Maybe Churches Are Like Small Businesses…
Hey All,
I am kind of changing gears, but I have a story to tell that isn’t really about a business but more about churches, the community and communication. My church, Trinity Methodist in Ralston had a grand opening for a new community center on June 4. The community center has a full gym, meeting places, and a full commercial kitchen. It will give the community a place to get together for meetings, community and social events. This is the result of hard work by folks in the church and members of the local community. They recognized a need in the community and went to work to raise the money for construction and committed to funding the community center in the future.
The church’s ability to fund the community center in the future will mostly rely on commitments and pledges from the existing congregation, but the future also depends on bringing new members into the congregation. Churches by their very nature are conservative and don’t really think they are in the marketing and recruiting business per se, but they are. I suggested to our minister, Reverend Nan, that she should tap into technology to reach out to new people moving into the community and local area. We could use emails, social networking pages, but we need to also use this grand opening as a way to collect data in addition to recruiting new members to the congregation. My company, infoGROUP, has a division, American Church Lists, specializing in marketing to and for church congregations. Using the marketing information that exists in our church database along with information on new homeowners and new movers is a great way to reach out to potential new members of the congregation.
I will have some work to do, convincing the finance and membership committees to do some different things, but with Nan’s help I am sure we can convince them to use the new technology and some of the marketing techniques I talk about. By doing this, we can focus on increasing the church membership, which is essential to maintaining our commitment to the community center and to the community.
I am sure there are some other great examples of how other congregations have raised awareness to increase their membership and I would love to hear your stories.
Don’t work to hard.
StormDawg
