Church Marketing Sucks

Easter is only nine weeks away. Is your church ready? We’re launching a new series where we ask some church marketing experts for their input and our first question is about gearing up for Easter.

What is your church planning for Easter and how are you communicating it?

Cleve Persinger: Due to budget cuts, we’re not doing our usual big marketing for Easter. The Easter services are about apologetics – evidence for the resurrection, so as part of our Easter plans, we will have a one page microsite that asks the simple question “What will you believe?” and provoke thought and discussion before the services. We hope to engage our communities through this topic. The goal would be to drive our attenders to invite others to one of our Easter services and share the site through Facebook, Twitter, and e-mail.  We’ll also have Facebook ads, print media available to our campuses, and an annual indoor community event for kids and families on each of our campuses, two weeks before Easter.

Here’s an article about last year’s pre-Easter event.

Brian Gaffney: Our theme for this year’s Easter Sunday service is “Pray[ing] for Resurrection Power.” We are not shifting worship service times, nor are we adding any additional worship services. We are, however, working to ensure that our existing worshiping community is comfortable and confident extending an invitation to their family members, friends, and to the members of their various networks. I still believe that the strongest form of communication is word-of-mouth, but our website, social media presence and especially printed postcard will serve as aids to our members’ invitations.

Katie Strandlund: Easter will be a culmination of a three-month-long series on the book of John. We are playing with the theme of light as a major layer in the series and it is growing as the series goes along. Communication of just about everything is done primarily through our small groups. Communication to the community is done through being in the community in our church-wide serve initiative. It’s all relational.

Danielle Hartland: We are launching our first multi-site campus on Easter (I know, I know). We’re focusing in on a theme around how we’re all part of a bigger story. We did some studies and found that the area we’re going to does not respond well to flashy and new, and they don’t seek information out (they expect it to come to them). So, we’re doing a few things:

Strategic Business Leader Meetings: Our Core Team is meeting up with local business owners in the area to communicate our value and support of them. We’re also arming them with a point-of-purchase cube that has a small pad of informational papers that customers can take. It’s going to be an interactive piece with a QR Code (it’ll have all the info on it, but the QR code will take people to extra info just in case they do want to go look).

Direct Mailing to families in the area. It’s a story book about the new campus and how it intersects with their story. Sent with a polaroid-shaped fridge magnet (and a QR Code).

Web Stories. We’ll be featuring six inspirational stories form the Core Team, all culminating with a video during the first service at all campuses about our story intersecting with God’s story.

Shawn Wood: Easter, what?!  Is it that time already? Good grief this create on demand stuff is hard.  Let’s just say a meeting is scheduled.