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Designing and using contact cards
Contact cards are a great way to communicate with someone one-to-one, leaving them with a way to contact you, visit your church website, or learn more from an outreach site.
It is possible print your own onto cardstock, if you have a good option for accurate cutting. However there are many online companies that enable you to choose ready-made backgrounds, and edit the text (even add your own graphics) online, using draggable resizable text-boxes that you may be familiar with from desktop publishing programs such as Publisher or Serif. They can be very cheap – even under 10 dollars/euros/pounds for 250.
Churches can print contact cards in bulk for members to use. You can design your own personal address card with recommendations for outreach sites you feel are appropriate, and/or your church website.
Read more:
- Tips for using Vistaprint and other online design systems
- Using contact cards – ideas and strategies
- Yvon Prehn offers e-books on card design, and other church communication ministry ideas including Halloween and Mother’s Day.
Please share your stories of positive outcomes resulting from contact cards, using ‘leave a comment’ option below.
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Tony:
This is a great idea and one that generates a lot of traffic at my site.
I write a similar idea here:
Business cards that Church Members Can Give Away.
It’s good to have website and service times, as well as directions printed on the back. My sample has a map on the back.
Chris W
EvangelismCoach.org
[...] Digital Evangelism issues writes up a fresh article on church contact cards for members to give away. [...]
Just some additional thoughts.
Its not just the mobile guy in me, I don’t think contact cards are great for *personal* interactions. Organizationally, sure, but they are impersonal and always come across as sales marketing and not relationship building.
Personally, you can swap contact information by sending your vCard to someone else via SMS. You get the benefit of getting their number to add them into your mobile, and they get the memory of using their mobile in a way they probably didn’t – causing you both to have a shared behavior beyond the conversation to reattach to on the next communication. Also, a vCard can hold a lot more info than you (graphically) want to squeeze into a contact or business card.
I’d also recommend using QR codes on cases and skins (see SkinIt.com for skins). This will allow you to (again) flex the technology, and also you’d have a tool that’s a larger visual indicator to your brand.
For organizations, put a QR Code next to your contact information on all media. On items like flyers, you just need the name of your organization, 1 (and only 1) social media handle, and the QR code. Compel people to use what they have in their hands, rather than just relying on the tactile nature of passing paper back and forth. Think about it also from the perspective of “how man people after meeting you really sit down and want to type information into at least one contact management system?”