Churches Planting Churches

Outreach Effectiveness

Posted on 30. Jun, 2010 by Steve Swisher in Events, Marketing, Outreach

I’ve seen several studies on why people ended up attending the church they are at and the clear #1 on the list is always personal invitation. This beats out every form of advertising and special events combined every time the survey is done. The surveys always find that 75%-95% of the people coming to your church came because someone invited them.

So what do you do with these numbers? How will leverage this information? Obviously, it means that you need to be spending more time and money on what has the biggest pay off.  While mailers, signs, billboards, and special events do bring in a few people, they aren’t nearly as effective as a personal invitation.  Here’s how this information has impacted what we do.

1. Invite Cards: These have become so common now that I almost don’t need to mention them. There are two types that you need to have. The first is a generic invite card that people in your church can hand out to their friends any time of the year. The second is a seasonal or sermon specific card. Many churches use these for their fall and spring kick off sermon series, Christmas, and Easter.  Before you spend $1,000 or more on a mailer, spend the money to hire a graphic artist to make you a great looking generic invite card and cards for 1-4 special things throughout the year.

2. Give People Something to Invite Their Friends to: This past year our second highest attended Sunday was Memorial Day weekend. That’s right, it was second only to Easter in attendance. On a weekend that most churches have their lowest attendance, ours was only 15 shy of our Easter total. Why? Because we gave out church members something they could invite their friends to. We planned a BBQ cookout for after the service and had games for the kids, volleyball, kickball, corn-hole, and other stuff for families to do. It was an event that people wanted to be at and wanted to invite their friends to. On Father’s Day, 4th of July weekend, and Labor Day weekend, we move our entire church service to the beach. Those used to be our lowest attended Sundays of the summer, but now they’re something that people invite friends to. Find a park in your area that has a covered pavilion, picnic tables, playground, and a grill and make it a special event Sunday.

When we move the Sunday morning church service out of our normal location, I tell our church members that it’s the best time of the year to invite a friend. I jokingly tell them that they don’t even have to tell their friends they are inviting them to church, just ask them to come to a big cookout that a bunch of your friends are having. Tell them that there will be live music, a guest speaker, and food. Every time we’ve had church at a public park or the beach we’ve had someone who would never go to a church come with a friend who invited them. I’ve been doing this for four years now and at every beach service we’ve had a first time visitor that ended up joining our church.

3. Put an invite card in your bulletin: This is an idea that we are working on right now. In the past we have paper clipped a few invite cards on the bulletin at certain times of the year, but now we’re looking to take that a step further. We are in the process of designing a bulletin on heavier paper in which there is a perforated tear-off invite card. On one side will be a preview of next week’s service and on the back will be the church info. Keep in mind that church bulletins have the longest shelf life of any printed advertising you do. They can sit in people’s Bibles, cars, and kitchens for a year or more. What if you had an invite card they could tear off that bulletin they are carrying around with them?

4. Change Your Focus on Outreach Events: When you have a block party or other community event, often a part of your  strategy is to get people from that event to come to your church. But when you realize that less than 5% of people attending a church came as a result of an event like that, doesn’t that mean you should change your strategy for an event like that? Instead of trying to get people from the event to come to your church, ask people in your church to invite friends to the event or better yet, invite their friends to help with the event. I can’t tell you how many times that strategy has worked. It’s a lot easier for someone who has a friend that isn’t willing to go to church to ask them if they will help make snow-cones for a community block party. While their friend is at the event they end up meeting other people from our church and often see people they know, but didn’t know they went to our church.

Further, let your people know that the main purpose of the event isn’t to get people who attend the event to come to your church, but rather to serve your community. This will both adjust their expectations of the event and help them see success in terms of loving people like God loves people and not in terms of what the attendance is at church the following week.

5. Adjust your Outreachertising Budget: I once heard of a church youth group that would give students $50 if they could get 10 of their friends to come to youth group with them in a given month. At the time I thought it was making the church into something that resembled a pyramid marketing scheme. While I still wouldn’t pay people to invite their friends, I now understand why they did it. To get the same number of people to show up from a mailer you’d have to send out about 2,000 postcards at a cost of around $500 and even then there’s no guarantee anyone would come to church from it.

While paying people to invite their friends may not be the answer I’m looking for, the answer isn’t to spend more and more money on strategies that result in only a handful of people coming to know Christ. While I still think that mass marketing has a place in the budget, I can no longer justify spending $1,000 on mass marketing and less than $100 on promoting personal invites. I am now much more willing to spend $500 or even $1,000 on a special event Sunday that people will invite their friends to. My tendency used to be to skimp on a special event, but spend big money on a mass marketing project. Now it’s the other way around. The next thing we do is a part of this adjustment.

6. Give Guests a Great Experience: If someone is going to invite a friend to come with them to church, they need to know that you are going to treat their friend right. When guests come to our church they are offered a free coffee and breakfast treat. When they leave they are given a free book.  Later that week we send them a $5 gift card to Panera, Starbucks, or Tropcial Smoothe. All of that costs money, but it’s worth it. When you treat someone like that, they end up thanking their friend for inviting them to church. That makes your church members more likely to willing to invite more friends to church.

7. Hype Up Big Events: I have always been wary of hype until this past year when I gave it a try. At the time we were running about 135-140. I had just gotten word that another church in town was going to give us their facility. Instead of just announcing it the following Sunday, I waited two weeks. For two Sundays I told people that there was going to be a big announcement coming and they need to invite a friend to hear it. The only people who knew about the news were my top leadership team and I shared with them the reason for the secrecy and the benefits of hype and buzz. They all kept a tight lid on it which generated a lot of buzz.  Everyone wanted to know what the big news was.  We just kept telling them that it was big and they need to invite a friend to hear it.  We had 186 people there to hear the big news which was the biggest crowd we had ever had up to that point.  While this was a very rare type of thing, there are other things that are hype-worthy like an Easter service, a special event, or a sermon series that you know is going to be good. I once told our church, “Have you ever been sitting there thinking I really wish so and so was here this morning to hear this message? Well, if you don’t invite that person to the series starting October 1st, I guarantee you’re going to be saying that. Don’t be that guy!!!” Hype it in your blog/website, your facebook, your sermons, your announcements, and everything else.  Find ways to make it buzz-worthy. [For more thoughts on Hype, read this post.]

8. Personally Invest and Invite People in the Community: I normally do my church computer work at Panera Bread or Buffalo Wild Wings.  Do you realize that the statics show that it’s more likely that the person waiting on your table at one of these places is more likely to come to your church if you invite them than all of the people you will reach with the work you do on the computer designing fliers, mailers, and writing blog posts? The statistics have proven to be true for me. Currently there are several people from both of the places I work at that are at church every Sunday and I’ve had the opportunity to baptize two of them in the past year. If you aren’t personally inviting people to church other people won’t be either. When someone asks, “How did you hear about this church?” and the response is that they met the pastor at a restaurant and he invited them, it speaks volumes. Don’t expect others to do what you aren’t doing. And yes, that means you need to find a way to get out of your office, house, or church bubble and be around non-Christians long enough to develop relationships with them and invite them to church.

Related posts:

1. What to Blog About
2. Halloween Outreach Ideas
3. Hype Man

Tags: Buzz Marketing, hype, Missional Lifestyle