Chuck Scoggins | Web + Print + Video Design

Often, we dive into a project like a Christmas outreach or Christmas services without thinking about how it fits in with everything around it.

• How does it affect the ongoing activities of the church?
• How does it impact the public perception (brand) of the church?
• How can the momentum be leveraged to help boost the church in January?
• How does the energy and finances spent on Christmas yield positive returns?

Our holiday checklists become so busy that we often jump in and work hard to get the thing done. I’ve been there…trust me, I get it.

In my design concepts classes at Lindenwood University, I teach my students about a process to help them work through their designs from start to finish. It looks something like this:

1. Target Audience – Who are we trying to reach?
2. Message / Theme / Concept – What message or theme will reach them?
3. Composition – How can we compose our design in such a way to deliver the message or accomplish the theme?
4. Components – What elements do we need to use to achieve our desired composition?
5. Tools – What are the best tools (software in this case) to use for our design?

We’ve already examined how this applies to planning christmas with finding our target audience and looking at our message / theme / concept. Now it’s time to think about how our Christmas design (outreach, programming, services, etc) should be composed in relationship to the rest of what our church does.

In design composition, we consider placement, divisions, harmony, unity, alignment, and flow. If we use our imagination, I think these might help us in our Christmas planning as well.

Placement

How does the time, location, and arrangement of our Christmas services, outreaches, and events help or hurt the overall mission and direction of our church during this season.

Divisions
How can we use divisions, or differences from our normal programming, to give emphasis to the Christmas effort?

Harmony & Unity
How can we leverage our Christmas event to bring unity to our congregation? How can we rally our people around a common cause?

Alignment
How does what we’re planning for Christmas align with our mission and purpose? How can we plan it in a way that it causes the community to align with what we’re doing (as opposed to adding noise and complexity to this already-busy season)?

Flow
Again, how does our Christmas emphasis flow from what we’ve done throughout the past year to what we’re doing next year?

The process of planning for Christmas at our church is similar to planning a design project. By thinking about “composition,” we can make sure that our efforts in December aren’t an interruption to the mission, goals, vision, and calling of our church, but rather a part of the composed whole.

Next time we will look at some of the communications components that will help us reach our planning christmas goals. Until then, what are the things you’re doing to make sure your “composition” works for Christmas? Leave a comment…

Occasionally on Tuesdays I give you my thoughts, unfiltered and off the top of my head. Here’s what I’m thinking about today…

I read this post by Steven Furtick this morning before paying my bills for the week. I hate paying bills, but it is good to think of the blessings behind them. For example, it stinks having to pay the house payment…but it sure is a blessing to have a roof over my head. Paying the car insurance bill: not fun. But having a car to get around town in sure is nice. Often times it is a matter of perspective, right?

Speaking of perspective, it has been an interesting few weeks for the Scoggins household since I lost my job at Calvary Church (read about it here). However, it has been absolutely amazing to see God work though the process. Projects have been springing up from the most unexpected places to help pay the bills. I’ve been able to do some things that I’ve been wanting to do like writing posts for MediaSalt and doing some work at the Center for Church Communication. I’ve been freed up to do some things that I haven’t been able to do before, such as go on my kids school field trips and attend their Halloween parties at school. God is so good!

As I’ve been considering “what’s next” for me, I feel a calling to partner up with churches, non-profits, and small businesses that might need help with communications, media, or technology. If that is you, we should definitely talk! Shoot me an email or give me a call!

I’m thinking about writing an eBook on the topic of relationship-driven communications in churches. It would have some philosophy, some strategy, and some practical tips for implementing a relationship-based model. Would that be something that interests you? Let me know…if there is enough interest, I’ll take the next steps.

That’s all from me…what’s on your mind today?

Once we’ve determined your target audience, we can then begin thinking about what theme, concept, and/or message would be most likely to connect with that audience.

Theme

In design, there are a multitude of themes that we utilize to reach various audiences. To name a few:

• grunge
• graffiti
• clean
• minimalist
• dark
• organic

Similarly, depending on our target audience, we can choose a theme for our Christmas services or outreach. Are we going to have a family carnival theme? Perhaps a warm and traditional theme? Do we want to do something modern and technical? Some themes will work better than others in various contexts.

