Dec/093
Advertising When Money is Tight
Barry asks how he can get the word out about his church plant when he doesn’t have money to pay for postcards and his city won’t allow him to put out road signs. Here’s some thoughts, and I would love for you to chime in.
1. Make road signs and have people put them in their own yards.
2. Print simple flyers (you can get nice full-color ones online for cheap) and get a group of your people to put them on doors personally. The most expensive part of postcards is the postage.
3. Print up some t-shirts and ask your people to them around town on a certain day or give your people bumper stickers for their cars. Or have them write with shoe polish on their windows.
4. Print business card size invites to a series (less than $50) and teach your people how to use them. Personal invitations are the absolute best way to invite people to church. About 75% of our first time guests come because they are personally invited.
5. Go through your budget and cut some internal stuff and use it on getting people there. My guess is that you could cut somewhere. You may need to sacrifice something you think is necessary to free up some money to get people to church.
6. Hire The Change Group to help you generate more operational revenue.
7. Make sure your church service is amazing. Somehow, people show up at what is good.
What would you add to this list?
Dec/091
Names and Domains
Oak Leaf Church’s first service happened in a movie theater, and early on, our identity was somewhat tied to that theater. We played up movie theater elements in our branding.
But we moved. And then we moved again. Now we meet in a renovated bar, and this may not be our final destination.
So I’m glad that we decided to use oakleafchurch.com as our web domain, say, instead of churchinatheater.com. If your web domain is tied to a location, when you move, you’re toast. And the name of your church should evoke the strongest emotions and brand recognition, not your location or your slogan.
I know domains are hard to come by, but choose something that has longevity over something that is cute.
Apr/094
Registration via Google Docs
A couple of people have asked this question, so I thought I’d answer it here. For The Cartersville Egg Drop, we allowed people to pre-register online. We collected information on about 2,000 people, and when they came to the park, they just picked up an armband.
The simple form was created via Google docs, and when the user hits submit, the data automatically goes into a spreadsheet. That makes it easy to manage. They also get a confirmation page – we used that to give them the schedule for the day once more.
We’ll send all the folks that pre registered an evite to our upcoming series. And we’ll later merge the info with the info received on paper registrations at the park and send a snail mail postcard.
It just allows us another opportunity to invite people to church, so that’s why we do it.
Mar/090
Web Design Recomendation
If you need a website design, I want to recommend a new friend. Chad did our Egg Drop website, and is an all-around good guy that does all around great work.
Look him up on twitter: @chadkello.
Mar/080
Inbox Promotions
We’ve used Inbox Promotions a few times to send out thousands and thousands of e-mails to people that live in our area. We’ve promoted our Christmas Eve Eve concert, the launch of a parenting series, and we’re sending one out this week to promote our Egg Drop and Easter Weekend.
We’ve very pleased with the results. At least 1,000 people visited our website as the result of the last e-mail. I think that’s pretty good for less than $300.
Mar/080
Good Place for Ideas
Check out the Flickr Church Marketing Lab. Designers post different types of postcards, posters, slides, etc. for peer review. There’s some pretty good designers and some pretty good ideas in there.
Feb/088
Group Text Messaging
For a few months, we’ve been asking our people for permission to send them periodic text message updates. So far, we have about 200 cell phone numbers and permission to send messages. Seems like it would be good way to send a quick reminder.
But I don’t know of a decent and affordable way to send out group text messages. Anyone got any ideas?
Jan/086
Advertising is Spiritual
Rob Bell doesn’t like marketing and advertising. His doesn’t do mailouts or invite cards or billboards. On more than one occasion, I’ve heard Rob talk about his distaste for advertising and marketing, as it’s lumped in with the commercialization of Christianity. He’s pretty down on the subject.
These words come from the same guy that talk about how everything is spritual. How the secular and spiritual divide wasn’t existent in Hebrew culture. How art and music and culture are spiritual, and how the secular label falls so far short.
If art or music can be spiritual, than so can marketing. I’m not saying that advertising is required. But I believe it can be a form of advertising. Equipping our people with invite cards and doing some targeted direct mail and putting out signs on the weekends are just some of the ways that we do outreach. Personal invitations are fueled by some of these other methods. And as Rob Bell might say, they are all spiritual.
Jan/080
Promotion via E-Mail
Based on Tadd’s recommendations, we recently used InBox Promotions to do a mass e-mail to a bunch of people that live in our area. These were opt-in people, and we sent them an e-mail that promoted our upcoming Google series. The e-mail cost us $295.
The email generated about 850 hits on our website. We did see more first time guests the week after the e-mail went out (there were probably other factors in addition to this). But even if a few people came to church as the result of this $295 investment, I think it’s well worth it. I think it was a fair price for nearly 1,000 hits on our website.
We’re planning on doing it again in March when we launch a family series. That time, we’ll let the e-mail point to a specific page on our site where we have a promotional video for the series, map and service times.
This post sponsored by BlueHost, web hosting with one click Wordpress install.
Jan/081
Free Marketing Book – Audio
I highly recommend that church planters study marketing and advertising. Buzz Marketing and Made to Stick are two books that I recommend. I also recommend PyroMarketing, authored by the guy that marketed Purpose Driven Life. If you don’t like to read, he’s made the entire audio version available for free.
Advertising and marketing can be a form of outreach. They can help get more people to hear the message of Jesus Christ.
This post sponsored by Lunar Pages.
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