Church Communication Link

With the Internet at our finger tips, there are many great tools that communications leaders can get their hands on. Some are free, some cost, but when we learn how to use them, these tools can help us reach audiences that never heard our message before. They can also help us increase our creativity and get our messages out in new ways. Below I’m sharing a few, I’ve used, but I’d love to hear what resources or companies you’ve had success with and how you’ve used them.

• Photos.com and istockphoto.com are two great resources for adding people or unique images to your design projects. Photos.com has a handy subscription service with a flat annual fee and unlimited number of downloads. istockphoto.com has a great variety that includes vector images and more. istock offers watermarked sample images that you can mock up your design with before purchasing the un-watermarked version. istock charges per credit but you can get many images for about 10 credits (which ends up at about $10-$15). As with anything on the Web, keep in mind that there can be images that are not friendly to the moral mind so you’ll want to be cautious and on guard when searching for images

• A simple but wonderful photo processing tool that’s free is Irfan View. As much as I like Macs I’d keep a PC around just to run Irfanview because it’s so sweet for batch processing images if you’re running on a PC. However, I must note that if you have but are not using Adobe’s Bridge then you’re missing out. Bridge is a wonderful way to sort through thousands of images quickly and has some nice batch processing (renaming, keywording, rotating, etc.) available. If you don’t have Bridge, I’d definitely ge a hold of Irfanview. For some areas that want to be able to work with lots of photos but don’t have a budget for Photoshop, we’ve set them up with Irfanview and it’s been a big help for basic viewing, slideshows, re-sizing, and rotating. It’s not Photoshop, but it’s a mighty little viewer and processer for your images

• The Church Marketing Lab on Flickr is a great way to see what other churches are doing and the cool ideas that are out there. You can sign up and share your own ideas.

• Granger Community Church has a heart for sharing ideas of what they’ve done with others. Through conferences, workshops and blogs, leaders at GCC are really doing cool stuff to get the word out and connect people. Check it out at Wiredchurches.com