I am, by no means, an advertising or marketing expert. However, it is my job as the assistant pastor of Ballenger Creek Baptist Church to understand a little bit about reaching an audience. I am, more or less, the outreach director of our church, which is basically just a fancy title to say that I tell people about our church. Being in some of the best churches in America (Lancaster Baptist in Lancaster, CA, Church of the Open Door in Westminster, MD, and Granite Baptist in Glen Burnie, MD. I'm biased when I say "best") I have seen how to reach out to communities and get unsaved people to come to church. After all, our target audience is not people who already go to a good solid church, it is those who do not know Jesus Christ as Saviour that we are trying to reach. I fear that when churches hear the words "advertising" or "marketing" they get a false idea and quickly label the person speaking those words as a heretic who is trying to leave the old paths. But what is advertising and what is marketing? Isn't it reaching out to people? And isn't reaching out to people where we get the word "outreach" from? I believe that outreach and advertising are, in essence, one and the same.
Through watching, through reading, and through experiencing, I have learned some things about outreach. As I said, I am not an expert, but I do think I may have an insight or two that can help someone:
First, You should never keep all of your eggs in one basket. What do I mean? There are a lot of churches who only reach out to their communities via door knocking and door hangers. There is absolutely nothing wrong with door knocking, but doing door knocking alone won't accomplish anything. I love Lancaster Baptist Church! One of the great things they focus on is door knocking, after all, it is the best type of outreach for the layman to do in the church. But Lancaster does not simply go door knocking, they also have tv commercials, radio spots, newspaper ads, Facebook ads, and on and on the list goes. Outreach involves much, much more than going out soul winning on Thursday night.
Second, a sharp website wraps everything together. Every form of outreach and advertising you do should lead to your website, which in turn will lead people to your church. Nearly every visitor we have had since we started services in February went to our website before they came to visit us. I personally thing our website looks pretty good. We use a web hosting service called Share Faith, and it is very user friendly. Since I basically control the website, it isn't everything I would like it to be (I am not tech or code savvy) but I believe it is sufficient for what we are trying to do (check us out at www.ballengercreekbaptist.org). There are some church websites that stink. They stink really bad! I'm sure you have seen them: Words bouncing around the screen, GIF's of a stick figure running from the fires of Hell with a Bible under his arm, background music, a calendar with no info on it, and overall not presentable. Most of the time, people will look at a tacky website and assume that you have a tacky church. Nobody wants to come to a tacky church. Honestly, Dr. Bob Jones Sr. said, "It is a sin to do less than your best." If you have a church website, do the best you can with it and make it sharp.
Third, measure outreach by 2 things: Is it Biblical? Is it Effective? I will quickly hit these: I will never compromise on our Biblical stand just to bring in a crowd. Churches are changing the way they do church, they take out the preaching, they bring in the rock band, they change their Bible version all to get a crowd. It is unbiblical and doesn't get people saved and growed (I know it isn't a real word, it sounds good though) for the Lord. Don't lower your Biblical standards or convictions. Is it effective? There are some methods of outreach that churches do that are no longer effective. Some churches still pay a lot of money for a yellow pages add and get no results from it because NO ONE USES YELLOW PAGES. I am amazed by how many churches do not have a Google Places account. Everyone uses Google, Google Places is easy, free, and get high amounts of traffic. This is a no brainer.
Here is the crux of this post. When it comes to effectiveness (I'm going to get some people mad at me for this), door knocking is not very effective, tv and radio spots are not very effective, Google is not very effective. Let me introduce you to the one outreach method that both the church world and secular world agree works the best: Word of mouth. How to you get people to church? You invite your friends, neighbors, and coworkers to church and be genuinely excited about it. People no longer respond to sales gimmicks they respond to relationships. So when you go door knocking, the idea is to build a relationship with those people and then invite them to church. A lot of people don't do this because it takes more time and effort than a 5 minute sales pitch to a total stranger. When doing a Facebook campaign, build relationships with those who leave comments and likes. What our church is doing in October is Friend Day. Honestly, the church is not putting much effort corporately into making this day happen. We are relying on our members to bring their friends, the people that they already have a relationship with. Friend Day does two things, it gets your members involved in bringing their friends to church (and also gives them a deeper burden for lost souls), and it brings people into the church who have never heard the Gospel. As a church, let's not get so wrapped up in advertising and outreach that we forget that the most effective (and I honestly believe the most Christ-honoring way) to bring people into the church is by word of mouth through relationships. The four men who brought the sick of the palsy to Jesus were not strangers with the man who was sick of the palsy, they were his friends. We can not call ourselves soul winners until we bring the people that we care about and love most to Jesus. Bring your friends to church!
I hope this helped someone. I am still learning this stuff, if anyone has any insights from their own ministry I would love to hear from you since I do still have a lot to learn.
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