For years I thought the ideal church would be one I founded. I’d envisioned every detail: we’d publicize our services, meet in rented space until we could afford to build, and finally construct a beautiful, functional building. It would be a dream come true.
Then one day it happened; I founded a church that met in the Marriott Hotel ballroom in Greensboro. As Toyota says, “Who could ask for anything more?”
I could.
We didn’t attract new people like I’d hoped. The first few weeks, we explained our lack of visitors by saying it would take time for word to get around. But after almost two months, even our most optimistic members were beginning to wonder, “Will we ever attract newcomers?”
In my enthusiasm, I’d failed to ask an important question: Who are we going after? What’s our target constituency, our “market”? Everybody wasn’t a good answer. We began with a core of about forty families; our money and man-hours were limited. We needed to use resources where they would do the most good if we were to be effective, even in our rapidly growing part of town.
We recognized at least two major problems.
Problem number one: No building. Previously I thought that would be an asset. I soon realized that when you meet in a building that looks like a Marriott Hotel, nobody can tell a church meets there. We decided we’d have to compensate for our lack of an easily identifiable location.
Problem number two took longer to identify; it sort of crept up on us. But eventually we realized that not only were we missing a building; we had no community. The hotel was at the airport, so we weren’t exactly the church at the crossroads. No one lived within a mile and a half of us. If you weren’t going to the airport, you didn’t go by the Marriott.
We’d said we wanted “to reach our community for Christ,” but we finally had to admit we hadn’t the foggiest idea of who our community was or how we were going to reach it. How could we let our new (if not near) neighbors know we were there for them? We felt somehow the answer lay in marketing.
Taking a Message to the Market
We defined marketing as anything we did to communicate effectively our church’s message to our world. The New Testament church may not have known about modern marketing techniques, but its preaching, teaching, and healing in the “marketplace” provides a biblical example of effective church marketing. It wasn’t, we determined, a foreign concept never to gain entry to our church. We could use appropriate marketing strategies to further the kingdom.
Maybe we need some demographic data about our community, I thought. It wouldn’t hurt to know who actually lives near us. What kind of people are they? What real-life needs do they have? I’d already taken a windshield tour of our area, and I’d judged our community was dominated by four groups.
One housing development nestled around a golf course, tennis courts, and a swim club. These folks seemed to be affluent, middle-aged families with teenagers and elementary-age children.
Another subdivision seemed to be primarily first-home families. Lots of Big Wheels and bikes betrayed the presence of numerous preschoolers and young children. The houses weren’t as big or the cars as new as in the golf course community. But the neighborhood seemed to say, “We’re off to a good start.”
Then there were the apartments and condos. Four new developments of each were going up within two miles of us. Two other groups, young couples and career singles, would be living there.
But, we weren’t sure about any of that. So we ordered a demographic profile of our community from an outfit that sells statistics by mail. Guess what we found: Our community is composed of career singles, young couples, families in their first homes, and middle-aged families with money and older children.
At least we bought the knowledge we were on the right track. These groups matched our congregational profile, and they, like us, were relatively new to our community. We decided to go after these four segments of the marketplace. Here are some of the methods we tried.
Coupon Packs
We needed some immediate results. We had little time to build an image. And, money was scarce. So, television was out, we decided. Too costly. Radio spots and newspaper ads weren’t much cheaper.
A man in our congregation owned several sandwich shops. “Let’s advertise in a coupon pack,” he suggested. “My company does it all the time. We can get into ten thousand homes for only four hundred dollars.” I hesitated. “And, I’ll pay for it,” he added. I hesitated no longer.
The coupon pack seemed like a good idea. We could select certain Zip Codes, target our immediate area, and piggyback our message with Firestone’s “Five dollars off on your next oil change and lube job” coupon.
Our problem was, what to give away? We couldn’t offer free admission to our services or ten dollars off your next contribution. And, with the advice of the ad salesman, we decided pitching a free Bible wouldn’t be a great incentive. So, we simply listed our service times and invited the community to join us for worship.
