Effective Church Communications

Effective Church Communications provides Timeless Strategy and Biblical Inspiration to help churches create communications that fully fulfill the Great Commission

Effective Church Communications provides Timeless Strategy and a Biblical Perspective to help churches create communications that fully fulfill the Great Commission. Our tools constantly change; our task doesn’t; we can help.

Strategy #7: Always be marketing—outside the church and inside the church

Most churches today realize that marketing is not evil, that it is simply another term for telling people about the church and getting them involved in activities that will help them connect with the church and come to know Jesus as Savior. Secular marketing theory gives us strategic tips that help our church outreach: the importance of repeating our message in various channels, how to focus a message, what to measure to be effective, and many more that the Effective Church Communications ministry works to apply to the specific needs of the church.

In addition to specific strategies and tools, one area of marketing most churches need help in is marketing inside the church; internal marketing. This happens because those of us in the church and often church leadership and the people creating the church communications have been at the church for a long time and they forget that people new to the church and infrequent attenders don't know the jargon, the meaning of church traditions or special events or even what it means to be a member or why joining the church is important.

Successful marketing that both keeps people coming to the church and involved in the activities of the church takes much more than sending out postcards for the Easter service and we've got strategies that will help you be successful both with unchurched people and the uninvolved at your church.

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Marketing is not inherently evil–and why content makes all the difference

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You don't have to do crazy things to involve people in ministry
You don't have to do crazy things to involve people in ministry and church activities.

Marketing is not inherently evil any more than talking is inherently evil. The content makes all the difference.

We can talk in a way that exaggerates, misleads, and is obnoxious or we can talk in a way that is gentle, kind, and informative.

This morning I received two emails that illustrated this difference and I want to share them here and then comment on their implications from them ministry marketing in our churches.

Editorial clarification: I published this initially a couple of years ago and just found it again and thought it might be useful as so much marketing on the web continues to be of the overly pushy, loud, in-your-face type. This isn't necessary and we shouldn't copy it. I don't know if the obnoxious site still exists, but Lightstock still does wonderful work, check them out.

Here is a short video of both video links and after the video, my commentary on them. Please remember Effective Church Communications does not take advertising or take part in affiliate programs. If I like or dislike something it is my opinion related to ministry usefulness, not to any monetary agenda. Check out the video below and then read the commentary:

 A tacky and obnoxious marketing example

The link below is an example of the now overly popular squeeze or landing page.  If you are not familiar with these communication tools, here is a good definition:

Landing page is pretty much synonymous with sales letter. It's a hard sell page that pitches a product with several calls to action.

from: http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.phpf?857520-Squeeze-page-vs-landing-page

The link here is attempting to sell some software that will automatically link content on your websites to various social media sites. There are many problems with this approach including that though automatic linking to social sites can be useful. I use a tool that links the headlines of the articles on this website I write to my Twitter account (http://www.twitter.com/yvonprehn) but that tool is free and bundled in WordPress, the system I use to build my website. Given the skimming nature of Twitter (and I don't check it often and seldom interact through it), I feel like this is an honest representation of the level of involvement I want with it and feel is useful for the ministry at present.

In addition, the basic premise of the pitch for this product is faulty—automatic links, if solely used, come across as phony, automatic links and they often don't make sense.

People aren't stupid and Google isn't stupid. Automatic spamming of anything no matter how efficient, isn't a useful communication tool.

A tasteful and helpful advertisement

This example is from http://www.lightstock.com. I don't have the link to the specific ad because that came to me via email (that's why I did the video above) but here is what I like about this advertisement:

  • No hype, it simply presents what the company has to offer
  • It is beautiful and restful to look at
  • It makes the product offerings clear and links to the products if you want more
  • It both has material that is free and material for sale
  • It respects the viewer—if their product is something the viewer wants, he or she will click-through and buy. If not, they have given the viewer a few minutes of visual inspiration.

If you didn't look at the video, please do visit their site http://www.lightstock.com and take advantage of their free weekly images and video clips.

Ministry communication implications

When you want people to attend an event at your church or take part in any ministry opportunity, don’t feel like you have to pressure them or hard sell them.

Be clear, be concise, be kind, be complete in your message. Do the best you can to tell about the ministry truly and from a Biblical perspective. Having done that, get your message out in as many channels as you can, as many times as you can and trust the Lord to speak to the people He wants to draw to your church.

 

 

 

Is your church marketing failing because of the lack discipleship in your church?

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Our personal discipleship and effective church outreach
Could our main challenge to effective church outreach be the person in the mirror?

The goal and North Star of Effective Church Communications is to "Fully fulfill the Great Commission" which means helping people to not only come to know Jesus as Savior but to grow to mature disciples. And though that is our goal, the following, incredibly challenging article, thoughtfully links the lack of success in our church communications to the lack of discipleship in our lives.

