Stewardship and Marketing: Is Your Outreach Efficient?

In the marketing assessment framework, the AEE Benchmark, the second point in analyzing your church marketing is Efficiency.  In a broad sense, efficiency concerns the ratio of input to output of a system.

A car is fuel efficient if its engine maximizes the miles per gallon of fuel put in the tank. A marketing tactic is efficient if it produces a high return on investment while achieving the campaigns goals.

For ministry leaders, efficiency is a crucial filter for all church marketing plans. If your church chooses to engage in what we’re calling marketing, you owe it your people to invest their tithes wisely.

Poorly planned, inefficient marketing is bad stewardship.

So what do I mean when I say your church marketing efforts must be efficient? Here are some points to consider as you pass your plans through the AEE Benchmark:

• Marketing efficiency begins with a plan – Read about SMART marketing objectives and the marketing planning flow.
• The buck stops with you – every dollar you spend must be justifiable in light of your sound, well thought-out plan.
• Don’t follow the crowd – avoid doing things because it’s something churches have traditionally done (e.g. Yellow Pages ads, promotional pens, yard signs). These tactics aren’t necessarily bad, but maybe not always the most efficient options for your community.
• Track, measures, repeat – you should know what happens to every dollar you spend on your communications. Analyzing campaigns can be time consuming, but over time, you’ll learn which methods are efficient and which methods are wasteful.

A common temptation for ministry leaders is to “do some marketing” whenever a special event is four or six weeks away. This typically means putting together some brochures or sending a direct mailer, or maybe even buying some radio spots.

My hope is that we can being thinking intentionally about our church marketing efforts, which means avoiding shotgun approaches to outreach that result in wasted dollars and poor stewardship.

Our marketing decisions reflect our understanding of stewardship as well as the gift of our people’s tithes and offering. I hope the efficiency of our marketing efforts express to our people that we take very seriously the management of Kingdom resources.

Churches and Tyranny of Too Much

We like choices, right? Choosing between several options of say, toothpaste, gives us the feeling of control over the decision. Brand A is better than Brand X, and we’ll vote with our dollars.  But can too many choices be dangerous?

In marketing circles, it is well-known that too many options tends to paralyze consumers. This has been called the Tyranny of Too Much. Many studies have shown that consumer behavior differs greatly when offered a few choices compared to many choices. For example:

In one experiment, when researchers asked subjects to compare chocolate chip cookies from a jar of 10 cookies and a jar of two cookies, the subjects rated the cookie from the smaller jar better than the one from the larger jar.

And the cookie wasn’t just better. It was rated more valuable, more desirable to eat in the future, and more attractive as a consumer item, despite the fact the cookies were identical. More choice made the subjects feel that their sample was less desirable.

In another experiment (the source of which I cannot recall), when shoppers were offered 2 or 3 versions of a particular jelly spread, they were able to make a purchase. When the number of options jumped to 5 or 6, they left the store frustrated.

A culture of fear?

Seth Godin deals with a similar issue on his marketing blog. In discussing market-goer’s inability to decide between several kinds of apples, he highlights the inherit fear among the American public. He says that people are afraid of your offering for two reasons:

1. They don’t know about it.
2. They’re afraid of it.

What this means for churches

Imagine the paralysis of choice resulting from the number of churches in America. Not only are there myriad denominations, there are countless flavors of those denominations (I’m looking at us, Baptists).

How does the large number of choices affect peoples’ ability to choose which church to visit, and how do these options affect teh community’s perception of the value of Church?

In considering your church marketing efforts, all strategy must include  an acknowledgement of the plethora of choices and the effect it has on the people.

The “competition,” to borrow a business term, is not other churches bodies, but the shear number of churches as a whole. In one sense, you’re competing with yourself.

I think there are some tactics to address this issue and help clear things up for people in your town, but we’ll save this for another post.

Assessing you Church Marketing: Are You Authentic?

In my proposed framework for assessing church marketing, the AEE Benchmark, the first benchmark is Authenticity.

The point of authenticity may be the most crucial trait of church marketing. The term “church marketing,” as I mentioned in my post about the term “church marketing,” doesn’t fully capture the true depth of the Truth churches communicate using modern communication methods.

If ministers wish to engage in communication that may look like marketing (direct mail campaigns, print ads, outdoor, radio spots, etc), the message and the method both must be authentic.

