Church Marketing Sucks

After reading the Church Marketing Sucks guidelines for guest blogging, I came across this post from lead Firefox engineer, Ben Goodger. Ben writes: “It’s great when people make contributions in the form of ideas and proposals, but it’s even better when they’re written for busy people.”

Here are some of Ben’s tips for writing for busy people:

• Make important points up front.
• Clear taxonomy of headings, and lots of them.
• Write clearly and succinctly.
• No long, unbroken paragraphs or tracts of text.
• Prefer bulleted lists with clear points to paragraphs.
• Use of emphasis in formatting to make important things clear.

As someone who is trying to learn what types of promotional materials to create for our camp, I’m finding that I would rather read a list of highlights than a few long paragraphs in a brochure. I read recently, “Don’t tell them you’re surrounded by a beautiful forest. Show them.”

I’m beginning to believe that the less on our promotional materials, newsletters, etc., the better. With a web site packed with the information everyone needs (written with Ben’s tips in mind, of course), I want to point them online. The other promotional materials, I believe, may just need to catch their attention. Let the web site do the rest.