Church Directories

Halliburton Photography is a family-owned and operated portrait photography business. We have chosen to focus our efforts in two primary areas: school photography and church directories.

We are working with churches in the southeastern region to help them produce their Church Directories. I love the Lord and His people, and with a professional background in commercial printing and portrait photography, it makes a great combination for doing church directories!

Our Church Directory Program is designed to help churches produce a high quality printed pictorial directory that will serve as a ministry tool and represent your church in a positive way to those outside of your church family.

While there are several ways to produce a directory, our program makes it possible to do it without any financial risk or expense to the church. We enter into a partnership with your church in a way that benefits everyone involved:

  • Your church families benefit by having an opportunity to get professional studio-quality family portraits at very affordable prices with no sitting fee.
  • Each family also receive a free 8x10 family portrait.
  • Your church benefits by receiving one free printed directory for every family that is photographed. In addition, we will provide about 20% more at no cost to your church.
  • The benefit to our company is that we have the opportunity to sell portrait packages to the families we photograph. This is what drives the whole program financially.

When we do our job well and the church supports the directory program, everyone benefits. Obviously there will be some families that decline to purchase portraits; but the majority of families take advantage of the opportunity. Out of the profits generated from portrait sales, we pay for the printing cost of the directories.

Quality portrait photography is critical to the success of your church directory. For many church families, the directory portrait will be the only professional family photograph they will have taken for several years. We take this very seriously and pledge to provide your families with quality portrait services.

Another critical component to a successful directory is the printing process. I have worked in the commercial printing industry for over 25 years and would like to put that experience to work for your church. We have partnered with Marathon Press to produce our directories. They work primarily with professional photographers and specialize in printing directories. The quality of their work is outstanding. Marathon has invested heavily in state of the art digital printing equipment that allows them to be price competitive even at quantities as low as 50 books.

We also provide help with the design and digital layout of the directory. In fact, we can do the entire project using software created specifically for directories. All we would need from you would be the data files for the roster section and the names of the families that are pictured. You can design your own cover and activity pages, or we can help with that too. You can have as much or as little involvement with the design process as you feel comfortable with. We want to help you see the directory through to completion in a timely manner.

The general format for church directories includes:

  • Activity Pages -- church staff, groups, deacons / elders, candid photos of events, etc. You will have one activity page for every 25 families photographed. 200 families = 8 pages.
  • Family Portrait Pages -- usually 12 or 16 photos per page, whichever works out best for ending up with the right number of pages (saddle stitched books need to be in increments of 4 pages).
  • Roster Pages -- contact information for each of the families and individuals in your church. You can include whatever information you prefer; approximately 30 listings per page.

Promotion is also very important to the success of your directory. We encourage you to promote picture days in your church for several weeks prior to the scheduled appointments. To help with this effort we provide you with free printed bulletin inserts that can be imprinted on a copier. We also provide full color reminder post cards that can be sent out to families prior to their portrait appointment. We certainly want to do anything we can to help you encourage your church families to participate in the directory.

If you are considering a directory for your church, we hope you will give us the opportunity to work with you. If you have any questions or would like to schedule dates for family portraits, give us a call. We look forward to hearing from you!

Jeff Halliburton

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