A Great New Initiative To Reach Out to Our Area!

As you all know, My Father passed away a couple of years ago, and it turns out that he left his three kids a pretty good-sized inheritance.  Not enough to retire and buy a villa in the South of France, or anything like that, but still, a bit more money than any of us kids expected to get.  And in thinking about what I could do with some of this money, I thought I might invest it in the church’s future, which would, of course, mean that I was investing it in my future as well.  And so, after due consideration, I decided to broach the idea of funding a church marketing program to our leadership.

The program I proposed went like this: I would invest the equivalent of $20,000 a year in a three-channel marketing program for the church over a two-year period (2026 and 2027) with the idea that if the program produced positive results I would continue it for as long as I was Minister.  Now, I don’t want you to think that this is all altruism on my part, because I also proposed getting paid a bonus equivalent to 25% of any new pledges the church received from new members who were introduced to the church through the program, so what I proposed wasn’t a gift, it was, as I mentioned before, an investment. 

Well, of course, there were meetings, and discussions which ensued, which resulted in refinements and improvements to the proposal, and finally to Prudential and Council agreeing to proceed.

So, how will things go.  Well, as I mentioned above, I’m going to invest $20,000 a year in building what you might think of as a three-legged marketing stool.  The first leg is something called the “Google Ad Grant.”  Our friends at Google has a program where they give non-profit organizations the equivalent of $10,000 to purchase advertising on Google.  Now those aren’t real dollars, of course, because you can only spend them on Google, but they’re valuable all the same, because they let you make sure that when people search for something on Google that you do (like being a church) that searchers see your church website, or Facebook page, or Instagram feed, at the top of their search results.  The advertising is free, but the way Google allots it is incredibly complicated—in fact, its so complicated that you really need to pay someone to run the program for you.  So part of that $20,000 is going to an outfit called Project World Impact, who specialize in running Google Ad Grant campaigns for nonprofit organizations.

But if we’re going to use the Google Ad Grant to push our church’s website, Facebook page, and Instagram feed up in people search results, we also need to make sure that those three things are up-to-date and informative.  And if you’ve ever tried to keep Facebook pages and Instagram feeds up to date you know that is a job in and of itself.  So, another church of that $20,000 is going to go to Kate Fitzpatrick Consulting, an outfit dedicated to helping small businesses and nonprofits manage their social media presence. 

The third leg of the stool will be direct mail.  There is an outfit in Texas called Outreach that helps churches design, manage, and evaluate direct mail campaigns and we’ll be working with them to run direct mail campaigns 6 or 7 times a year in Kent and in the surrounding towns.

So why are we doing this?  Well, because, as every church in America has discovered, simply opening the church doors and waiting for new people to come in just doesn’t work very well anymore—and hasn’t for past, say, 30 years.  That being the case, if we want our church to thrive, we’re going to need to be more intentional about getting our message out to people.  We’ll need to take the initiative to let people know about who we are, and what we do, and why they should drop by church on a Sunday morning and check us out.