheets and publicity

- working with the media

- creating a reader-friendly church newsletter/magazine

- creating a church logo

- using technology

- the church building, and the messages we send by how well (or not) it's looked after

and pretty much all aspects of the communication/publicity side of things for churches.

It's a very good book, with attention to detail (e.g. exploring the readability of different fonts, and the kind of message they send), and plenty of examples of both good, and bad, publicity. Some of the church noticeboards are particularly grim, and make me shift uncomfortably in my seat when I think of the condition of one of ours! Any church wanting to review it's publicity, or even explore one of the areas above, would get a lot out of consulting the book.

Just 1 thing which I wasn't sure about. Creighton is pretty scathing about poor quality publicity materials, which is fair enough. But when he got to talking about mass-photocopied leaflets I started twitching. We did 3000 of said leaflets at the start of the autumn - an A5 card, duplicated on a risograph, and distributed by an army of 30 or so volunteers from the church. I think it's the fact that it wasn't a glossy printer job that made it stand out from the leaflets for Morrisons and Dominos pizza.

We reckon there have been about 20 new contacts through that card, from baptisms to toddler groups to folks turning up at church. So we're doing it again for Christmas. Creighton is right that quality materials aren't beyond the budget of many normal churches, now that technology has brought things within range for us. But I wonder if there's an authenticity about something that's a well-done but clearly in-house production.

If you want to browse the book and live in Somerset, it'll be back in the Diocesan resources centre in Wells by the end of next week, as I currently have it out on loan! In the meantime, here are some of the links he recommends:

http://www.parishpump.co.uk/ - material for church magazines etc.

http://www.hosea.co.uk/ - advice on website design

http://www.thesheepdip.co.uk/ - resources for newsletters, magazines etc.

Thursday, September 06, 2007

Conventional wisdom

The conventional wisdom, or maybe I just read it somewhere, is that if you're a church there's very little point shoving leaflets through people's letter boxes. If you really have to, make sure they're well produced, quality things, rather than just photocopied black and white thingy's about bell ringers and the flower group.

Well, being the cutting edge people we are, we're printing off a bout 3,000 black and white photocopied cards to shove through people's letter boxes. Worse, the shade of blue I ordered from the stationers turns out to be slightly darker than I'd pictured. I know that yellow is the best background colour for readability (and dyslexia apparently), but fancied a change from the colour of our Easter card. When I popped down to Yeovil Community Church to copy them last week I forgot to take both boxes of card, so we only had the first 1500 ready to go on Sunday.

So what do you know, I get a phone call from a couple in the church to say they're a few cards short for the (newly built) street they were covering. Later the same afternoon I get a call from someone on that street wanting to know more about the church, delighted to find we've got a Sunday school (though we call it something different), and saying she'll be along in the next week or two.

The only excuse the conventional wisdom might have is that, with lots of newer housing around, there's a chance that some people in those houses might want to find out about the local church as part of their process of settling in. Or maybe somebody prayed.