How To Take Charge Of Your Church Events Bulletin

And more, sometimes in multiple typefaces (gotta have Comic Sans for the children’s ministry info, of course).

Our Sunday Bulletin at Sojourn is one 8.5 x 11″ page, folded down the middle to make a front & back cover and two inside pages. The front cover is reserved for liturgical art and the current sermon series logo. The art changes weekly, and fits the aesthetic of the logo. On the inside pages we print the week’s sermon Bible texts and the pastor’s brief outline (with plenty of space for guests and church members to write notes).

Too much going on here ...

But today let’s talk about the back page. This is where we print the stuff that is so troublesome to many church leaders: the announcements and information. We also print an “About the cover image” artist statement, where our volunteer liturgical artists talk about their design concept. Sojourn highly values the arts. We own an art gallery and have many visual artists in our midst. We also cultivate an appreciation for the role of art in the church among all members. If this doesn’t sound appropriate for your church then your job could be even easier, because you could reserve the whole back page for announcements and info.

As you saw in the image above, for most of 2011 the format on our back page was:

1. Banner graphic of the top thing we wanted to promote that week.
2. Four short text-based ads for the four big things we were promoting.
3. Artist’s Statement
4. Info (address, phone #, email, Sunday service times, staff office hours)

How did we determine the “top thing”? Which of our events and opportunities to include in the four text ads? Ultimately it’s the will and vision of our Lead Pastor Daniel Montgomery, channeled through me. Our Communications Manual lists “Big, Medium, Light” promotional divisions for recurring events. “Big” things like our free health clinics and Membership classes always made the bulletin. Smaller things like ministry-specific classes often did not.

But this approach was still too text heavy. We were relying on text to sell people on the vision of each event, which is a poor choice for the back page of a church bulletin. People just need the who/what/when/where. So next we tried this:

Much simpler, and it enabled us to include all the events coming up at each particular campus in the next month (part of this is possible because we don’t do as many events as most mega churches. It’s part of our philosophy).

As so often happens, we didn’t see the weakness of this system till after we printed it the first week. By doing a monthly calendar, we ensured that we’d be promoting events at the end of a given month much more than events at the beginning. So the next week Media Director Chris Bennett (who designs and prints our bulletins each week) modified our Bulletin like this:

So instead of “December events” its a rolling 30-day list.

Concurrently we redesigned our web pages, ditching the fancy-pants separate Event calendars for each campus in favor of a simple, embedded Google calendar with color coding for each campus. Now, for every event, we can simply point people to:

sojournchurch.com/events

For info (and if needed, registration).

I love it when a plan comes together. Now we’re promoting more events than in the older model, but we’ve streamlined and simplified the design.

How do you do Sunday bulletins? Have you ditched your bulletin all together? Do you advertise all events or do you drive people to the major events? Is it a source of contention on staff, or is everyone on the same page?