Last week I blogged about the cost of clutter. This week I want to help you de-clutter your communications message before it ever reaches your audience.

Whenever an advertising agency or design firm takes on a new project they always create a creative brief before they start any creative work (I worked in an a design and agency environment for 16 years before coming on staff at Crossway). They do this so that both the client and the agency have a clear understanding before the creative work starts what exactly the communication is trying to acheive and what they want the consumer to do.

In short, a creative brief will help you sharpen and clarify the main point of the your message. This will help your communication piece become much more effective.

In a world full of fuzzy and cluttered advertising a sharp, clear message cuts through when other adverts just become part of the noise.

I've taken a creative brief that I use (which I've updated for church). You can download it here (word doc). It's editable so you can start straight away.

After the jump, would you add anything to the brief? Comment below.

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My friend Kem Meyer owns the idea of de-cluttering on her Church Communications blog, Less Clutter. Less Noise. As she says "you can't say everything at once."

Like Kem, Seth Godin has written a brilliant post on the cost of clutter. Killer quote for me is:

"Once you overload the user, you train them not to pay attention. More clutter isn't free. In fact, more clutter is a permanent shift, a desensitisation to all the information, not just the last bit."

Often we in churches are so guilty of this. We desensitise our audience by bombarding them with too much important information for various ministries, instead of giving our audience the right information.

As Seth says, more is not always better. In fact, more is almost never better.

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I’ve blogged about the art of storytelling before. My friend Steven Kryger posted this video up on his blog. It’s a great video from a new church in Australia.

This video has a killer line which I love, in fact I wrote this topic wrote about last week. The church seriously needs to do more of this.

As every Englishman wants to do when I first came to Australia in 1992 I wanted to be able to brag on my return to England that I had surfed at Bondi Beach.

My friends and I hired a long board and sat on the beach. When it was my turn to have a go on the surf board I wandered to the waters edge, looked over at the surf life savers then proceeded to paddle out to the back, because that is where the serious surfers reside.

Big mistake.

You see, what I didn't know because of my inexperience was that there was this thing called a rip. Now if you don't know what a rip is, it is a strong current just under the surface of the water. While I was sat on the board, admiring the amazing view back onto the beach and the surrounds I was unaware of the fact that I was rapidly drifting towards lots or rocks on the left hand side of the bay.

Before I knew it I was way to close to the rocks and the crashing waves for my own good. I started to try and paddle away from the rocks, but the best I could do was to stay still in the water – the rip was that strong.

Exhausted, I eventually gave in and started to drift towards the rocks. Knowing that I had nothing else to give I started to wave for help. Fortunately a big, bronzed surfer who was around 200 metres away from me came over on his board, seeing that I was exhausted he told me to hang onto his leg rope and he (to my shame) effortlessly paddled back against the rip and then took me some way back to the shore.

If there is one thing I hope you'll learn about me is that I'm upfront about my communication successes, near misses and failures. You can find one such moment of candor in a recent post about my own communications disasters.

But here's my point, churches like with my surfing can drift along in their communications. There are many 'rips' within churches that can mean that you drift along towards disaster. Here are five ways to avoid a communications wipeout:

1. A lack of experience.Don't over extend yourself what you are trying to achieve technically or creatively. Don't ignore the life guards, play it safe, swim between the flags. People will tell you that you can be wildly creative or push the technical boundaries. Sure, push them. But know that you better deliver. Otherwise your idea could be wiped out due to bad execution of the idea (Here is an example of a good execution).

2. No clarity on the goal of the communication. What outcome do you want to achieve in your communication? Be clear on it and ask yourself throughout the whole production process, is this communication still clear? Are we being clear on what we want people to do?

3. Lack of understanding of your audience who you are targeting. We can drift along and try and include everyone in as our primary audience, yet in reality it may be a small cross section of our community and the communication vehicle we are using may not be the best one to use. There may be a more targeted approach that will be more effective. Here is a previous post I wrote about having and knowing your who your audience is.

4. Use of insider language that excludes people. If you've ever been to a beach in Australia you'll see the flags that you are supposed to swim in between, but the Australian Government are now showing on almost every flight into Australia because so many tourists don't understand what the flags are there for. Some basic education videos have been developed to help tourists understand how to decode things like knowing that you should swim between the flags. Here are some examples of insider language in churches.

5. Let other forces drive the communications agenda. If you are not careful powerful 'rips' within your church can push your communications agenda to places that it shouldn't go. One way to resist 'rips' is to develop a communications manual. Here is a great collection of different church communications manuals.

How about you? What has worked for you or what wouldn't you do again in a hurry?

 
If you serve at a church and are involved in communications you'll know by now that you live in a goldfish bowl. Everyone can see what you do. You can't hide anywhere, everyone has an opinion about what you create. Good, bad and in between. Your every communications move is watched, very closely.

It's the same if you make a mistake, the goldfish bowl effect is somehow exacerbated. Everyone is quick to tell you or tell the congregation.

I remember one time when I slotted an advert in our video news for our upcoming sermon series one week too soon.

Yes. One. Week. Too. Soon.

To compound matters as I was shrinking in my seat on that Sunday morning hoping the ground would swallow me up I could see my Senior Pastor who was on stage anchoring in the dimly lit auditorium look over to me while the ad was playing. (I was reaching into my pocket fumbling for my phone in the vain hope that I could get out tech guys to somehow help me out and fix it in the 20 minutes in between services, no such luck)

What was going to happen next? My boss simply said that the ad was a week early and announced what was happening the next week. Phew. But bear in mind, he had to say it in another two back-to-back services that day.

I learnt some important lessons from this incredibly humbling 'gold fish bowl' disaster:

1) We are all human all we all at some time will make a mistake. Get over it. Own it. Move on.

2) Where possible and if at all humanly possible try and fix the mistake.

3) Where your mistake impacts others, apologise to the person who has to take the hit on your behalf.

4) If you are a leader of a team where the mistake has been made at another level below you. Own it. Don't try and say that so and so made the mistake. Own it. Apologise. Move on.

5) Put a process in place so the same mistake won't happen again.

Two questions for you: What mistakes have you seen or made yourself in a church communications environment? What have you learnt from them?

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