Communication and Public Relations
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From events management, media relations and crisis management to website development and marketing, the Communication and Public Relations department looks after all of these areas.
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Browse through the areas listed here for a more detailed look at our work.
A crisis is a situation or set of circumstances that will normally put an immediate public focus on an organisation. Planning for and developing techniques to handle crisis is now becoming a normal consideration for many organisations. To assist church administrators and communicators prepare for possible crises, we provide the following resources:
Pre-Crisis
Strategic planning
We can help you assess the risk involved in particular issues and the probability of such issues to turn into crises. We can assist you to put a procedure in place to deal with crises.
Media training
Media training provides spokespersons with the necessary skills to communicate with the media. We can help you locate media training courses suitable to your needs and in your local area. We can also work with the media training consultancy in selecting a 'training scenario' relevant to you.
In Crisis
Message points
We can help you prepare message points during a crisis. Message points are short summaries of important things you need to communicate to the media and others.
Media releases
We can help write media releases and provide background information for press reporters and public broadcasters, and statistics for commercial radio and television reporters.
Media monitoring
We can help monitor the coverage that a particular issue receives in the media. We receive press clippings from media monitoring agencies in Australia and New Zealand each week. For an additional fee, we can advise the media monitoring companies to provide us with clippings on particular issues on a more regular basis.
Briefing the spokesperson(s)
We can brief and advise your spokesperson before a media interview.
You would not be reading this if you did not already think that the Internet is a powerful communication tool. It continues to impact the way people make choices, even spiritual ones. Our department is responsible for the initial set-up of this website and for its maintenance. The focus of the website has been to create a system that allows maximum involvement, minimum fuss and user-friendly access to information.
Would you like to be involved in creating content for this website?
Does your church have a website?
Would you like to link your current site to ours?
Our priority is to inform the community of who Seventh-day Adventists are. Establishing good working relations with the media is important to achieve this goal. We produce and distribute media releases and feature stories on regular basis. We also train others to become media relators by providing the following resources:
Message points
We can help you prepare message points during a crisis.
Media releases
We can also help write your media releases and provide background information for press reporters and public broadcasters, and statistics for commercial radio and television reporters.
Media guides
The Communication Department subscribes to two guides providing contact details for the media in Australia and New Zealand. We can provide you with names and contact details of the media in your region.
Other
We can provide you with templates for logging your contact with the media. We encourage you to use the by-line "Adventist News Network" on all your media releases. The structure of the church is confusing for journalists and reporters.
Media monitoring
We can help monitor the coverage your media releases generate. We receive press clippings from media monitoring agencies in Australia and New Zealand each week. We keep a database of all the clippings we receive. Please contact us if you or your church is looking for a particular article(s) from a newspaper.
Media distribution
We can help distribute media releases to Christian publications, radio and television stations and religious writers worldwide through the Religious Media Agency, and to the worldwide Adventist church through Adventist News Network (ANN).
Media kit
We have developed a media kit. Your church can adapt this to contact the media in your local area. The media kit includes information on:
- History of the Seventh-day Adventist church
- List of main beliefs
- Explanation of the church structure
- Statistical information about the worldwide church.
We run a series of training seminars for local churches.
Our seminars cover the following areas:
1. What is keeping people away from your church? Could it be the way it communicates? An overview of the messages that overall presentation, such as maintenance, street signage, gardens, car parks send to your local community. This seminar includes a survey that will help you identify the areas which your church needs to improve first.
2. Why is it that the church down the street is always featured in the local newspaper? Writing a media release that will get published is not as technical and as difficult as it sounds. The seminar deals with the ins and outs of media relations and story angles. You might even get to draft a media release…
3. What’s the big deal about ‘branding’ the church in the right way? What’s branding anyway? Strategies, examples and practical resources your church can use straight away to attract new people and find a renewed sense of identity.
When is the last time your church put on a party for the neighbourhood children? When did you last teach someone how to cook a delicious vegetarian meal? Do you want people to see your church as a welcoming place? Consider organising a top-class event. Learn how to organise and market an event to the right people. And how to change these people’s misconceptions about your church in the process.
4. Websites: should your church have one? If yes, what should it look like and what should it say? Learn what works and what doesn’t when developing a new website, or how to improve your existing one.
5. What is the role of the local church’s communication secretary?
6. What does your bulletin say about your church? How can you improve it?
