What Marketing Might Help With

So yesterday I blogged on the downside of marketing in response to Tony Morgan's post about why churches should stop marketing.

Really grateful for the questions/comments Nick and Dan offered in regard to yesterday's post, so here's a little more.

• To me, starting a church is as much as question of narrow-casting your vision as broadcasting it.  While all church leaders want numbers, I think it's better to have 15 core leaders who share the same heart and strategy than 100 people who have competing strategies sitting around the table.  If I was to market, it would mostly be only to get the right people around the table. I think that can be done relationally in start up or through carefully targeted marketing. (North Point started with no marketing, but some partners use them.)

• Once you have your core, and the DNA of your church has gelled, marketing can be a friend when it empowers your team to more effectively invite their friends.  Rave cards can help alot and we are constantly putting materials into the hand of our regular attenders to help them share the message (for example, starting with our next series, anyone who asks gets a free CD of each message). 

• I think the best application of marketing, if a church is going to do it, is to connect with unchurched families over parenting. The average unchurched parent doesn't lie awake at night wondering what some senior pastor is going to talk about next...but they do lie awake some nights wondering whether their kids are going to be all right. Most parents just don't know the church can help them.  If a church has a great family ministry strategy, some marketing can help make the connection.  Since helping families win at home is the heart of our mission, and the only money we really have set aside in 2009 is to market a series and strategy aimed at parents we have planned for February and March 2009.  But we are going to deeply encourage our regular attenders to get their friends to that series, so it's a way of supplementing our strategy.

Overall, I think the withdrawal from spending tens of thousands of dollars on marketing has been healthy.  It has

• Refocused me on ensuring that personal connections between people and Christ and people and people are being made.

• Given us a more accurate read on what's really happening at Connexus.  No 'fake' growth.  Any growth is from buzz that people give to people.

• It has better focused who comes to our church.  There has been a little less church shopping and more personal connection.  For me, that's a win.

Other thoughts?

Comments

[Nick Blevins]

Good thoughts. I totally understand the narrow-casting vision deal. Our mailers definitely brought churched people along with the unchurched people. Some got the vision and loved the strategy, full invested and are still big time contributors today. Some tried to make it work for a while, but then left. Some tried to make it work for a while, then got out of everything and are just consuming (and will probably leave soon).

I like your point about having a core and strong DNA before marketing. It's definitely a tough road to travel when planting from scratch. But, you clearly wouldn't want to use advertising to grow your launch team if in the end it hurts more than it helps because multiple different visions exist on the team. On the other hand, it could take a while to build a good-sized launch team through relationships only. But, I think that's completely different from an existing church or one with a very large launch team (100+). I'd be interested to hear what some of the partner churches that have used marketing to think about it.

A church we helped support launched a couple months ago and used various marketing ideas to grow the launch team and then sent mailers the weeks leading up to the launch date. I think it will take time for them to determine how much the marketing helped or hurt.

Great idea about connecting via parenting. We did our family production in the main services last year, didn't market at all, and it turned out to be one of the most-invited events we've had. We'll use that to our advantage when we do it again this January.

[Laurie]

Confession - I'm a responder to marketing! I think that God has plans bigger than our marketing/bring-a-friend campaigns.When God is in the planting, the results are amazing!But as you said Carey - if we are focused enough on God and listen for his prompting, he'll put us in the right place with the right person.When that happens my day sparkles!