advertising

[raymond guterman]

I am aware that the best way that new people come into our churches in when our members invite their neighbors, friends, family, etc. However, with the loss of nearly 60,00 active members last year, I would like to see our denomination consider a national advertising
campaign, as well as produce ads that local churches can use in newspapers, etc. Our Methodist friends seem to do this well. I know it's expensive, but so is the thought of the extinction of the pcusa by 2038.
raymond guterman
ocala, fl.

[Donna R. Hoppestad]

Hey David - I totally agree with your impression of the "Here and Now" ads. I also think that they are a bit dated. I also love your idea of the "journey" - it's very inclusive and makes people outside the church feel that they too can be valuable.
And who isafter all a pro at this Presbyterian advertising thing? I don't think that we can make a wrong decision right now, as long as we're doing something! And sharing ideas is the best way to make the least mistakes, I think.
I also think that we have a golden opportunity right now to make a unique, positive image of church in the mainstream. What we have to offer is unique, so why not accentuate our unique positives?!

[Skip Dunford]

Here are a couple of sites worth checking out by anybody who has an interest in continuing this topic. I'll be watching for responses!
http://www.churchmarketingsucks.com/
and
http://adage.com/article?article_id=136541

[Adrian Pratt]

A local Church here in Beckley WV has a billboard on one of the main highways that (with plain black typeface on a white background) simply asks 'Tired of big business religion?' and underneath (in larger type) has 'www.beckleychurch.org'. Well it got me to check out their website... which contained a sermon of the same title complaining about churches who used entertainment or sports (or even church dinners) to attract folk to church rather than preaching the 'true gospel'. (I noticed the sermon did not consider billboards as being a big business marketing device, but then what do I know?)

All I'm saying is that it made me take a look :-)

[Donna R. Hoppestad]

Funny how the simplest message will have the most effectiveness, huh? Even if they don't really mean what they say!!

BTW, how was their website? Was it updated, etc.?

[Bruce Reyes-Chow]

One of the most effective tools that we have had for advertising besides a strong google presence is being reviewed on yelp.com. Yelp is the biggest source for reviews on EVERYTHING here in SF and in any major cities. I wonder what is being used in other local communities? I would think if a church is in the same place where folks are searching for other important elements of their life, would that be helpful?

Our reviews are at http://www.yelp.com/biz/mission-bay-community-church-san-francisco if you want to take a look. I would say that 75% or so of visitors look at our yelp reviews.

[David Parker]

Thanks for your comment about Yelp. You got me on to that about a year or so ago. It isn't as big a deal in our smaller community, but our Chamber of Commerce website is. We're the only church that has a website link from the chamber's site so we're always getting referrals from that. We too have a pretty good goggle presence. for the younger generations, the way to go is the web...that's how we've had our younger people check us out...and how we've begun to cross racial boundaries too!

thanks

[Donna R. Hoppestad]

I love the yelp.com concept! Unfortunately, this doesn't help a lot of our more rural communities, but it does reinforce the one thing that gets more people to our churches than any other - word of mouth. Yelp.com is just another form of advertising, or evangelizing, or outreach, or whatever you'd like to call it. It's okay (in my layman's mind) not to have a deep meaning behind everything we publicize - for example, statistics show that if you highlight only your worship services, your response rate (among unchurched) goes down quite a bit. However, if you publicize your food bank, your clothes closet special event, a special Saturday to put together baskets for cancer patients in your local hospitals, you are going to get response. The worship and the gospel come later. Is that a terrible thing to say? The facts are that in order to do our job, we have to figure out new and unconventional ways, like yelp.com, to let people know that we aren't just chanting in our stained-glass windowed buildings and damning them to hell because they're not there with us. We are changing the world, and they can help. If they learn a little about Jesus along the way, well....... Of course, this doesn't mean that I advocate any compromise on our part, just that we have to know that things aren't the way they used to be, so we either roll with it or lament our losses until one of my children or your children lock the door on our last church.