The coupon packs went out. We waited. That week we received two anonymous phone inquiries and one letter from an irate pastor who was convinced we had fallen into the depths of Madison Avenue madness. Nobody new showed up for our services the next Sunday. Or the next. Or ever. So much for coupon packs.
Door-to-Door Determination
After meeting as a church nearly four months, we’d gained five new members. Our dreams of being the fastest-growing church in history were fading fast. But now we at least knew our target community.
We’d scraped together enough money to print two thousand copies of a church brochure. So someone in our congregation asked, “Why don’t we go door-to-door in all these new subdivisions, give our neighbors a brochure, and invite them to church?” Not a high-tech proposal, but not very expensive either, and it definitely would get our message into the hands of our target audience. We decided to try it.
On a Saturday morning, twenty-seven hardy souls gathered at my home for street assignments and prayer. “We don’t want to sound like vacuum cleaner salesmen,” someone cautioned. Friendly and low-key was the approach we chose. We agreed to knock on doors, introduce ourselves, hand the folks a brochure, and invite them to join us in worship. That’s all-no hard sell.
We prayed, and the volunteers fanned out across neighborhoods. The Sunday school director and I rode the streets like Rommel in North Africa, encouraging the troops and replenishing their supply of brochures.
When we reconvened two hours later, our volunteers were ecstatic. They genuinely tried to top each other with stories about positive responses. Over and over they’d been told, “It’s about time somebody put a church out here.” Was I encouraged!
That Saturday, we knocked on almost four hundred doors in four new single-family developments. The face-to-face contact with our new neighbors was exhilarating and it cost less than twenty-five cents per household.
The best part was the payoff. The next Sunday three new families showed up for worship.
Media Freebies
Coming off of our door-to-door experience, we were heady with victory and ready to broaden our marketing mix. One day we were discussing ways we could publicize a special musical service. Our youth minister casually asked, “Would you like to be on the ‘Good Morning Show?’ ” (This local equivalent of “Today” and “Good Morning, America” has higher local ratings than either of the network programs.)
“Of course,” I responded, “but as the unknown pastor of an unknown church, how could I get on?”
“I know the host,” Bill replied. “I’ll call him and see what I can do.” The next day we confirmed a booking.
At 6:30 A.M. one morning, I got to tell all the Greensboro viewing area who we are, where we meet, what our dreams are, and how much we’d like to get to know our new neighbors. I also invited everyone to attend our musical.
Had we been able to buy it, that air time would have cost over a thousand dollars, but it was ours. Free. “Ye have not because ye ask not” somehow seemed appropriate.
About that same time, the local newspaper named us “Church of the Week” and gave us a full-page feature article in the Saturday paper. We submitted information and photos of smiling, happy people obviously enjoying their experience at Cornerstone Church. And, of course, we included in the article an invitation to our musical.
In addition, our members sent 250 engraved announcements to friends, co-workers, neighbors, and relatives, giving them a personal, handwritten invitation to the service. As a result of the multiple exposure, over 250 people attended! We normally averaged about 150.
We were beginning to learn the media lesson of multiple messages: Tell your story in as many ways as possible, and the result will be greater.
Several visitors that Sunday said they had seen us on TV and read the newspaper article. The biggest response, however, came from recipients of the personal invitation. Many of them also saw the TV interview and/or the newspaper article, but they decided to come after they got their invitation from someone they knew.
We took the spring and summer to follow up on those who had visited us. In the five months following our multimedia effort, twenty-three new members joined our fellowship. Most were a direct result of follow-up from the earlier advertising.
Telephone Tips
But as summer wore on, we ran out of hot prospects and went for weeks with few visitors and no new members. What next?
Through the church growth people at Fuller Theological Seminary, I heard about a new telemarketing program called “The Phone’s for You!” The premise was simple: make enough phone calls and you’ll find a lot of people interested in your church. Since we’d decided to look for the ripe fruit first, our members liked that idea, and we got ready.
We estimated the additional phone lines (we had two but needed five), the printed material, and the postage would cost us about two thousand dollars for ten thousand homes, or about twenty cents a call. That’s considered not a bad cost per contact.
