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Dear Pastor, Your Communications Department is Overwhelmed

Dear Pastor,

Whether your key communications and marketing person is staff or volunteer, you’ve probably run into hearing that he or she is overwhelmed from time to time.

You need to know that it’s not unusual for the position, not always something they are doing wrong, and not something that can be fixed overnight (or debatably, not something that can ever be permanently resolved).

(I also wrote this blog post to help Communications Teams avoid using “overwhelm” as an excuse.)

There are some strategies that you can implement to help them address feeling overwhelmed and reduce the likeliness of it recurring.

My goal is not to defend or justify laziness, disorganization or an entitlement mentality. My goal is to give you a peek into our world – a world we can’t always articulate – with some practical tools to help so your communications department can reduce the likelihood of being overwhelmed and be as effective as possible in helping your church introduce your community to Jesus.

My hope is that this article will help start conversations between communications teams and their leaders. If you need help having what may seem like a difficult conversation, I would recommend reading the 5 dysfunctions of a team by Patrick Lencioni, and Leadership and Self-Deception by the Arbinger Institute.

 

Why is feeling ‘Overwhelmed’ affecting your church communications department?

Before we dig into strategies to mitigate and address overwhelming situations, I wanted to dig in a bit about why they affect the communications department specifically. I know these details are different for every church, community, and culture, but generally speaking, here are some of the ideas that affect most churches.

Consideration 1) Vertical: The Communication Leader is Middle Management

The communications department is somewhere in middle management in the organization’s structure. Usually, the communications person is not the lead Pastor, and often they have someone working under them that they oversee – whether this is a graphic design contractor like Church Media Squad, or working with external software and teams like Text In Church, or a volunteer team on-site at your church.

While not making the decision, or sometimes getting input into decisions, the Church Communications person represents the decision as if it’s their own and communicates on behalf of the leadership and the church (internally or externally).

This can be taxing when we have an idea of how to best communicate something, which channel to use, or how to position an announcement, but we’re considered robots – following directions about how, when and where from someone who may not understand our tools – rather than considering us creative people who specialize understanding our tools and presenting ideas in a unique way.

Consideration 2) Horizontal: We primarily serve other departments.

Some leaders are in a solely-focussed role, while other leaders who are wearing a few hats may have to work in 2 or 3 categories. Your communications person needs to have their ears to the ground in almost every category, event and department at your church.

For example, the youth leader has a full plate getting youth services ready, preparing games, food, missions trips, weekends away, counseling students, communicating with parents and executing midweek services or small groups. While the responsibilities are diverse, all of those items fall in the category of the youth department.

A week in a communication person’s world may look like:

  • When is VBS?
  • How many new small groups are we adding this year?
  • What is our Social Media strategy leading up to Back to School / Back to Church?
  • Did the printer quit partway through printing the bulletins?
  • What are we including in announcements this weekend?
  • Did we get that email sent out about the food drive coming up this weekend?
  • Where did last week’s volunteer photographer leave the battery when they were done?
  • Is it time for us to rebuild the website? Kids ministry pictures are outdated.
  • Should our church get an app?
  • Oh, there’s a text message from the 70’s and over married couples skydiving small group asking why they aren’t getting an announcement during service this weekend!
  • Why aren’t we getting as many new likes on facebook this month as we got last month?
  • I need to get a quote from the printer on new banners for our parking lot.
  • Which graphic would best suit the upcoming series?

my way or the highway signWe often have to make decisions that are going to lead to some amount of disappointment in other departments:

  • We’re announcing this but not that (one person is happy and another is not.)
  • We only have one spot to hang a banner, so we’re hanging this banner up, but not that one (one department gets promoted, and another isn’t).
  • We’re not going to promote small groups in that way (now a whole group of people is disappointed because they wanted their small group to get an announcement, bulletin mention, yard signs, billboard, radio ad, a personal Instagram video from Pastor, and a parade downtown are all upset that you “don’t value their group as much as they do”)

Consideration 3) How long does that really take?