Following is a key quote from it and click the link below to read the entire article:

To put it simply, we don’t have a marketing problem, we have a sales force problem. Study after study reveals American Christians simply don’t believe in our product anymore. Can we turn it around? We believe we can, but not until we get serious about living the kind of life that astonishes the surrounding world. Remember in the gospels how people were “astonished” at the message of Jesus? But 2,000 years later, how many people are astonished at our message or our lives today?

 

8 Ways for Christians to Regain Credibility

Why improved announcements or marketing may not get more people to attend church

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Church doesn't have to be on Sunday. Consider other options if you truly want to reach people in our busy world.

If you can't get people to come to church on Sunday, it may not be the fault of your communications is my conclusion after reading Thursday Is the New Sunday a thought-provoking article that underscores something I've encouraged churches to do for a long time and that is to have a service on a day other than Sunday. From the article, here are some of his statistical reasons for doing this:

A third of the American workforce works on the weekend. At least 60% of families with children between the ages of 6 – 17 take part in organized sports, with many of those having weekend events. We are in an area where a large number of people have camps/vacation homes that affect their attendance during the summer. Throw in both parents working and chores to be done, lawns to be mowed and families just wanting to spend time together, and church on the weekend wasn’t always making it on the calendar.

Not only statistically, but personally this resonates with me

My husband and I have served in churches in bi-vocational roles for many years and now, to support our ministry habits, my husband sells manufactured homes. A majority of his work (and I help) takes place on weekends and Sunday afternoons. With all we do at church I sometimes find myself dreading having to put in the hours at church on Sunday before continuing to work the rest of the day. Though we do it, we don't have to juggle children at home or in activities into the mix. If we had that, church on Sunday would most likely be impossible.

Work schedules are not choice for many people today. Unlike when I was in high school and I was able to take Sundays off because Tasty House (the family cafe I worked at) allowed me to, most employers today don't consider wanting to go to church a valid reason to take the day off.

Application to church communicators

Before I make some other suggestions (and I urge you to read the article above for their great ideas), an important thing for church communicators to realize is that no matter how hard you work to communicate about an event or program at your church, no matter how complete the social media campaign or how compelling the graphic design of your marketing materials, if the only time your ministry is offered is on Sunday morning, many of your target audience simply cannot attend.

I recently heard a church leader talking about how one program on Sunday morning was had very low attendance and his solution to this was to have the Pastor announce it more often and more forcefully. I didn't even bother to comment as I knew the church he referred to give the announcements before the service started and most people were still walking in and didn't hear any of the verbal announcements, no matter how important they might be. In addition, pastoral authority to motivate people is not what it used to be—people may like and admire their pastor, but authority figures in any area of life have little influence on behavior today.

Beyond these reasons, even if people did listen to the announcements and do what the pastor suggested most of the time, if their child has a game or they have to work, attendance simply isn't an option. Following are some ideas that might be options in our world today. . . . .

[Read more...]

3,000 on your membership list; 350 on Sunday? It may be a problem with your internal marketing

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Don't forget internal marketing in your church
When creating your outreach plans, remember it's just as important to plan INTERNAL marketing for people already attending your church.

A common challenge for many churches today is that they may have 2,000 to 3,000 people listed on the church rolls, but only a fraction of them show up each week.

Though there are many reasons for this, one key reason for is that many churches do little to no internal marketing. If a business never followed up with customers, but simply greeted them warmly when they came in the door, but never contacted them again, never sent a sale flyer or had any other contact with them, the customer would probably not return. A church is not very different.

Most churches put the majority of their church marketing and communication efforts on getting people outside the church to come to the church. Though this is important, we shouldn't stop there and just like the customer above, if a church doesn't work on communicating with current members, they may not see them often.

We also have more reasons to do internal marketing than the local business. Remember, Jesus commanded us to make disciples, not simply worship and special event attendees. We need to learn to use every tool of technology available to get people involved in the activities and ministries of our churches that will take them to the next step of Christian maturity. To do this we need to plan out our internal marketing and it works best if you have a coordinated approach using both social media and print.

Internal marketing defined

Internal marketing includes all the communications you create for people already attending your church to get them involved in the activities of your church or ministry that will help them grow to maturity in their Christian life. Not only is this important when people come to your church after a special event, but it is important on a continuing basis.

Far too often this aspect of marketing and communications does not take place in the church and if it does, it is done in an often haphazard and spotty way. This lack of attention to this aspect of marketing is seldom intentional. It happens because:

  • The church staff does not see the importance of need to do this kind of marketing because of the unspoken assumption that people will automatically attend small groups, training times and other activities of the church.
  • Because it is important to the staff, they think it is important to the congregation, but this is seldom true.
  • Church staff is too stressed out and overworked to do one more thing in communications and marketing than they are already doing.
  • There is no intentional plan for internal marketing and no way to measure the effectiveness of the program.
  • Internal marketing is only done through one channel—if that's social media primarily (as much is today) this doesn't have a an impact on people who prefer print or don't have access to digital channels.

Following are suggestions on how to begin to remedy this situation: [Read more...]