[Sue Coller]

One aspect of advertising that I think is vitally important is the impact it has on existing members. None of the churches I served did anything like tv ads, but one church in a small town made an intentional effort to get their name out in the community once a week in the weekly paper - sometimes a paid ad, sometimes a listing in the community events section, sometimes an article with photo that we would write and submit to the paper. We didn't get a single new person walk into the church because of those efforts, but the effort still had a huge effect on the church. People in the community started talking about the church - saying things like "you all are doing a lot of things there!" Mind you, the only thing new we were doing was telling people what we were doing. No new programs or anything else. The members started talking more about the church out in the community. In the fall that year we did a survey of the membership, asking about their perceptions of how the church was doing, and it was overwhelmingly positive - hardly any negative comments at all. And giving that year jumped 30%. Did I mention we decided not to do a stewardship drive that year?

The next year, we did not make the same effort to get word out about our existence and what we were doing. Giving dropped, member complaints skyrocketed, and in the community, I heard thru the grapevine that rumors were going around that we were closing. (which told us -- if you start a publicity campaign, beware of stopping it! It also reminds us that if people don't hear anything, they seem to tend to assume negative info and make up their own info to fill the void.)

Bottom line - the efforts went a long way toward helping the existing members feel positive and contribute more to the life of the church, and be more comfortable speaking to non-church members about church activities.

So while I also would like to see some relevant, national efforts to get the PCUSA name out there, I look at it more in terms of it's potential impact on existing members than on its ability to attract new people to the church. If that does happen, that's icing on the cake!

[Bruce Reyes-Chow]

Yes . . . this was one of the problems that were heard from other national campaigns. There really is no way to capture a common identity if the local church is not on board or at least resembles to some extent that image portrayed.

[Donna R. Hoppestad]

I think that this conversation has become fascinating in many different ways! I think that East Tennessee is becoming a "test market", if you will, for something that the entire denomination needs to investigate further. I have read and heard a lot of things about our billboard campaign, but really haven't heard much feedback on what is really going on in our "New Vision" program. The heart of the program lies in teaching and encouraging our existing members and churches to talk about their church, its missions, and in general, "evangelize" in their communities. We have developed seminars and discussions concerning how to be a greeter (we're all greeters, of course), how to, for very little money, increase the exposure of their missions to their neighborhoods, how to make their buildings and properties look more inviting, and on and on. It really just depends on the needs of the individual church - the Presbytery is here to help them figure out what they need help with the most. None of this, with the exception of the tv and billboard ads, costs much, if any, money - it's only a mindset change.

This is easy to translate on a national level, because after all, we do have a few things in common. Skip the theological discussions at first and let's concentrate on the basics. We all use the same cross - that's our brand. We all work to accomplish The Great Commission. We got to our basic "Find" words on the advertising (find compassion, community, faith, hope, love, peace, joy, grace, acceptance, and during Christmas, comfort and joy) by thinking about what we all hope to offer to others....big, small, rich, or poor, I would hope that all of our churches try to give our members and visitors each of these things.

The billboards give our members something to point to and bring up in conversation. Let's face it - unless we work in some capacity in the church, it's hard to bring this sort of thing up in the workplace nowadays. It has made most of our members proud and excited - some of them don't like it at all, but at least it has stirred up lots of conversation about how we are to get the word out that we are alive and well.

So, to many outsiders, a cross that they see on a billboard, a church sign, a windshield, a newspaper article, etc., may just register when they begin to think about their own spiritual being. I'd like to think that someone who has never had a church experience will feel more comfortable visiting a church that has advertised love, hope and peace, acceptance and compassion, than a church that has made it too complicated or too scary.

What do you think?

[Marietta Wynands]

Since many churches have websites, couldn't the denomination provide a video to which our sites could link? Most people are finding our churches by searching online anyways.

[Scott D. Hill]

Another option is to use the Here and Now ads in movie theaters. Prices are lower, audiences more attentive, regions and demographics more targeted. Our presbytery did this a little -- you can add about 5 seconds of your own content to the end of the ads, which we thought were great.