In addition to having both Vertical and Horizontal responsibilities, our “to do” list is often misunderstood or misrepresented. The question of “How long does that really take?” is an important part of the ongoing conversation that you can have with your team.

With the perception that “Posting on facebook is as quick as sending a text message” or “Creating a 2-minute video is hitting record on your phone and recording for 2 minutes,” or  “I write a 3 paragraph email in 10 minutes, so writing a 3 paragraph email newsletter should only take 10 minutes,” or “Just send the bulletin to the printer and pick it up when it’s done in an hour.” (I could go on…)

In light of those perceptions, the ACTUAL time it takes to craft a Facebook post, or shoot an announcement video or write an email newsletter may seem too long and can create a sense that the communications person is unproductive or needs more on their plate to fill their work hours.

Did it really take you 20 minutes to edit a photo and create a 1-sentence caption for Instagram? Did it really take a whole afternoon to film and edit a 4-minute announcement video? You’ve been working on that email newsletter for how long?!

Keep in mind that a 40-minute sermon may take you days to craft at times, and other times, could literally take only 40 minutes, and many care and counselling roles at churches are driven by meetings: a 1-hour meeting takes one hour. A 15-minute meeting takes 15 minutes. Surprises and overruns don’t happen often when you have back-to-back meetings – you can simply schedule another meeting if needed for a future date.

The same isn’t true when creativity and technology meet at a crossroads.

While we have tools that make us more efficient, creatives often use the tools to do better work, not faster work – we may use a tool that gives us a better final outcome, but it doesn’t necessarily mean we spend less time picking a color, or choosing our words, or adding in final touches to a video.

Consideration 4) How much energy does that take?

It’s not uncommon for a creative person to be exhausted by 2 pm or 3 pm.

Sometimes we’re night owls, so our best ideas (and best work) happen late at night. It’s possible we were up until 3 am night working on graphics for church this weekend, then at the office at 9 am the next day for a staff meeting.

Maybe it’s that we’re morning people, so we’re able to knock out a creative video in an hour at 9 am, but that level of energy is going to leave us unable to put together a perfect tagline for the next series at 3 pm.

Inversely, someone who is a night owl who has a flex-schedule may work until 2 am, get into the office at 11 am and have some of their most productive time mid-afternoon with a great project to show from the night before.

Being “less productive” from mid-afternoon until the end of the day isn’t always a symptom of laziness (although, let’s be clear that sometimes it may), but it may be a symptom that we’ve given our best for the organization at other times through the day, and we need to recharge.

Just because something took 1 hour this morning, doesn’t mean we can turn around and repeat it in 1 hour this afternoon.

Consider a creative day like a boxing match. A punch is a punch, but that doesn’t mean that round 5 has the same level of sustained energy as round 1.

I’ve heard from many Pastors that they are exhausted after preaching for an hour on Sunday. It would be ridiculous to assume that one hour of replying to emails on Monday might take the same energy as presenting a one hour message on Sunday. The same is true for someone who is spending their creative energy.

The same thing may be true early in the week compared to later in the week. It’s different for every person, but there has to be some flex built into the schedule for considerations about “How much energy does that take?”

Consideration 5) Our world is always changing.

…And I don’t mean that every few years a new channel shows up. What I mean is that what you see another church doing on Instagram may not be able to reproducible the next week, or what you see someone with a large following doing on facebook may be a feature that requires 100K or more ‘likes’ on their page, and you simply aren’t there.

What you did on facebook last month to get an incredible response may fall flat this month, Instagram may add or remove a feature, and twitter may change how their timeline functions altogether.

You may not get the results you’re used to from one day to another, or your communications person might have built a strategy around a particular feature which is no longer accessible one week into a campaign.

A program they’re used to using could run an update and change the layout of the toolbar that takes them an extra half hour to get re-oriented, and Google may change what constitutes as “spam” email, and way fewer people may open the email this week compared to last week.

