Church Marketing Sucks

Recently, Mission Community Church launched a brand new campus, complete with a promise that they’d donate five years of clean, safe drinking water for every person in attendance. This obviously made a splash, and we caught up with Brian Kaufman to talk about the promotion and opening.

We’re going to delve into their story in two parts. Firstly, why did they go this route? What was their inspiration? Then we’ll get into the results and the follow-up. Here’s our first conversation with Brian:

Can you tell us a bit more about yourself, who you are and how you’re involved with Mission68?

Brian Kaufman: I am principal and creative director of Tipping Media, a small agency outside of Phoenix, Ariz., that works primarily with nonprofit, faith-based and political organizations. My wife, Amy, and I have attended MISSION Community Church for nearly three years. During that time and through some personal connections, Tipping Media was able to work on a number of items for MISSION—including a building capital campaign, social media strategy, web strategy and most recently the campus expansion Grand Opening campaign.

I also coauthor an online e-zine called Shrink the Church which was created as a resource to churches looking to simplify, make better use of their resources and explore creative social media and web strategies while having a little fun along the way.

So you mentioned the Grand Opening, which is how we got in touch recently. I understand it was a “campus expansion” launch on March 28, 2010. Can you tell us a little more about what that means?

Brian: A few years ago MISSION arrived at a moment where they recognized rapid member growth on a campus that was not built to support the increasing numbers. They were running five packed services and children/student space was also quickly filling up. As the story goes with a lot of churches, MISSION explored several options including satellite campuses, increased services and a church plant, but, ultimately felt the best use of both financial and human resources was to expand the current campus.

The campus expansion included a 1,500-seat worship center, adult classrooms, student center and office space as well as some remodeling as existing space was reworked for new requirements. Originally, when the campus was built there was an area dedicated for offices, but, as the church grew the staff gave up that space to support the growing children’s ministry and nursery. To optimize their budget they opted not to lease office space and instead made best use of the campus and basically fit themselves in wherever they could work.

With the new expansion MISSION has positioned itself to essentially more than triple its capacity to minister.

Wow, tripling your ministry is always nice. You guys had an interesting pitch for people to come. Not a sweepstakes, giveaway or performance. What was the hook?

Brian: Churches often use moments like these to draw a lot of attention. Yes, we’d like to see our attendance increase, and if we are honest, despite the tremendous financial costs in building, we are also very excited about the future. Large churches in our area had used celebrities to attract the community to their grand openings. It is an effective way to draw in all types of people.

We had considered inviting former Arizona Cardinals quarterback Kurt Warner to come and speak at our grand opening, but it felt uncomfortable. It would not only take our entire grand opening budget to get Kurt there, but also, and more importantly, we did not feel that paying a celebrity to come speak in that moment fit with our Micah 6:8 vision—do justice, love mercy, walk humbly.

Instead we chose to use our budget to “do justice.” Working with a nonprofit organization called charity: water we agreed to donate five years of clean, safe drinking water for each person that joined us on our grand opening. We believed that type of justice resonated with Christians and non-Christians alike. We wanted the community to come be a part of something incredible, and all we asked of them was to show up.

Pretty interesting. And I know you’re still crunching numbers and gathering feedback, but gut-level, what was your perception of how it went?

Brian: It’s important to note that this was the grand opening to the community, not to the current attenders at MISSION. We actually opened the new building three weeks prior to our March 28th grand opening. This not only allowed us time to transition and train but also to celebrate together as a local church body. We filmed and aired a 30-second spot, created a grand opening website and distributed a mailer to approximately 70,000 households within a five mile radius of the church. We also heavily incorporated social media and put other invite tools into our people’s hands.

We have received a lot of positive feedback on the day. People celebrated with us as they looked around and realized how much water people would be receiving just because they were there. We had a speaker from charity: water open with 20 minutes on where the water was going (a village in Haiti) and how we were involved. The energy during worship was, to me, incredible as people drowned out the voices on stage. It was a very cool moment to be a part of.

Come back next week for Adventures in Grand Openings Part Two.