Church Marketing Sucks

Ginger Creek Community Church is a suburban church in Aurora, Ill., of about 600 people.

Struggle:
Even though we are a team of three (and I’m told that’s a rare find—usually it’s just one person), we are a reactive instead of proactive. We never have time to plan ahead, make new goals, try new things and get rid of what isn’t working. I want to figure out how to make the switch while juggling the normal weekly tasks.

Victory:
Over the summer we switched databases and needed our church family to make the switch as well. It meant that they had to create a new user account. The goal was to maintain the number of online givers, have 200 of our church family make the switch by the time we needed to launch our fall semester classes.

We launched in three phases:

1. Online givers update their giving
2. Church family sign up for an account
3. Use the accounts to sign up for the fall classes

We were able to maintain 99 percent of our online givers, hit the 200 mark by Aug. 20 and had over 60 attendees signed up for our fall classes.

In addition to hitting those goals, we found out our church families are so busy that they will act on a piece of communication only when it becomes relevant to them. While this may be common to other churches, it will be a challenge for our team. But knowing about it is helpful.