Unlike the worship team that turns on the same sound system each week or the kid’s team that has the same classroom space in your building, their world, tools (and the communication strategies/tools they use) are always a moving target.

Consideration 6) We execute with a strategy in mind.

While you may think that it’s only going to take a few minutes to publish a simple “last-minute” post on facebook, that may actually hurt your big-picture strategy.

In this example, Facebook wants to see engagement on each individual post to determine how often to share the next. If you had just posted on facebook a few minutes ago, it can actually hurt the impact of both posts by publishing too quickly again since there wasn’t much time for people to see and engage with the first post.

If your communications team has a strategy about what gets included in Sunday announcements, it could actually hurt the impact of the 3 important things they want to share when you insist on Sunday morning that there are 4 additional things that need to be mentioned without discussion.

They love your church. They’re doing this because they love the community, your vision, and they want to communicate effectively. They’ve made decisions that lead to a certain result (and your team would probably love to have a conversation with you about that.)

I imagine that you wouldn’t randomly walk into a youth service and tell the youth leader to add in a new song that night or tell the kids teachers on a Sunday morning to change their lesson plan. A random “I need you to do this now” doesn’t reflect an appreciation for the strategy your communications person brings to the table.

Something more like “We need to communicate this urgently. How can we best do that?” shows that you trust what they’re doing and you’re trusting them to handle the details.

Consideration 7) Our work is on public display

Ask your communications person how many communications they get per month about a typo on the screens or a detail incorrect on a facebook post (that instead of commenting privately, the event co-ordinator decided to make a public comment on the post to correct the details). It’s not that your communications person is sloppy, but we’re human and mistakes happen – and ours are often public.

Worse than actual, identifiable mistakes, we also get to hear everyone’s opinion about “Why would you choose that background?” or “Can we do something a little more subtle?” or “I don’t like that font” – and often from people who are unrelated to the event being promoted.

I once had a gentleman come to me after church to tell me that he noticed a typo in someone’s name on the screen during a video I made for our building campaign. He said “If we’re raising that much money, it’s disappointing that we can’t even spell someone’s name correctly.” (this was only one of the three times the name appeared during the video.)

I asked if he would like to help and preview the videos like a “proof reader.” He said he wasn’t the one getting paid to be sure it was right, that’s my job.

Most departments may have an internal memo with a spelling error, or the youth leader has an off night during his message, or in a meeting, something is said that could have been worded differently.

Our work is getting mailed out to the community, posted on the front lawn, shared on facebook, seen on the screens, or hung in the lobby.

How would you handle it if every time you misspoke during a sermon, someone stood up and let you know like it was urgent?

A fire alarm is urgent. Misspeaking, having an unclear thought, mentioning one scripture reference but turning to another, or tripping over your words is not worth someone yelling “FIRE!”

I realize that you’ll often get a follow-up email from someone about your message, but even that person knows to distinguish between what they think is important (important enough to send an email) and urgent (like jumping up in the middle of church service).

 

How can you help reduce the feeling of being overwhelmed?

Consideration 1) Vertical: Middle Management.

Move towards giving your communications person a seat at the decision table and allow them to earn your trust. You don’t have to flippantly toss decisions to them or take their recommendation every time, but a simple “What do you think?” or “If this was your decision, what would you do?” along with hearing the rest of the discussion is going to be helpful in communicating the big picture.

Consideration 2) Horizontal: Serving other departments.

Equip your communications team with tools to help them be more efficient and give their best. Here is a toolbox of what I would consider essentials for less than $100/month.

With the help of that toolbox, you’ll equip your team do their best in tracking projects, create incoming request forms, and work with other departments in your church as efficiently as possible.

Delegate communications decisions to the Communications person, support them as the decision-maker, and bring them into a conversation if someone comes to you to request that you veto a decision.

Consideration 3) How long does that really take?

Ask the question when you delegate the responsibility and ask it again when a project is completed.

