Reflecting on your Christmas 2016 Publicity

Reflecting on your Christmas 2016 Publicity

I recently wrote a column for this month’s Christianity magazine, with some helpful tips on getting ready to communicate at Christmas time.

Although we’re now well in to the Christmas season, and it’s likely your church has already held some or all of its Christmas events, I want to reflect a little more on one of the tips I included.

Church Christmas Communications Tips

First things first, then, here’s what I wrote!

It’s really important to carefully plan the promotion of your church’s Christmas activities.

It goes without saying you need to prepare well in advance! Creativity takes time, and you’ll need to allow time for your material to be printed, distributed and published online, too.

The look and feel of your communication is as important as the words you choose – aim to grab your audience’s attention, but remember less is more! Look to brands you admire for inspiration – there’s no harm in searching Pinterest for ‘Church Christmas Flyers, but don’t be afraid try something new! If you don’t have the resources to do it yourself, or you’ve left it a bit late, you can find brilliant Christmas templates from places like CPO or Creative Market.

It’s vital that you proofread before you release your content. The more sets of eyes you can get on your work, the better. Once you’re happy with your publicity, encourage online sharing. When your churchgoers spread the message with their friends and followers, your reach will be multiplied, meaning more people invited, and hopefully more attending!

Finally, ensure that you review your efforts once the Christmas chaos has passed – learn from any difficulties you encountered. If it’s all been a bit last minute in 2016, make sure you start your preparation early next year!

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Top Tips for Church Christmas Events

To sum this advice up in to a list of helpful tips for publicising the events your church holds this Christmas:

  • Prepare your publicity in advance
  • Aim for eye-catching designs
  • Look around for design inspiration
  • Don’t be afraid to experiment
  • Proofread all of your designs
  • Encourage online sharing
  • Review your promotional efforts after Christmas

Reflecting on reflection

It’s this last point about reviewing your efforts that I want to spend a little more time on, now.

First, allow me to sum up my experience of the post-Christmas period in church, when it comes to publicity and communications:

Christmas is a very busy time for the church, with lots of events. This means lots and lots of effort goes in to the pre Christmas period, as each event needs a flyer, or poster, or social media graphics… not to mention the blog posts and social scheduling! I’m sure you know the feeling only too well.

After all of this, our admins and/or our comms teams breathe a huge sigh of relief, having a well-earned break – and rightly so!

What happens next, however, is we realise that January is actually a pretty busy time too. We have ‘text-for-the-year’ to be thinking about, and we probably need to design visuals for a new sermon-series too. Maybe we have a new course starting in the new year, and don’t forget about the ‘back-to-school’ publicity for the youth groups.

This can mean a very short break for the creatives in our midst, as they set to work on all of the upcoming tasks.

It can also mean that we don’t have time to look back and review our Christmas publicity.

Making the time to look back

Christmas rightly demands a lot of attention – it is probably the biggest push of the year, in terms of Church publicity (closely followed by the Easter period). Because of this, it should also be the period that demands the most careful review, in order to learn from our mistakes and optimise next year’s efforts.

I don’t doubt that we all reflect on last year’s Christmas marketing when it’s time to produce this year’s, but in all likelihood, this will be at least 8 months after we last thought about it. With a little thought we might be able to remember the reasons behind the decisions we took, but too long has passed to conduct a proper review.

My suggestion, then?

Review your 2016 Church Christmas Publicity in January 2017.

Church communicators, this is your challenge – make it your New Year’s Resolution, if you’re so inclined.

However you choose to do it, whoever you decide should or shouldn’t be a part of the discussion – make time for it.

So how to go about it? Here are some solutions…

Christmas Publicity ‘Wrap-Up’

My first tip is an important one!

Make it fun!

We all have too many boring meetings already. Take advantage of the opportunity to have a fun, social get-together with those that you worked with to produce your Christmas publicity. Get the snacks in!

Invite the right people!

Consider who needs to be invited to your Christmas Publicity Review (designers, event planners, Vicar/ministers) and then have a think about who else might have useful input or feedback.

Praise as well as critique!

As well as giving constructive criticism, acknowledge all of the things that were done well this year! Remember that a lot of hard work has gone in to ‘planning Christmas’!

Be honest!

If you don’t like how things were done, this is the place to give your feedback. If there are things that could be improved upon, raise them, and ask for suggestions about how to do better in the coming year.

Be gentle!

Whilst being honest is important, we need to remember to share our feedback in love. If your opinions are given with humility and gentleness, you will be much less likely to cause offence, and those who were responsible will not feel victimised.

Take notes!

Task someone to keep a record of your discussion, but don’t feel that this has to be a formal set of bullet points! Get creative – bring on the sharpies and post-its!

Draw conclusions!

This meeting is concerned with reviewing what can be improved, rather than making firm plans for next Christmas’ publicity. With that said, it’s important to agree on some principles that will be carried forward. Perhaps these principles may be useful for the rest of the year’s communications, as well as the Christmas publicity!

Pray!

Thank God for the privilege of putting on and publicising events, in order to share His Good News with the world. Pray that we may do so with wisdom and enthusiasm, and that He would bless your communications efforts and that you would see fruit!

 

There you have it, my reflections on reflecting on Christmas. Let me know how your review meetings go, and any helpful tips you have for optimising your Christmas campaigns!

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