Name: Cultivating Growth & Engagement Beyond Your Church Walls
Uploaded: 2025-03-10T18:21:10.811Z
Duration: 35 min 4 s
Description: Cultivating Growth & Engagement Beyond Your Church Walls

Transcript for "Cultivating Growth & Engagement Beyond Your Church Walls": Hey, guys. We anybody out there? Alright. Can, everybody hear me okay? Sorry, this is Dylan. Can you see the chat where everyone's commenting? Just saying nothing. Great. Perfect. Just wanted to make sure. I'll get going then. Okay, guys. I'm gonna get rolling on this. I'm, Tim with Outreach, and, we are a company based in Colorado Springs, Colorado, nation's largest church marketing company. I've assisted in over 1,200 church plant launches. And, anyways, did a lot of marketing over the years, and we're just kinda gonna run through this. We've only got a short amount of time. There is a question and answer area that's over on the left side. You can text your questions in there, and I'll try to get those at the end. But, we'll roll through here and, and get things going now. Okay. Okay. Cultivating and growth of your engagement beyond your church walls, reaching out to your community, and, reaching out for Christ. So what do we mean when words say marketing? What is marketing? Well, it's simply sharing something meaningful that connects with people and encourages them to take action. So this is very simple like if you go to a good movie and you wanna share this, you're going to tell your friends. That's marketing. And that's what we wanna do with our congregations and our churches with Christ. We want to take this meaningful, event in our life and share it with others. And so that's just taking it outside of your church and talking with others. Now what is the best way to reach people in my community? Well for every church it's a little bit different but we want to go over several ideas. What this whole webinar is about is helping you to expand your mind to think of things that maybe you didn't quite think of before that your church could get engaged with in order to reach your community and grow your church. So to be the most effective is to have a fully integrated, layered, multi channel, and multi touch approach. Now that is a mouthful, no doubt. But it what it means is you have to do several things. Not just doing one thing in your church to reach your community, but doing multiple things. In today's world, there's a lot of options to do marketing, with your congregation and outside of that. So let's let's kinda walk through some of this now. The rule of seven is this. You may have heard of it before but on average, it takes seven positive touches to truly connect with someone before they take action. Now you may have heard it as eight is eight is great or, you know, whatever it takes. It's a multiple touch that we know to get somebody to engage. But you've got to create an awesome awareness campaign. And and by doing this, what you want to do is be an unavoidable presence within your community. This is the key there. You want to be unavoidable. That everywhere they turn, they're gonna see your church and connect you guys. So how do we do that? Well, knowing your community and your culture is key to your success in reaching your community. You have to know your community. You have to know the pulse of your community. And some crazy numbers here, not only about 10% of American churches are actually growing through reaching new people. This is conversion growth not not sheep stealing or sheep moving from one church to another but this is actually conversion of new Christians. And this is a hard hard to accept it too but you may even know in your own congregations that less than 3% of our congregations are actually inviting people to church. So if we can bump this percentage up, boy, the amount of people that we can see coming into the church would be phenomenal just beyond going 3%. So I'm going to talk to you about some of the ideas and how we can do that. The number one rule of visitor growth is simple. You want more visitors, you need to get more invites out. So, you know, and there's, again, there's multiple ways of doing this, but we have to get more invites out if you want to see more visitors in the church. The invites gotta get there. So the best marketing tool that you have, of course, is your congregation, is your team for sure. So churches who are the most effective at reaching new people, they create a culture that focuses frequently on the unchurched and on hospitality. So we have to have a focus. This has got to come from, leadership. This has got to come from the pulpit. It has to be a frequent inviting of unchurched and you have to be a welcoming church. You have to have a lot of hospitality or they're gonna come in and go right back out right away. So these are the two most important things to be effective in order to reach people. So creating an invite culture is one of the most important tools to the growth of your church. Now this is the Great Commission. This is Matthew twenty eight nineteen. We are all called to go out and reach our communities for Christ. This is what we're called to do. And if we only have 3% of our congregations doing this, so we need to bump that up quite a bit. Right? So having an invite culture is the key to a lot of these answers to receiving and having more people come in. Now there are times of doing marketing as well, and we always wanna take advantage of these tools at the right times as well. So naturally in our country, we've got three three to four natural church growth rhythms. And one is obviously the fall time. People get out of school, they get back on, they get back into school, I'm sorry, and they get back on their on their schedules and their rhythms. Obviously Christmas and Easter and New Year's is actually a great part of that