Church Marketing Sucks

The Certification Lab is a two-day, intensive workshop designed specifically for those new to the role of church communicator. Events are coming soon to your area, so register now. Stephen Brewster is one of the instructors and below is a taste of his insights:

Are your creative meetings boring? There is nothing worse then dreading going into a creative meeting because you feel it is going to be a waste of 90 minutes. Creative meetings should be the most fun, inspiring and creative meetings that we host.  So how can you turn a boring brainstorm into a creative experience that gives you ideas to build from?

1. Create Environment

Make sure that where you are having the meeting inspires creativity. Theme your locations to your subject matter as much as possible. Make sure that there are resources, food and an environment that will inspire people to share their best ideas. If your creative meeting is in the same place you do your everyday work you are setting yourself up to fail.

2. Open the Guest List

Don’t just invite the “creative people.” Go after anyone who might have an idea. Staff from other departments, volunteers, attendees of your church, people who don’t even go to your church, the more the better. When you create diversity on your guest list you will create diversity in your ideas.

3. Plan to Succeed

Go in with a plan, and know what you need to accomplish. You should come in with an agenda, and have one person responsible to facilitate that agenda. When you know what questions and activities you are going to execute you insure you will get results that are much more valuable to your process. For example, if you need a title for a series, create questions or activities that will inspire titles.

4. Create a Soundtrack

Your creative meeting should not be quiet. It should be buzzing with energy and excitement. Music creates tone so make sure you are intentional with your soundtrack being the type of music that will create the emotion and tone you need for the subjects you are discussing.

5. Set the Expectation

Let people know on the front end what you are trying to accomplish, that there are no bad ideas, that this is a safe place to share and that if you don’t use their idea it is not because it is not valuable. Very often the ideas we have in creative meetings breed other ideas in other meetings that become the foundation of our series. Every idea counts and every idea matters.

Get to Work

These concepts scale so if you work at church of 100 or a church of 10,000 you can host better creative meetings. We serve a creative God and he finds pleasure in us being creative. Don’t sacrifice creativity for efficiency, especially when it comes to meetings that will help you create collateral to tell the most important story in history, his story, to a world desperate for hope. Now go create!