Come to an agreement on what is a reasonable expectation, and where time consumed on one project may not provide the best return compared to that same time spent elsewhere.

Be slow to assume that making a request is so simple that it can be easily fit into the workload instantly.

Build time into the schedule for your communications person to be creative, dream and explore new ideas. Stuffing every minute of their day is going to be exhausting, and you’ll get the same recurring results… which leads us to the next point.

Consideration 4) How much energy does that really take?

Have conversations like “What is your most creative time of day?” and “When do you do your best work?” and “What would an ideal schedule look like for you to bring your best to the team?”

Push back against the tendency you may have to set office hours. When Sunday rolls around, do you want to present your best work or do you want to check the box that said someone was present at their desk from 9 am – 5 pm all week? Of course, nobody at your church cares how many hours a project took, or whether it was completed at 2 pm or 2 am.

What matters when all is said and done is the end result, not the schedule necessary to create the result.

This isn’t to say that your communications leader can miss morning meetings if they’re a night person, or miss afternoon meetings if they like to start earlier in the day. But if there’s nothing scheduled at 9 am, and they worked an extra 4 hours last night, what difference will it make on Sunday if they show up at the office at 9 am or not?

Earn the best from your communications person by having clear goals and helping them meet those goals in whatever time it takes.

Consideration 5) Our world is always changing.

Have regular conversations that start with “What strategy do you have in mind for this event?” or “How are you planning to promote this?” or “What have you seen others doing that could work here?” Understand that we can’t promise the same results since the tools we use are always changing, and those changes are outside of our control.

Avoid saying, “We’ve done it like this before. Do that again!” or “They’re doing it. Why can’t we?”

Instead, have conversations with your communications person that lean into their wisdom, experience, and hands-on knowledge of the tools they have available to them. Ask questions that start with “What would you suggest for…?”

We’ll never get away from changing social media tools, but you can reduce the stress that keeping up with those details can cause by giving us some freedom to try new things, and explore. Recognize that at any time, the answer might be “That’s not how it works any longer.”

Consideration 6) We execute with a strategy in mind.

While we can technically post something quickly on facebook, it may not be the best strategic decision based on the technology, the way we want to present that information or the timing.

The same goes for what we plan to include in announcements, (or how many announcements), what we post on facebook, twitter or Instagram, how we’ll send out text messages or our email newsletter.

By all means, have conversations with your communications person about their decisions, their strategy, pick their brain about what and why, and be clear about what you’re hoping to achieve so they can help your church get to that end goal…

…AND, remember that this is our life and focus. We don’t take the responsibility lightly, and we’re not (usually) trying to be flippant or lazy or territorial if we say that your suggestion about how we communicate something may have some better options.

Consideration 7) Our work is public.

Learn to distinguish the difference between important and urgent. Important means “That’s worth noting and talking about later so that we try to avoid that mistake next time.” Urgent means “This needs to be addressed now.”

When you walk up on stage after an announcement video and make a joke about a typo on the screen, or send off a text message about the bulletin when it’s already printed and can’t be adjusted, then that’s come across as “Urgent: This can’t wait and has to be addressed now.”

It’s a bit overwhelming to be told that “This is urgent, but you won’t be able to do anything about it until next Sunday.”

 

Here’s an example of the distinction between urgent and important:

Urgent: “The time was incorrect on that announcement, and we need you to be here tomorrow at 7 pm instead of 7:30 pm” – That’s worth addressing now.

Important: “There’s an extra “w” before the website address in the bulletin. I’ll send an email Monday so a correction can be made before the bulletin goes to print next week.”

Support your communications team and recognize team effort if someone else points out an imperfection.

“We’ve been working on a lot as a team. I’ll have someone take a look this week,” causes much less stress than “So and So looks after our marketing. Go point it out to them” or “Here’s some public shaming in the form of a joke because I don’t want someone to think I’m responsible for the issue.”

 

 

Learn to delegate to and trust your communications department:

This could be difficult. This may not seem ideal. They have probably made mistakes before, and they are publicly representing your church, so if you don’t feel like the person in place is the right person for the job, please correct the situation sooner than later.