too. New resolutions, new you, new fresh air. It's been a great time for the church to to reach out during that time. So these times more than not people are more open to hearing the gospel and coming into the church. Another time is obviously if you move, be at a different location, or if you have a special event. And, you know, God is the people for your church, but you do have to reach them. So a quick a ground marketing campaign can be very very budget friendly. Now this is good old elbow grease. This is boots on the ground. This is this is hard labor but very inexpensive. So if you're a small church and you want to reach that, this can be a very inexpensive way of doing it. Let's touch base on some of it. So your ground campaign, like I talked about, creating an invite culture is key. Personal invites are the number one tool that you can use in your church. If you don't use them, this is the best way and the most inexpensive way, again, is using your congregation, to go out. If you supply your congregation, your group of people, your team with an actual personal invite, with a business type of card, an invite card. You then lower the bar for them to reach out to somebody, invite them to the church because you've given a tool in their hand that really, it makes it much easier than just telling them where they're at, where the church is. I'd like you to come to my church. You know, it can be confusing, hard, they don't have anything. But if you have can supply your members with an actual invite card in their wallet, and I suggest actual business size card because it's very easy to carry around for men in their wallets, women in their purses, and at any time you can pull that out and you can invite someone to your church. So that is probably the number one tool that you should be using in your church if you are not doing that. You can also put QR codes on there so that they can be infinitely well that sends them right back to a landing page or, can start a texting, free texting, invite with them as well. You can set that up with a QR code on an invite card. So, door hangers are good, inexpensive, but a lot of work, obviously. Yard signs can be in inexpensive, but, again, you can give these to each of your team. Everyone could take one home. In our community, we have a church that says you matter and everybody knows that that is tied into that church and their you matter signs are all plastered all over the city. Banners and flags are great because this is attractional. It's fun. When a store opens up, what do they do? They're putting up a tent. They're putting up flag signs, and it's saying, hey. It's exciting. This is where it's happening. You need to be a part of this. So a couple other ground campaign ideas. Servant evangelism. So many cool servant evangelism tools that are out there. You could take a team to a a donut shop, give them give them a couple hundred bucks and say everybody who comes in here in the next half hour, hour everything's taken care of, give them a card to the church. You can, adopt a high school and go in after football, basketball games, and clean the stands, and wear your shirts, and and, and and build your team, but also serve the community at the same time. So there's just a lot of different servant evangelism things that your church could do to create exposure, to create awareness. Obviously, if there's community events in your community, whether it's a parade or, you know, maybe there's a, a fair that you can be a part of. Make sure you're plugging into that. Local government planning committees. These are huge. Not a lot of churches tap into this, but you have a bunch of volunteers that you could go to the local government and say, hey, mayor or or planning committee. Hey. We've got a team of people. How can we serve you as our community? What can we do to help here? And then and if you're not involved with maybe the Chamber of Commerce or those like type of, of, community, planning committees, you need to be jumping into them. That will help create, again, more relationships and, and better exposure and awareness for your church. So a strong team I've got down here with a great website and a powerful on air and ground campaign will equal a very successful awareness marketing campaign. Again, mind at heart is that you adapt onto something. Something sticks to you today. It says, hey. This is something our church could be doing that we're not doing. So, now to type tap into a little bit, your air campaign. So you need to have a strong digital air cam strong digital campaign today. This is where a lot of people are at today. It's very active, and, you need to be engaged in a lot of the social media net. So some of the things have on here is website, of course, social media. You have digital boards that could be a part of your plan, you know, television. Of course, it could be radio, print media. A lot of peep press releases. A lot of churches don't take advantage of this, but these are free. If You got a big event going on, let the local news companies, newspapers, news, know what's going on. Excuse me. And they do a free press release. Everyone's looking for good news. And, this would be a great way for you to just to get out some information at at a very low cost. Direct mail marketing, huge way to do it. This is great too because, you know, a lot of people think that, hey, does direct mail still work? Absolutely. There is less mail in your mailbox today than there used to be. So less competition in that mailbox. No more people doing their bills and everything online. So a direct mail marketing campaign can be fantastic. And most all of your campaigns can be successful when there's multiple forms. That's what I I mentioned earlier. Having different types of marketing, whether it's social media, print media, servant