Church Marketing Sucks

All week long we’ve been looking back at 2010. We’ve covered the most hotly debated posts, your picks for the top posts (all 13 of you who bothered to vote), the top CFCC news and the top tweets of 2010. You can also still vote for the best advice shared in 2010 (at least for a few more days).

Now we come to the big one, our picks for the top 10 posts of 2010:

10) 5 Tools Church Designers Need
In this six-part series Paul Armstrong dives into five tools church designers need. He covers confidence, determination, communication, boundaries and teamwork. It’s Design 101 for how church designers can be productive, creative and happy in settings that aren’t always kind to designers.

9) Are We Building Bench-Riding Believers?
Brian Gaffney looks at what message our marketing is sending. Are we inviting people to come, sit and stay or to go and do? One is an engaging invitation. The other? Not so much.

8) Missions Giving vs. Building Funding
Money seems to be the church’s Achilles’ heal and putting your missions giving side-by-side with your building fund puts your priorities in sharp contrast. Think about how you use your money and how you communicate it, because it says a lot about your church. And people will notice.

7) Snowmageddon Cancels Church: Communicating in a Crisis
Ryan Spilhaus offered lessons in communicating during a crisis based on his church’s experience responding to record blizzards. So far this seems like another winter when those lessons could come in handy.

6) Our Marketing Budget is $0
Danielle Hartland’s church shifted their budget from traditional marketing to more outreach-based efforts. Technically their budget isn’t actually $0, but they are allocating it in ways that people don’t normally think of as marketing.

5) Lessons From a Declined, Plateaued and Downsized Church
Rich Kirkpatrick shared lessons in failure for churches that are facing dwindling numbers. He shared about ways to do more with less that any church can learn from.

4) Opposing or Embracing Muslims
Reaction to Muslims dominated the news this summer. We considered the marketing implications of how churches respond to their Muslim neighbors, looking at two opposite examples. We went on to talk about multi-faith dialogue and marketing lessons from Muslims.

3) Canceling Church To Do Good
More than 75 churches cancel their worship services to get out in their community and do some good. Debate raged about whether or not we should cancel worship services to do good, but most people lauded the effort to make an impact on the community.

2) Pastor Bans Facebook to Stop Adultery
The bizarre story of a pastor banning Facebook for his entire staff in order to stop adultery. It gets especially weird when it’s revealed that the pastor has been unfaithful himself. Oops. That’s a church marketing failure.

And the #1 post of 2010…

1) Churches Aren’t Paying Attention on Twitter
An experiment to see how churches respond on Twitter revealed how thoroughly churches are dropping the ball on what’s supposed to be a two-way form of communication. Too many churches are simply broadcasting on Twitter and missing out on the opportunity to listen and help. Our own Justin Wise offered some tips and ideas for how churches can better use social media.

Thanks for a great 2010 and here’s to more courageous storytelling in 2011.