The weekly bulletin. So many options to choose from. To print in-house or out? Full color or black and white? Tri-fold, bi-fold or half sheet? Or go rogue and ditch the weekly bulletin all together?

My church used to order bulletins that cost thousands of dollars and went straight into the trash can. We decided to bring them in-house to cut costs. First, we want to be good stewards. Second, this freed up our budget for higher impact areas. By doing this, I discovered you can create a simple, well-designed bulletin in-house and it can be just as effective.

Here’s how we create our bulletin in-house: 

Printer
We have  a pretty heavy-duty of a printer. It could be a transformer. If you’re going to do bulletins in-house, make sure you have a printer than can handle the capacity and won’t jam on you. Also, we print with color so we needed a printer that could do that well.

Paper
We use a 28 lb. paper for the bulletins. This seems to be a good weight that’s sturdy but light.

Design
A few volunteer graphic designers update the cover art.

Software
I use Apple Pages to add content to the bulletins.  Here’s an example. We limit our bulletin to 5 events per week. The inside panel is catered to guests with information about where to take their Connection Card and different ministries they can connect with. We offer a blank page inside for note taking. We insert a Connection Card. It’s simple and mostly points people back to the website.

We’ve found a clean and clear bulletin can be created without the expense of a out-of-house printer. I don’t have any problem with churches who do print out-of-house. If you have the designers and resources, that’s great!  But it’s encouraging to know that you don’t need a massive budget to create a great bulletin.

What about you? How do you create your bulletin?

• Communication