evangelism, community events, All of these are a part to help you create awareness campaign and create great awareness so that it's not just coming from one angle all the time. It's not just social media. It's not just Facebook but you know, multiple forms. And any of this can be set up even with lower budgets if it has to be. You can still accomplish quite a bit even with lower budgets. So a multichannel marketing using all the tools available to you, that makes sense. Now pushing your brand out there, like I said, that makes sense. So we know in today's world of marketing, there are so many options, but let's do what makes most sense for your your church. Now you may have someone that goes to your church that owns a radio station. Great. They can get you really good ads for for hardly any money or maybe television or maybe that's a really good effective way of reaching your community. But today's world, a lot of it is social media and it is print media. And those are things that you definitely wanna take advantage of. You've gotta push your brand out there. So being attractional, I wanna point this out, be attractional. Have fun. Make it exciting. Enjoy what you do. This is not a drudgery. We are are are representing Christ. We have the greatest ticket in the world and that is salvation through Jesus Christ. So so we wanna have the most fun with this and enjoy what we're doing in reaching our communities for Christ. Your website is your new front door? Absolutely, it is. Absolutely. 70 to 90% of people will will visit your website prior to coming into your church. So this is why it is so important to have a real easy to read website and, have it up. And and on your website, let me make a quick note. It ought to be first page. It ought to be where you meet and when you meet. Very easy for a visitor to see this and go on. You can have all the bells and whistles you want, but that front page really needs to be inviting, and it needs to have information immediately that shows them where they can go and how to get there and at what time. So some of the digital marketing also that you can tap into in today's world, we have Snapchat, Google, of course, using your AdWord purchase AdWords out there, video, a lot of selfie videos, you know, for for social media works great today. Tapping into YouTube, you also have TikTok, emailing and texting. So we've got a lot of different types on your air campaign, this digital marketing side of things that you can to, tap into. And it's just what makes sense again for your church. Maybe you have some skill sets, some people who go to your church, that have skills in these areas that can really do this at a very low cost. That's great. It's something, for you to tap into out there. So with social media, they say, hey, the church needs to be where the conversation today is and, excuse me, and today that is social media. It's a very active group. But you do have to manage this, you know. You have to manage reputation on there. You have to monitor your activity whether it's praises or if there's complaints, you know, you have to be on top of it so that it doesn't get out of hand. And obviously, using videos are huge today and information on your graphics and blog posts are good. And invitations, I have a clear call to action. This is always something that a lot of churches don't do is to make sure that you've got a call to action on your on your social media. We want you. We're inviting you. We'd like you to be a part of this. So don't forget to always have a good, excuse me, good clear call to action on it. Measure your marketing as well. Know your your return on your investment. So what gets measured gets correct attention, good direction, and gets improved. So, whenever you're doing any kind of marketing, kind of follow-up and see, hey. How did this work? You know? Did you just have anything to track it or trace this? You know? What does work? What doesn't work? So you know where to correctly put your dollars at. I wanna touch base on direct mail. What's so good about direct mail? Well, we talked about a lot about digital. Well, those are great and, but not everybody's on social media. You know? So so sometimes direct mail can have a huge impact today. At Outreach, we're sending over fourteen, fifteen million postcards this year for Easter for churches all over The United States. So why would we do that? Well, it's because it works. It still works and it's got very impactful. And like all things, you want to drive it to your website. Some things about direct mail that are good is that it's got a personal touch. It's got long shelf life which a lot of social media obviously does not. It's here and it's gone. So social media comes and goes very, very quickly. So there's one thing that direct mail can do is hang on a refrigerator, on a table, in a car, and, and and hang around. And, anyways, so then, you know, we get it mail direct mail can stand out in your mailbox by using an oversized mailer. It can be a low cost per house reach. It can position the church in your community. It can touch people who members you don't know. It can cast a very large net and it helps you build awareness. Here's a direct mail fact. Churches who did a direct mail marketing campaign, on average had a 50%, seven % higher attendance on their lunch Sunday. Now this is specifically talking about a church launch, but it also has a very big effect on just the normal church for an Easter Easter, campaign or Christmas or fall time. Some of the things on a postcard design would be huge. If you've ever heard of the term or the acronym ADA, this is you wanna use this for all of your marketing efforts. So does it have good attention, interest, desire, and action? These are things that we wanna think about in all our marketing efforts and especially even on a