Concept

We can develop a concept once we know our theme. For example if we’re going with the carnival theme, we might choose to do an entirely outdoor experience with hayrides through christmas lights, petting zoos, a live nativity, games for children, etc. Or, we might want to go with an indoor puppet show, craft areas, and carnival-type foods. If  our theme is more of a modern approach, we might do something similar to Grace Church’s Little Drummer Boy program or Church on the Move’s Thriller/Grinch production:

Message

Ultimately our concept and theme will all need to work together in order to convey the message, brand, and image that we want guests (and regular attenders) to walk away with at Christmas. It goes without saying that we want them to hear the message of the birth of Christ, but are there other messages we want them to walk away with as well? How about the message of hope or peace? How about a message of avoiding consumerism or materialism. How about messages about our church such as, “we value the arts,” or “we are all about families here?” All of these factors are important to consider before we launch into the busyness of pulling off the concept.

The point is, we need to think about our audience first, then our theme, concept and message.

Christmas is a very unique time for churches in that it is the one time of year where people are most open to visiting a church or responding to an outreach effort. I’ve done my share of Christmas planning over the past 10 years in church communications. I know first-hand how crazy the season is for church workers and how important it is for us to think strategically about this time of year. As we approach the holiday season, here is the first of five areas we should be thinking about as we plan (as a side note, these are the same 5 big-picture design areas I teach through in my Design Concepts class at Lindenwood University):

Target Audience

If you aim at nothing, you’ll hit it every time. – Zig Ziglar

There is a temptation as church communicators to skip the difficult step of thinking through exactly who it is you are trying to reach. The churchy answer is, “we want to reach everyone in our community.” It is a noble goal to try to be all things to all people, but it is not practical and not helpful as we do our outreach planning. Different age groups, people groups, and culture groups within our communities require different methodologies. For example, if the goal is to reach families at Christmas, we should have a different approach than if the primary audience is artists.

Questions To Ask:
1. Who is the group of people in our community that will go unreached if our church doesn’t reach out to them?
2. Who is it that we can reach that 1,000 other churches wouldn’t be able to reach?
3. What is the DNA of our church and, based on that, who are we best suited to reach?
4. What unique calling has God given our church in terms of outreach.

Our effectiveness in planning and execution will be much greater if we do a the hard work of selecting our target audience. Chances are good that by selecting a group to go after that we will attract those on the fringe and even outside of the target group as well. Don’t be afraid to target a specific audience.

Occasionally on Tuesdays I give you my thoughts, unfiltered and off the top of my head. Here’s what I’m thinking about today…

Job Status
Three weeks ago I was “laid off” from my church job due to the tough economy and tough finances at the church. It has been three weeks of uncertainty about the future…but has been a great time of introspection, soul searching, and thinking about how God promises to provide for our needs. I am more confident than ever of my calling and of His faithfulness. I’m still looking for a “day job,” but have had some amazing conversations and opportunities pop up during this “down time.”

Ironically, this month would’ve been my 11th anniversary working at Calvary. It has been (and continues to be) an amazing privilege to serve the local church!

House Work
In the mean time, we’ve been working hard to get our house ready to put on the market. I want to say a big thanks to everyone who has come over and helped us out, especially my small group. It’s true what they say…life is done best in community! Or, as Andy Stanley says, “circles are better than rows.”

Media Salt & Church Marketing Sucks
Speaking of opportunities: I’ve been asked to do some blogging on other blogs around the internet. Here is a post on MediaSalt about relationship-based church communication (note: I wrote that post before I knew I no longer had a job at Calvary…not that it changes anything, but just wanted to throw it out there to avoid confusion). I also have some posts coming up on Church Marketing Sucks about the Church Marketing Lab.

Stealing?
The other day I was driving down the road and saw a church that had “borrowed” a slogan/mission statement from a church across town. My first reaction was, “they’ve got some nerve stealing that other church’s slogan.” Then I thought, “well, the other church probably got theirs from somewhere else too.” And then it hit me: What if all the churches in an area could come together and figure out the best slogan, mission statement, graphics, etc. and all use the same stuff? After all, aren’t we all on the same team? While I know that practically this is probably impossible – and maybe not even desirable considering different churches place value on different things – it does make me wonder why we don’t “share” more. If a church does a message series and sinks lots of resources into branding graphics and support for that series (think banners, support videos, etc), why not hand those off to a church with fewer resources to use as well? Do you know of anyone doing this effectively? I’d love to hear about it!

Worship Environments
There is an incredible opportunity being offered by Stephen Proctor on creating worship environments. Check out the details here.

That’s what I have on my mind…what about you?

