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Contact cards – a great way to share faith

Contact cards are a good way to share your faith, and have some advantages over tracts:

• Small – so you can easily carry a supply at all times.
• Culturally acceptable almost anywhere, whereas tracts can be seen as threatening and religious in some circumstances.
• Can be personalized with your name, email address and your website URL.
• If you don't have a site of your own, you can use cards which feature any evangelistic site which feel is appropriate.

Consider using a double-sided card, because this gives space to present a more information.

There are many companies (both Christian and secular) offering printing of cards at a reasonable cost. Check online and in your local high street.

It is also easy to make your own very cheaply. There are software packages specifically for creating business cards. You can also use some word-processing or desktop publishing program. Then print them out on thin card (100-120gsm) if your printer can handle this thickness, and cut up very carefully on a guillotine. ‘Crop marks’ may help to line up the cuts.

Evangelistic sites

Evangelistic sites can offer online a read-to-print contact card that Christians can use. 10 or 15 cards could be offered in full-color as a PDF file, for easy printing onto thin card. Alternatively, outreach sites can offer ready-made contact cards on their websites, to be shipped by post.

Tshirts and car-stickers with a prominent site URL are another way of helping Christians to do ‘viral marketing’ for an outreach site. A Tshirt can alternatively carry a mobile phone Short Code number, as a way of getting information delivered to someone’s mobile phone by text message.

Churches can print contact cards for their members to use, with a link to the church website. Ideally, the church site should be very outsider friendly.

An appeal for tract publishers

It would be good to see more Christian literature publishers using the contact card format. A surprising amount of information can be included if the card is double-sided. 4-color printing coupled to quality graphic design can make a very exciting product at a low unit cost. The following features can be included in such a card:

• a challenge to think
• answers to the problems of life
• one or two quotes or mini-testimonies from named individuals, which helps people identify with the feelings expressed
• the Gospel in a nutshell
• your name and email address or other contact details
• one or more websites which present the Gospel clearly to someone who has no Christian knowledge

Of course, it would be possible to make several versions of a contact card – one for teens, one for women, one for business contacts, and so on, with different websites included. There are many other evangelistic sites that could also be used.

One Christian ministry, Vitanovis, is planning a general presentation of the Gospel, and allows Christians to post their testimonies on the site using a webpage interface. They can then use a contact card on which they write the ‘jump-code’ URL for their own testimony.

Offering CDs

Because DVDs and CDs are so cheap to copy, they are also a wonderful tool to distribute free. Small credit-card sized CDs have however fallen out of favor, as they tend to get stuck in some CD drives.