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5 reasons to include a signature on your email

February 21, 2011 in for Churches, Pastors

It’s easy to butcher an email signature.

However, this isn’t a reason to not to have one. In fact, there are at least 5 good reasons to include an email signature at the bottom of your emails:

  1. To provide alternate contact information. Perhaps the recipient of your email would like to follow up by phone – I’ve been in this situation many a time, where I’ve wanted to call, but only had the email address.
  2. To strengthen branding. At Church by the Bridge, we want to constantly reinforce why we exist – to live for Jesus, and to love like Jesus. The email signature is another medium to promote our mission.
  3. To clarify working days/hours. Particularly in a church, working hours can differ from person to person, with different people taking different days off. Clarifying these details in an email signature can remind people when you’re not in the office (see example below).
  4. To help people who receive your email via someone else. If an email you send is forwarded, the original recipient might know who you are and your other contact details, but the other recipients might not. Including a signature allows these people to learn who you are, and how they can get in touch with you. Other information (e.g. the web address) also provides these people with an opportunity to learn more about the church or organisation.
  5. To legitimise the organisation, and your role in it. Anyone can create a domain name and start sending emails. An email signature says ‘yes, we’re real, and if you don’t believe me here’s a few different ways you can check for yourself’. When you’re sending emails to people unfamiliar with your church or organisation, this is an important inclusion.

Read more (and learn what not to do when creating an email signature):

I also recommend this interesting read on ‘Why emails include legal disclaimers‘. The reason isn’t what you might think.

This is the template we use at Church by the Bridge:

–
Steven Kryger
Media and Communications Pastor | Church by the Bridge
Office: +61 2 8920 9817 | Mobile: 0403 904 392
steven.kryger@cbtb.org.au | www.cbtb.org.au

Living for Jesus. Loving Like Jesus.

Please note: I am in the office on Mondays and Thursdays – thanks for your patience in receiving a response to your email.

You don’t need a massive budget to create engaging video

February 18, 2011 in for Churches

Camera + good audio + quality script = engagement.

As always, content is king.

Example:

See more on YouTube.

Reading: ‘Zag: The Number One Strategy of High-performance Brands’

February 18, 2011 in for Churches, Outreach

This book has large text and big spaces between lines – it made me feel like a hero as I finished it off in one night!

“Without a clearly drawn vision, employees tend to work at cross-purposes, often taking refuge in functional silos instead of collaborating to transform a shared picture of the future into reality.”

You can peak inside the book here.

Great graphic describing the difference between marketing, advertising, branding etc. (courtesy of Inju – click to enlarge):

Dying to Know – a book about death

February 11, 2011 in Christian Living, for Churches

At the end of last year I wrote an article for Australian opinion site – The Punch. The article was entitled ‘What happens when we die?‘, and received quite a staggering response – 597 comments at last count.

Here’s the last two pararaphs of the article:

“The Christian message isn’t a new message, and I can anticipate many objections to what I believe and why. My point isn’t to convince you to believe what I believe, nor to defend the Christian gospel in a couple of paragraphs.

No, my purpose is to urge you to work out what you do believe, and to make sure you’ve got some evidence and ultimately some confidence, to back up whatever that might be. Don’t go round that last corner blind-folded. The consequences are simply too great to just cross your fingers and hope for the best.”

A couple of weeks later I received this book in the mail from Pilotlight Australia – ‘Dying to Know – bringing death to life‘:

It’s well-produced and easy to read, and does what I was encouraging readers to do in my article – talk about death, and think about death. Not talking or thinking about it might be less painful, but it’s a very ineffective preparation for the inevitable.

As the book explains:

“People study for weeks for a birth,
why not study for a death?”

You can buy the book here. Nice work, Pilotlight Australia.

10 reasons your church should advertise on Facebook

February 9, 2011 in for Churches, Outreach

If you’re thinking about how your church can connect with your community, make sure Facebook advertising is part of your strategy.

Here’s 10 reasons why you should advertise on Facebook.

1. Time on Facebook accounts for 29% of all time Australians spend online. If people in your community spent 29% of their leisure time at the local shopping centre, you’d have a presence at the shopping centre, wouldn’t you?

2. Not only do Australians spend a lot of time on Facebook – there are a lot of Australians on Facebook – nearly 9.5 million of us, in fact.

3. It’s not expensive - there is a minimum daily spend of just US$1. Obviously a spend this low won’t get thousands of people clicking through to your website, but it’s a whole lot cheaper than the minimum spend for a television advertisement. You can also choose to run the campaign for as long as you like – I’ve run campaigns for just a couple of days.

4. You can target who sees your advertisements, so that only people in your local area see the ads. The ads I run are only viewed in the suburbs surrounding my church – people in Melbourne don’t need to hear about our Simply Christianity course!

Facebook will also tell you many people are on Facebook who live in your targeted area:

6. You can target people by other criteria – such as age, likes and interests, relationships, and more. Running a marriage-enrichment course? Create an ad campaign, and target people who are married or engaged.

7. You can experiment with different content and images, to see what messaging is most effective at connecting with the people you’d like to invite to your church. Not only does this help you improve your Facebook ads, but you can learn lessons for your offline marketing activities too. If lots of people click on an ad with the title ‘Come back to church’, perhaps your church could run a ‘Back to Church Sunday‘ event?

8. It’s easy. You can run your campaigns using your own Facebook account, with no technical expertise required (but if you do get stuck, Facebook offers a comprehensive FAQs section to help you out).

9. Facebook will provide you with valuable data on how your campaign is going, so you can improve it on the fly. You can also see how many people have come through to your website via a Facebook ad – and what they did when they got there. There’s lots of valuable data to learn about how to make your campaigns and online outreach even more effective.

10. People still need to hear about Jesus.

Learn more about advertising on Facebook here, and get started here. If you need help, or want to share how you go, post your comments below, or get in touch via email.

Reading: ‘Branding Faith’

February 8, 2011 in for Churches, Outreach

Some of the mentions of non-evangelical ministries (e.g. Joel Osteen) will grate with an evangelical audience. However, I found this book helpful in thinking about branding, and the role of branding in churches and ministries.

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