It doesn’t serve anyone to keep someone around whom you don’t trust, you won’t delegate responsibilty to, and you don’t believe knows what they’re doing in their job position. However, if you trust that they know what they’re doing, then let them do it.

If the person overseeing your marekting and communications is not someone that you trust to take the reigns, either get them the training they need to become that person, have the conversations about what indicators you need to see in order to build trust with them, or release them from the position. It’s not an easy request, but neither is the veil of trust when there’s no foundation to support it.

Lastly,

I want to be clear that your communications person is not against you if they have different ideas.

They’re not trying to steer the public side of the church in a different direction through social media or public relations. If they want to discuss a decision further, it’s because they see an opportunity for improvement, not that they’re looking for a reason to tear down. Please give him or her an open line to have conversations about what is working and what they think could improve.

They love the church. They love your vision. They love you. They need your support when they’re feeling overwhelmed.

-Adam 

 

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Advertising Tools

Church Bulletins: Why or Why Not?

Recently, I spoke at a conference where I was asked (ok, I baited the question) about my thoughts on bulletins – to be clear, I would consider a bulletin a printed list of upcoming events or information, not an “order of service” or printed liturgy. (side note: I’d love to speak at your event or with your team. Let’s start the conversation here)

I think in answering the question that we arrived on the thought that bulletins are specific to each church and there are no right or wrong blanket statements for whether it’s best for all churches to have a bulletin or not.

I told the story of how I transitioned the church I served with from having a bulletin to a weekly email newsletter over the course of 6 months, and how I used surveys (both online and in paper) to find out how many people were actually using our bulletin compared to our email newsletter and evaluating those results with the paper, ink, photocopier ‘per piece’ lease cost and labor involved in producing it weekly or monthly.

I had to apologize during that session that I came across with the suggestion that all churches should get rid of their bulletin. I believe that through the conversation, we all understood that bulletins are very effective at serving some churches, and very ineffective at serving other churches.

There were many follow up questions – questions that I believe were genuine – about the purpose that the bulletin serves and how those purposes could be served otherwise, and I confirmed that I don’t hate bulletins.

 

Bulletins are merely a symptom

What concerns me about the conversation (not at this conference, but the larger conversation that I have with many churches about their communications) is that we are often making communication decisions based on:

  • What we’ve always done
  • What we anecdotally / logically think is best
  • What might upset someone if it changed

… and unfortunately, communication elements (like bulletins, or announcements) are often this untouchable piece of the puzzle based on the “What about”s created by the information above.

We have limited time and resources (for some, that limit is higher than others) so it’s worth finding ways to evaluate if our current strategies are the most effective strategies.

 

For example:

Make a list of the “What about”s:

Let it all out here. Finish the sentence “If we were to discontinue the bulletin, what about…”

All of the anecdotal concerns, fears, and possibilities, but before you make this list commit not to let the process end here. In the example of a bulletin, here are some great questions that I hear:

  • What about new visitors? How would they know what’s going on since we don’t have their email address yet to send them that information?
  • What about the person who volunteers and proofreads the bulletin each week?
  • What about people don’t find out what’s going on and miss events?
  • What about greeters who lose their ‘comfort blanket’ of having something in their hands to hand out
  • Our email newsletter only gets read by 25% of people. What about the other 75%?
  • (insert other “what about”s here)

Add up the costs:

If your bulletin takes an hour in a staff meeting or an hour worth of back and forth emails to discuss each week, an hour of design time each month to create a format, then an hour of inputting content each week, an hour of proofreading and verifying the content with every department, an hour pounding the photocopier and monitoring it for paper jams, plus the cost of paper, ink, and your “per piece” cost on the lease, then it may be worth the effort to add up all of those details and discover what the actual cost is to produce your bulletin each month.

