I’ll say it over and over…great design is much bigger than pretty pictures. If it looks good but doesn’t communicate, it will be ineffective. If it communicates but doesn’t move people it’s useless. Kem Meyer has a great post about crafting your message and points out that “effective communications has less to do with sending the right message, and everything to do with releasing the right response” She asks 6 questions in crafting your message:

• Focus Audience: who are we trying to reach?
• Forum: where can we reach all of them at once?
• Issue: why are we talking to them?
• Accelerators: what helps?
• Barriers: what hurts?
• Hook: how do we ignite their passion?

Notice that she doesn’t start with what it looks like or what style is used. Those are needed things, if it isn’t beautiful people will ignore it. We should be communicating with amazing visuals and those visuals should rest on the foundation of a clear and moving message.

And I’ll add a seventh:

• Proof: what is the story of change?

I add the seventh because often we stop just short of truly effective ministry. It’s not enough to move people emotionally. It’s one thing to move people on a Sunday morning, they may even make the trip to the altar. But as hard as they may have thought it was to walk to that altar, the real challenge is carrying it out in our daily lives. We need to craft our messages and our responses to be those of change. Please continue to bring people to the altar, but don’t forget to send them into the world.

Tags: change, communication, message

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 27th, 2007 at 12:20 pm and is filed under Sunday morning . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.