Lets face it, church’s spend a lot of money on printed publications. Recently our Congregational Care Team met with the Communications Team (of which I am a part of the latter) to discuss Visitor Packets. These are packets that will potentially contain a welcome message from our Pastor, History of our church, the ministries we have, schedule of services, class schedule, confession of faith and possibly a cd or dvd in a pocket or sleeve incorporated into the packet. We also discussed the possibility of content changing. Especially specific people over current ministries. I brought up the possibility of using inserts for each ministry so that changes to a single ministry does not cause the entire Visitor Packet to become obsolete and reprinting an insert is much cheaper. Also, the ministries would be able to use the inserts as stand alone pamplets at their events.
The one idea I had was to use QR codes placed above the physical pamplet. A QR code is a box of a bunch of different sized squares. When you scan the code with your cell phone bar code scanner, it performs an action. In our instance, we are looking to send people to a digital copy of a visitor packet. After a little research I found a site where it is possible to generate QR Codes.
http://www.racoindustries.com/barcodegenerator/2d/qr-code.aspx
The concept is to get people who like and want to use technology to scan the code and not take a packet. They would still get the same information or maybe even a more up to date version, but digitally. I don’t know how well accepted this concept will be but there is very little cost involved.
The steps would be to first create the online Visitor Packet, then create the QR code, print it and put it above the physical copy of the Visitor Packet. Also, we could put them in our bulletins and other printed media.
One other idea would be to put the QR codes on the ministry inserts themselves and have that link to their ministry portion of the website.
This may be putting the cart before the horse, because we still do not have a web phone friendly interface. (note to self: start creating a web phone freindly interface for our website)
Still, its fun to look back at these things to see how far we have come.
Hope you all find this helpful!
Scott
Church Related Information Technology Blog 