In our church, the cost was between $400-$500/month

 

Find out how effective that method is:

Next, you’ll need to find out how effective your bulletin is. Include a survey on the inside of the bulletin asking people to answer a few questions (for instance: How do you first find out about new events at church? Where do you look for more information about events between Monday-Saturday? Help us update our records: What is your first name and your email address?)

Be clear about how to submit that survey (ie. rip of this section and leave it in the offering plate either this week or next week.)

Also, send out an email version of the survey (this is great to learn about all different communication methods and how your church hears about and finds more information.)

In our case, we learned that 2% (8 people out of our 400 survey results) first found out about events in the bulletin. For the second question, we learned that 0.25% of attendees (this was 1 person when we got 400 survey results) used the bulletin to get more information between Monday – Saturday.

(Helpful information that we learned was that our website was the most likely “go to” place for more information from Monday – Saturday)

 

Make a decision:

With both the costs and the results of your survey, only now can you make a decision about the effectiveness of this communications piece.

In our case, we were spending $400/month to serve 8 people.

If you’re spending $100/month and 85% of your congregation uses the bulletin, then the decision is obvious. Your bulletin is a valuable communications piece.

 

Solve the “What About”s:

It’s important now to discuss the initial “What about”s.

If you’ve decided that maintaining the bulletin is ineffective, then how can you allocate some of those resources (time and money) to getting new visitors the information they need to get connected at your church (maybe this is still a print piece specifically for guests?) or communicate in other ways so everyone has the opportunity to find out what’s going on.

If you’ve decided that maintaining your bulletin is effective in your communications strategy, then how can you take the “What about”s and use your bulletin to solve those communication opportunities?

 

To sum it all up:

I don’t hate bulletins. I think some churches are served well by having a bulletin. I do, however, have a concern when we make decisions about our communications strategy on anecdotal concerns, and not based on factual information to discover what best serves our church and community.

 

Love this post? Hate this post? Either way, I’d love to hear your thoughts: adam@adammclaughlin.net

 

 

Categories
Advertising

How to sell a parachute to a penguin

Let’s say you’re going to sell a parachute to a penguin (stay with me on this) and all you know is that a penguin is a bird. That is 100% fact. You strike up the conversation like you’re talking to a sparrow or flamingo or seagull; after all, you’re talking to a bird.

You start by asking how his morning flight was or when his favorite time to catch a worm is, or how long his wife incubates on the eggs before they’re hatched. The penguin has a couple of options. He can ignore you, correct you politely, tell you bluntly what his life is like or go along with you anyway, but despite his choice of response, he’s not in a position to embrace the parachute you’re trying to sell.

Why? Because you didn’t take the time to learn about the penguin, you brought to the conversation your understanding of birds.

If you had learned about your audience, you would know that, even though penguins are birds, they don’t fly, they spend 75% of their hunting time under water and the male holds the egg on his feet to hatch while the female scavenges and brings back food.

This isn’t to say you couldn’t find an opportunity to a penguin that needs a parachute in case he fell from the top of an iceberg or needed to jump off the end of a cliff to escape a hungry seal. After all, penguins can’t fly. But until that penguin knows you understand him, he’s not interested in what you have to sell. He’ll assume you don’t understand his needs and can’t then provide a solution. Even with facts in hand (A penguin is a bird. It’s a fact) don’t assume you already know.

The same thing happens when we try to communicate to an audience we don’t understand. Whether through advertising, creating a guest experience, speaking to a crowd or building a friendship, fundamentally, you have to understand the penguin in order to sell him the parachute.

The best way to get to know him? Ask.

 

 

 

Categories
Advertising Marketing

4 ways to create audience-focused advertising

Advertising is an important part of what we do and the goal is to inspire a response. Something like “That’s for me” or “I hadn’t thought of it that way” or “I can be part of that”.

