Westserve

Reaching more people by reaching fewer...

One of the things I wrestle with every year leading up to our outreach-focussed Carols event is the best way to do the publicity.

The principle is simple:
We want to get lots and lots of people from our community along to our Carols event held on the sports oval of the local high school, so they can hear about Jesus at Christmas and be encouraged/challenged to consider further how Jesus can/should impact their lives.

How do we do that (get people along)?
We work hard at developing a creative, fun and engaging program, along with musically excellent carols. And we advertise.

Our main form of advertising is a letterbox drop in our immediate area – A 1Km radius around our church building, plus some posters in shop windows, and notices in the ‘Community Diary’ section of of the local (free) newspapers and local radio station.
Again, a fair amount of effort is put into developing a postcard-size glossy card – full colour one side, b/w the other, for the drop.
This year, we upped the number printed and distributed from 6,000 – 9,000.

The result? Who knows? We had a few more people on the night, but that may be due to other factors like weather, different date (a week earlier than last year), etc. We have no real way of knowing.
Could we do the whole promotion thing better? Should we put effort into doing that (‘marketing’ is so… secular sounding!)?
I admit to putting these questions in the too-hard basket most of the time. I don’t have the expertise/time/energy to work it all out – yet, I would like to get a handle on some key principles that would help guide the way churches do their marketing, so that we miught be more effective in that area and not waste money and resources.

Ministry Marketing
So I came across this post on a blog-marketing site.
Again, I find this whole ‘ministry marketing’ thing a tad cringe-worthy. It’s seems to me one of those areas that muddies the waters between ministry (word centred, gospel focussed) and market (nasty, tacky, money-grubbing focussed).
But perhaps it’s one of those areas we Christians can rip off for the gospel.

Some thoughts on this article and ‘ministry marketing’ in general:

His central idea/paradox is this: ““You will reach more people, by reaching fewer people more times”. Meaning in our context, that we would do better by targetting fewer people more often with publicity about activities and ministries.
The logic underlying this is that we cannot compete with the commercial big boys when it comes to plugging our church, so according to the author of the Ministry Marketing blog, Chris Forbes: “When you reach people more frequently you leverage your media to break through all the clutter that is out there competing for the attention of the people you want to reach.”
He goes on to say that because we target a smaller group of people, we actually havethe chance of understanding them better and therefore targetting them more effectively.
Now, I admit, my eyes start to glaze over at times. What does all this really have to do with the ministry of the Word? With reaching people for Jesus?
I know the intellectual answer – I’m just not sure of the moral answer!

However, some of Mike’s reasoning is very consistent with the gospel minstry we want to excerise. For example, a key idea he speaks of is to ask: “Who are the people in your neighborhood?” A good and valid question for all Christians to ask!

So have a read of Mike’s article, and maybe even download his free e-book “25 free marketing tools…” (it’s full of ads, but what did I expect?!), and let’s discuss how this can be useful for us in ministry…