Designing a leaflet
A well-crafted leaflet helps you promote your church. It can be used to deliver useful, reusable information, giving you the chance to put across your message clearly and draw attention to your church. Try to use clear and bold headings. The size and shape of the leaflet will influence its effectiveness. If it can't fit easily into a pocket or a bag, it may be thrown away.
Most leaflets start life as sheets of A4 paper. Folded in half it becomes A5 and folded in half again it becomes A6. A4 can be easily folded and printed from a standard printer. Decide what the main goal of the leaflet is; who your target audience is and how you are going to distribute it. Use these factors to help you to design your leaflet.
Why do you want to produce a leaflet?
- Introduce your church
- Encourage more people to worship in your church
- Welcome newcomers
- Advertise an event
- Explain a point of view or champion a local cause
- Present the Christian faith to the community
- Raise awareness of a social problem
- Raise money for a charitable project
Things to consider
If you find you're trying to achieve too many of the points above in one leaflet, you may be trying to cram too much into one place and so think about splitting it into two or even three separate leaflets.
- Think about the audience you're trying to reach and try to 'speak their language'.
- If you are championing an important local issue, you may decide to print a flier to hand out to people on the street.
- If you're raising funds for a charitable cause you could post leaflets telling your donors and supporters how the appeal is progressing.
- You may want to publicise a local event and decide to push your leaflets through letterboxes. These considerations will help you to decide the size, shape and design of your leaflet
Start Writing
Start with an eye-catching title if you can. Much like a press release or news story, if you can catch the reader's attention and summarise the leaflet in the opening two sentences, all the better.
Keep your leaflet simple, to the point and easy to understand
- Break up long paragraphs and keep them brief
- Use sections with their own headings
- Use boxes for examples and for 'showing off' case studies, etc.
- Everyone loves pictures (but make sure you have all the approvals and safeguarding forms signed and in place)
- Use plain language.
Layout and design
- The classic A5 booklet - it has a front and back cover with a two-page spread inside. The front cover may just contain a leaflet's title, perhaps a two-line summary of what's inside and a picture or logo.
- On page two and three you can tell your story. Splitting the page into two columns often works well, using pictures to support your message where appropriate and if you have them.
- Don't feel you need to fill every inch with text and images - blank space is often a useful tool to help highlight what you have included.
- The back cover is often seen as frequently as the front and so you may want to include contact details to support the content of the leaflet.
- Have titles in a bold, easy-to-read display font.
- Use a simple font - the font the Diocese Office tends to use is either Arial, Gill Sans or Myriad Pro - which you may want to consider for consistency, especially if you choose to include the Diocese crest/logo.
- Pictures can be used to add interest and value to your leaflet. Remember to obtain the copyright permission for anything you use, there a plenty of websites that provide pictures for free. Any picture you take or are given needs to have the signed approval of anyone in it, especially children.
- Provide a website address if you have one where people can get additional information or contact you.
Designing a poster
Canva.com is a great online tool for designing posters and flyers. You can access the "pro" version for free by downloading a certificate of the charitable status of your church and applying for Canva for non-profits.
Here's a quick guide to applying for Canva for non-profits using your church email address. If you don't have a church-specific email address, you will need to provide additional evidence that you are accessing Canva for non-profits on behalf of the charity. This could be in the form of a link to a "who's who" on your church website, or a letter from your incumbent, that you would need to upload during the process.
Watch the video below for a step-by-step workshop on designing a poster for your church, and here are the accompanying slides from the session.