So far we’ve looked at how to design / edit your file for Kindle, how to export and convert your file, and all that is left is getting it in the Kindle store. Luckily, this is the easiest part. Here goes…

Kindle Store

1 Create an amazon account (if you don’t already have one).

2 Go to kdp.amazon.com (the Kindle Direct Publishing site).

3 Create a KDP account.

• Enter your publisher info.
• You’ll need your Tax ID, EIN, or SSN.
• Determine how you want to get paid.Note: Amazon does not allow the distribution of free books anymore. So, if you wanted to give away your book, you’ll have to find a work-around. There is a rumor that if you offer your eBook on Smashwords and set the price at $0.00, Amazon will price match it down to $0.00. However, this process is said to be irreversible, so make sure you never want to sell that book again if you use this workaround.

4. Click on “Bookshelf” and follow the instructions to create your first book.

That’s all there is to it. It’s really quite self-explanatory and if I was able to figure it out, I’m sure you will be able to as well.

If you complete this process, I’d love to see your work. Leave a link to your eBook in the Kindle store in the comments below!

Once you’ve completed the design process, you’re ready to start exporting your publication and converting it to the proper formats.

Export to ePub

The first format you will export to is ePub; and you do that from InDesign. Go to File > Export For EPUB and enter the following settings:

• Under General:
  

1. Enter the name of the publisher (for us, it was the name of the church).
2. If you know your unique identifier, enter it. If not, don’t sweat it because it will auto-generate one for you or you can manually enter it on your own later.
3. For ordering, select the “Base on Page Layout” option.
4. If you have bullets and numbers, you can designate how those are handled.

• We stripped out all (or most) of our images so need to worry about the Images tab.
• Under the Contents tab:
  

1.  For the format, we want to use XHTML.
2. For the TOC, we want to make sure the “Include InDesign TOC entries” is checked.
3. For CSS Options, tick the Generate CSS option and make sure all three checkboxes under that option are selected.

• Click “Export” and you’re done in InDesign.

Calibre

For the next step, you need to download and install the free ePub management software called Calibre. Once you get it installed…

• Click the “Add Books” button to add your ePub file to the Calibre library.
• Click on your ePub document in the list of books in your Calibre library. Then, click the “Edit Metadata” button to add metadata.
• Give your book a title and an author and list how to sort them.
• Click on the “browse” button and add your cover that you designed.
• Once you’re done editing the metadata, click “ok.”
• Now it’s time to (re)export your file into the variety of formats you need.

1. First, click on the “convert books” button and select ebook from the output drop-down menu. You want to use this new exported file (which now includes your metadata and cover) as your new ePub for Nook and other ePub readers.
2. Next, follow the same process to convert the book to a .mobi file for the Kindle. This time you’re selecting .mobi from the drop-down menu.

I’m giving away a copy of Outspoken. If you missed my review of the book, go check it out. If you think it is something you could benefit from, here’s how you can win a copy:

Leave me a comment about how/why you would like to be “frustrated, educated, and motivated me to be the best communicator that you can be.” I’ll randomly pick a winner and send you a free copy of the book sometime late next week. That’s it.

[Edit: Congrats to Steven Wells for winning the free copy of Outspoken. Below is the image showing the random number generated used to select Steven!]

Introduction

For most of our message series at Calvary, we publish a devotional journal to help people take Sunday’s learning deeper throughout the week. Recently, we decided to offer our next journal in both print and digital formats. As I was working on the Kindle version, I thought that someone else out there might be interested in the Kindle design process so I thought I would detail it here. Even though this is a bit of a technical process, I think anyone who is familiar with InDesign can learn to publish to Kindle.

For organization purposes, I’m going to break this down into three posts:

1. Designing For Kindle
2. Exporting A .mobi File
3. Publishing In The Kindle Store

Designing For Kindle

Our printed devotional journals are 9 in wide by 7 in tall. We design them in Adobe InDesign, which has built in support for exporting ePub documents (which is a format we will need to export to in order to eventually get to the .mobi Kindle file). However, InDesign on its own does not do a great job of reformatting a document designed for print into a digital ebook format. It mostly has to do with how InDesign reads the file and converts the XML that the Kindle needs to read…it simply isn’t made to handle that conversion smoothly. Since I like to control the look of my document, I decided to reformat it into a size and style that will be better for Kindle.

Step 1 – Reformat Document
After doing some research and experimentation, I found that a file that was 6 in wide by 8 in tall would work the best. I copied the text (including all of the paragraph styles) from my original journal file and placed it my new file. Though some ebook readers, including the Kindle and the various Kindle Apps, can handle images, color, etc. I decided to strip out all of the presentational design elements and just work with only text for my document.