Arranging to have the phone lines installed and the promotional pieces printed was the easy part. We needed about forty volunteers to make the calls. Some people, of course, react strongly to phone solicitation, and our members proved to be no different than the general population. Our leaders recognized that we needed to help our people see the positive side of our strategy.
On a Sunday morning before Sunday school, we gathered the adults for an inspirational look at what we needed to do. An excellent video tape came in “The Phone’s for You!” packet. Twelve minutes of personal testimonies to the effectiveness of the program beamed out to our adult members. Actual clips of people calling and the responses they got flashed across the screen. Our folks watched and were impressed.
After the presentation, we circulated sign-up sheets among the seventy-some present. Not only were we looking for callers, we also asked for those who would provide refreshments each night and for others to pray for the campaign and the callers.
Amazingly, when the sheets returned, every phone slot was filled, every refreshment assignment was taken, and several people had said, “I’ll pray while you call.” Some even gave special gifts to underwrite the cost of the program.
The first night as the volunteers gathered to begin phoning, several asked, “What do we do if the people get mad at us?”
I gave them the answer I’d heard on the instructional tape: “Most people will at least be polite.” That turned out to be pretty much the case.
Interestingly, the handful of folks who seemed the most offended were members of other churches. Some of them thought we shouldn’t be using the phone to reach people. Others were unhappy that we were calling into their church’s “territory.” Our callers assured them we were looking only for the unchurched; we weren’t out to steal someone else’s members. I’m proud of our volunteers, who did an excellent job of turning the other ear the few times they had to.
Most people we talked to, however, thanked us for calling. Even those who were unchurched and uninterested usually were polite and wished us well.
The phone campaign was what media types call a “pulsed” effort. For four weeks we called almost nine thousand homes in our community. Over five hundred families acknowledged they were both unchurched and interested in knowing more about our congregation. We then mailed a promotional piece to these families each week for four consecutive weeks. Then we called the interested homes again, inviting the families to attend our church’s first-anniversary celebration.
The response was strong. From the 500 unchurched, interested families, over 150 individuals said they planned to attend our anniversary service. We prepared for them.
When our anniversary Sunday came, so did the people-over 250 of them. Learning a lesson from our multimedia experience, we’d sent out personal invitations again, hosted a free community barbecue the Saturday before, and, through careful planning, gotten ourselves featured again as Church of the Week.
When the smoke had cleared from our big event, we began to evaluate our approach. Surprisingly, we discovered only 23 of the 150 telephone prospects actually showed up. The rest of our guests came because of personal invitations. Although we’d spent only twenty cents a contact, the telemarketing campaign had cost us almost a hundred dollars for every visitor it produced.
Although we were disappointed with the immediate results, we did have a mailing list of over five hundred interested and unchurched families. And, in addition, we had phoned almost every home within three miles of the church. The word was getting out.
A Marathon, Not a Sprint
Over a year has passed since we conducted our telemarketing campaign. During that time we have bought property and begun constructing our first building. And more than sixty people joined our fellowship in the past twelve months. The telemarketing campaign has continued to produce visitors to our church, even after a year.
Our building progress has attracted interest. Some people have visited our services because they’ve seen the sign at our future location. Still others tell us they’ll visit when the building is complete. And, we continue to experiment with direct-mail pieces and a new-prospect tracking system.
What have we learned from all our marketing efforts? We’ve learned that sometimes we’re successful and sometimes we’re not. We’ve learned that marketing momentum doesn’t happen overnight.
We’ve changed our philosophy. Now, we’re in this for the long haul. Even though we like to see immediate results, we realize this is a marathon, not a sprint. We plan to be around for a long time, and we’ve decided our marketing efforts ought to take the long view as well.
Are we getting our message to our market? Last year, out of fifty Southern Baptist churches in our area, we were sixth in new members enrolled. But one year’s statistics don’t tell the whole story. Ask me again in five years.
Charles Warnock III is pastor of Cornerstone Church in Greensboro, North Carolina.
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