Advertising has 2 parts:

Tell people what to expect

Whether you’re promoting a trunk-or-treat Halloween event, Christmas concert, a new series topic, small groups or a new members class, advertising is an essential first step, and gives people a window into what to expect from your event. When your event happens, if the event is as good or better than they expected, then you’re starting to build trust. This is true for internal promotions (like your bulletin or announcements) and external promotions (on Social Media, road signs, billboards or mailers) and every step of the way is an opportunity to strengthen trust. Tell them what to expect and come through on it.

 

Inspire a response

Telling people what to expect is about the WHAT, and inspiring a response is about the WHY. Why would someone get off their couch on a Tuesday night and come to this event? Why would someone stay late after church or spend $25 to come to this event? If you can nail the WHY, then the WHAT just falls into place.

Here’s an example: Your favorite band is coming to town on Saturday night. It’s on your bucket list to see them and your best friend wants to take you and buy your tickets. Why do you want to go to the concert? Because your favorite bucket-list band is coming to town and you have tickets.

Does it matter if the show starts at 7 or 7:30? Does it matter if the ticket was $20 or $25? Does it matter who is opening for them? These are all the ‘WHAT’ details and at some point they matter, but they’re not the WHY behind making the decision for you.

It’s important to realize that, in this example, your WHY may not be someone else’s WHY. Maybe their “WHY” is their boyfriend is in the opening band, or their kids want to go and they want to spend time together or they have a goal of seeing a live band every month this year, and this happens to be the closest concert.

 

Discovering what motivates your audience will help you craft your “Why” message in your advertising. Here are 5 ways to discover your audience’s “why”.

 

1. Imagine you are your audience

If YOU are the target audience, what would inspire you to go? What incentive would you need? Would you want to go alone or take someone with you? Based solely on your personality, what would motivate you to arrive? Now, take those answers, and figure out how your audience is different than you. Are they in a different income bracket, or have larger families, or work later than you or newer to your church? Tweak your perspective based on those differences and figure out WHY they would want to attend.

 

2. Ask someone who has attended before

If this is a new members class, then have a survey at the beginning of the class asking how they first heard about your church, what made them want to come and why they’ve chosen to come to your new members class. That information is valuable in discovering their WHY, and using that as a way of advertising the class next time.

For instance, if they say they came to your new members class because they want to serve on your kids team and being a member is a pre-requisite, then your advertisement next time could be ‘If you’d like to get involved in serving on a team at church, come to our membership class to learn more.’

You could also do a raffle at your outreach event asking 3 questions and collecting contact info. This will help you know who came any why so you can prepare for next year’s event.

 

3. Ask someone who has not attended

This is a typical conversation for me: “I know you’ve been coming for a few months, and it’s great to see you every Sunday. Have you been to our membership class? I look after our communications here, and it would be helpful for me to get your perspective about what you think about the class.”  Answers vary from work schedule (they work every Sunday and classes are on Sunday afternoons) or didn’t realize that was a way to get to serve on a team.

At one point, we were trying to get everyone to that class within the first 3 months they started attending, so in our announcements I was saying “If you’ve started coming to Life Church in the last 90 days, we’d like to invite you to Connect At Life…”. The feedback that we received is there were people who had been coming for a 6 months or a year and how thought they’d missed the window to attend, so by focussing on one audience (people who had just started attending) I was eliminating another (people who had been around for more than 90 days).

More causally “I’ll see you Tuesday at Trunk or Treat!” and hopefully they’ll confirm, or let you know they won’t be there, and maybe offer a why.

 

4. Explore who else is reaching your audience well

In a world of Social Media advertising, YouTube and crazy amounts of big data, it’s relatively easy to track down someone who is already reaching your audience and pick apart their strategy to expose the WHY.

Need to advertise a youth event? Who are your youth following and can you figure out why they resonate?

Need to reach single moms? Look around your church to see who has their attention.

Duplicating or dissecting what’s working for someone else can help get you a step closer to resonating with that audience.

 

Remember, the WHY matters more than the WHAT. Always ask yourself “Why would someone attend this event?” and target your advertising to them. What have you found to work well in your church’s advertising? Leave a comment!