postcard. It's like, am I am I gaining attention? Am I having interest in there? Is it building desire? And do I have a good strong call to action? With with postcards, you wanna use oversized cards. We have to design it for USPS standards. And always use language that is not Christian ease but has more angled towards the person who's lost who does not know Christ. And so we wanna be sure to be careful with with the wording we're putting on there. Some of the postcard, design best practices too are to use bullet points, feed your need in your community if there's something going on. Hey. Broad attention to it. Obviously, a message series extends the, the life of a card as well and it's like, hey. If this is going on in the community, this is huge. You know, you need to draw attention to it. And then, again, a postcard is to push, attention and awareness right to your website because there's only so much that you can can say on a postcard. So or or on a yard sign or a social excuse me, a social media ad. Excuse me. So all of our messaging has to be has to be very pointed and to the point and very quick. If you're doing a postcard, you know, say, hey. Why would I do one? Well, these are the kind of return rates. What can you expect back from a postcard? Well, if you did a 5,000 piece campaign, you're looking for 12 to 24 people to come off of it. That's not bad at all. 10,000 homes, is 25 to 50 people. So there is a great percentage that can get returned back in here. And, of course, if you're doing direct mail, it's best when you're doing it with other tools, social media or doing other yard signs or whatever. When like I talked about, we wanna do multiple touches of different areas of marketing and, obviously, the best one being, the personal invite. Now what kind of cost can you have on direct mail marketing campaign? In our country, it costs 70¢ to mail a letter today, but the church is getting a 13¢ postage rate. That is phenomenal. No other country offers that. It is, something that the church can take advantage of. Now this is what nonprofit postage rates that the church qualifies for. There is an application that through the United States Postal Service that you do have to apply for. There's no cost to do that. But anyways, a great tool you have in your back pocket. Another really cool tool is a new movers program. When somebody moves in around your church, be the first church to send them a postcard that invites them to your church. Another great tool, they're personalized. You can get a new mover. We get a new mover list. We send it out to anybody that moves in within a mile or two radius of the church and invites them to the church. And we can do this, put a QR code on the mailer. You get a list that you follow-up with. Another excellent tool to reach out to them and adding this to your marketing mix, whether it's again with social media or a billboard or your personal invites. Again, multiple tools can come in effect, and and still, this can be, an inexpensive way to do it. We can still work around all kinds of budgets and, and and and make an effective marketing campaign and create a great awareness campaign for your church. So marketing with new movers is kind of what I talked about. It creates awareness, your brand. It can run all year round, and, and you can set your budget to wherever you need it to be. And you only need one or two people to come in off of a new mover program to pay for it an entire year. So should in your marketing, should you do print or digital? Well, it takes both, of course. And so we wanna make sure you're taking advantage of all the printing and all the on all the digital that you can, again, that makes sense for your church. And, and I would like to say this is the last thing pointed out that keep your house clean too. Meaning before you do any marketing, before you do this outreach, make sure you have a good, clean smelling place for people to come to. You don't want them going out the back door. You don't wanna put all this effort into marketing, inviting, and then no one, you know, wanting to stay there. So any mark getting you wanna make sure your house is in order prior to doing that. And, and we just pray that, you know, some of these ideas were helpful to you. I'll jump out of this and then just see if, you guys has any questions at all. We have a we have a question and answer on the q and a on the left hand side. Did anybody have any questions at all I can help out with? Alright. Best places to find mailing lists. You'll be able to get a hold of my contact. It's a great question. Any mail house can help you do that. If you're looking for a list to reach in your community, a lot of mailings that we do in that are saturation, so it's just address. But you can also, get demographic lists to go after a specific group of people. Yeah. This will be available. A copy of the presentation. Yeah. They'll be able to share this. Absolutely. I think Ministry Brands will be able to put this out there to anybody who who needs it. We also have a free church plan starter kit that gives, a thousand dollars of free signage, banners, some direct mail marketing to anybody who's starting a new location, launching a new church, or, or is revitalizing an effort. So if any of you are interested in that, just reach back out to Ministry Brands. We can get that in your hands. We have, if you go to outreach.com, /tim, it's outreach.com/tim. It'll take you to a form to get to our free church plant starter kit if anybody's interested in that. Very good. Any other questions you guys have? Okay. Well, I appreciate your time today. I think we're supposed to end at, 02:35, and we have, maybe another minute or two here. So, I appreciate your time. I will, without any further questions, I'll go ahead and jump off. And thank you guys for sharing.