Step 2 – Build TOC
The next step was to use InDesign’s built in Table of Contents (TOC) creator to make a table of contents. This step is important because the Kindle will read the TOC information and use it for the table of contents function within the Kindle. Simply follow these steps to create the TOC:

1. Make sure your chapter headings are mapped to a paragraph style.
   
2. Go to Layout > Table of Contents to tell InDesign which style matches up with your chapter headings.
   
3. InDesign will then attach the “place text box” icon to your cursor and you can click anywhere outside the canvas to place your TOC.
   

Step 3 – Map Styles To InDesign Tags
It’s very important to use paragraph styles when designing your document because they become the tags that the Kindle uses to determine how your document looks on the Kindle device.

To map the styles to the tags follow these steps:

1. Open the Tags pallet by going to Window > Utilities > Tags.
2. Make a new tag (click the new tag icon at the bottom of the pallet) for every paragraph style you used.
3. Open the pop-out menu on the tags pallet and select “map styles to tags.”
   
4. Match up your styles to the tags you created.
   

Step 4 – Cover Image
The last design task is to create a cover image. Once again, you’ll want to create your file at 6 in by 8 in. I went ahead and created a full-color cover since some devices (like the Nook) and apps (such as the iPad Kindle App) can display in color. However, on actual Kindle devices, the image will adjust to a grayscale image. Save this image as a .jpeg but do not place it in your InDesign file. You’ll add the cover to your document during the export and conversion process.
That’s pretty much it for the “design” phase. In the next post we’ll look at the process for getting your document exported out of InDesign into the .epub format, then converting the ePub to the .mobi format for the Kindle.

I was given the amazing opportunity to read an advance copy of Outspoken, the new book by Tim Schraeder and the folks at the Center for Church Communication. The list of contributors is a “who’s who” from the world of church communications, so I was excited to get my hands on a copy. I’m about half way through and so far, it has not disappointed. Thoughts presented in the book have frustrated, educated, and motivated me to be the best communications director that I can be…”to communicate, with uncompromising clarity, the truth of Jesus.”

Here are a few of my favorite thoughts from the book (so far…I’m sure as I finish reading it in the next day or two I will uncover many more highlighted sections):

Tim Schraeder
• Christianity is fundamentally a communication event.
• Today we stand on the forefront of a new cultural revolution. The ways we interact and communicate are changing literally every day.

Jeremy Sexton
• Every time you communicate anything in any medium as a church, it is preaching.
• We must ask ourselves…whether or not we are treating what we do with the level of reverence that it deserves.

Jay Argaet
• Communication is the tool into which we can breathe life, stir a thought, bring inspiration and make something that is otherwise difficult to understand, clear and relevant.

Cleve Persinger
• We’re fast to discredit the weird and out-of-the-box ideas that come to us in the shower, our drive home from work, etc., but God speaks in those moments. Don’t ignore them.
• What “ask” is holding your God-sized idea back from reality?

Stephen Proctor
• The truth is, we are communicating even when we are not “communicating.”
• I want to shift my approach away from “communicating at” my people and toward “communicating with or among” my people.

Michael Forsberg
• Some churches are slim – some churches are husky. [I'm paraphrasing here] The communications team has the responsibility to select its church’s wardrobe so it looks like something out of a men’s fashion magazine [end paraphrase].

Kevin D. Hendricks
• Often we’re not suffering from a failure to communicate, but a failure to connect.
• What a tragedy it would be if the church had perfect communication but failed to connect with people’s hearts.

Lori Bailey
• It’s impossible to control/review all of the communication that happens on multiple sites.
• The rest of Lori’s chapter was also highlighted.

Phil Bowdle
• When it comes to communication: Make excellence a value, make authenticity a mandate.

Cheryl Marting
• Clarity emerges by removing everything that is non-essential. By doing so, you create greater accessibility.
• The competing messages actually become roadblocks to our messages being received. Essentially, the complexity tunes people out.

Scott Hodge
• Most lead pastors aren’t nearly as consistent or clear in casting vision as they should be. Most communications directors aren’t nearly as patient in waiting for good vision to be formulated as they need to be. Pastors and communications directors need each other.
(Note: This chapter alone might be worth communications directors and pastors reading this book…together.)

We, as communications professionals have a very important job and we serve ourselves well when we learn from the collective wisdom of others in the field. The brilliance with which Outspoken brings together so many voices from the church communications community is a much needed voice and breath of fresh air in my daily grind. Thanks to Tim (and to many of my friends who contributed) for your gift to us!

Outspoken is officially available today on Outspokenbook.com