Questions for reflection:

• Do the images and copy of my design accurately portray my church or event?
• Are there pictures of the church and its people?
• Do the typefaces and design elements fit with the church’s culture?
• Does your language reflect the attitudes and beliefs of the congregation

Things to avoid:

• Edgy graphics if the church is old and traditional
• Stock photos of good looking people in random, cool looking environments
• Making the church look big if it is not
• Failing to remember that you are communicating eternal Truth, and not trying to promote an event or sell a product

When minsters find out I’m in marketing and design, they’ll usually hit me up for church marketing tips or design advice. I think the best church marketing tip you can ever take to heart is this: be authentic!

What is it with Candles at Christmas? A Case Study in Intentional Imagery

In a recent post I discussed the importance of intentionality in choosing images for your church graphic design. The foundational idea is that when communicating the message of the Church, ministry leaders must know what they want each image to accomplish as well as how that image will be perceived by the target audience.

In a bit of field research, I came across the following postcards from a prominent church marketing company. While this company offered many designs to choose from for Christmas promotions, a large percentage involved candles.

Anyone who has ever desigend seasonal collateral, myself included, is probably guity of this.

But my questions is this: why candles?

What do they say? What do they do for the target audience? Christians may have some extensive metaphor for Christmas and the light of the world yadda yadda, but do those not familiar with our codes get this?

Is there any motivation for using candles, or are the just easy?

In light of these thoughts (pun intended), I offer a question for use in critiquing your image choices: Does this image  most effectively communicate my intended message?

If you answer no or maybe, keep looking.

All images © Outreach

Excellent Church Marketing Resource: Church Marketing Lab

There’s a group on Flickr called the Church Marketing Lab. It’s an active community of folks who take part in church design. Members can upload pieces they’re working on and receive insightful and educated criticism from other members.

Check it out for inspiration, and take time to read the comments. Doing so will help you begin to critique your own church marketing collateral. And if you have the guts, upload your own work and see what you can learn!

Before you design your next church marketing piece, ask yourself these 3 questions

Striking images can evoke emotion and create a lasting impression in the viewer’s mind, so what role do images play in church marketing collateral? It’s very easy to hop on iStock and grab some nice looking images, but I think the urgency of our message calls for a more intentional approach. To move us all in that direction, I pose these questions:

Why did you pick that picture?

Is it because it looks like other church direct mailers or brochures you’ve seen? Maybe you just like the colors or the way the people look. It could be a utilitarian choice based on the amount of copy space.

Aside from these possible reasons, choice of images, like everything in the design process, should emerge from your overall church marketing goals and square with a church marketing framework.  Each image you use should be chosen for a specific reason and purpose, which leads to my next question:

What do you want your images to say?

Images can stir emotion, positive or negative, and therefore set expectations for the viewer about our church or event. If you use stock images of a foggy concert with cool lighting, but your event actually features 4 high-schoolers on a makeshift stage in your gym, it’s safe to say you’re creating false expectations.

This point aligns very much with the AEE Benchmark of Authenticity. You’re images should fit within your overall strategy, but they should also be real, whatever that means for you and your community. Too often church marketers portray who they want to be rather than who they are.  It’s time to change.

How do those outside your circle understand your images?

This last question relates to the way the intended audience perceives the messages your images send.  How do they decode what you’re trying to get across?

This is difficult to answer, both for church marketers and marketers from Business World, because it asks us to remove our own interpretative frameworks and view our efforts without bias. While completely removing our own bias in any situation is impossible, it helps to to try as hard as possible.

For example, what does that composite of young, good-looking, smiling families mean to church outsiders? What about the closeup of hands holding a sapling? And what is it about over saturated skies and really green grass? Just sayin’.

These visual metaphors are very popular in church circles, but do they carry the same meaning to those who aren’t in-the-know?

A confession

In the interest of disclosure, I must admit that I’ve been guilty of all the things I’ve criticized here. I’m pointing the finger at all of us, not all of ya’ll (that’s right; I’m from the South).

So let’s take a step in the intentional direction. Church leaders: you’re responsible for setting the tone of any church marketing your ministry carries out, so it’s up to you to set the tone.

A Proposed Framework for Assessing Church Marketing

Business World provides many tools for assessing the success of a marketing campaign. While some of these measures may prove useful for ministry leaders, I think we should push to transcend existing Business World frameworks and assess church marketing efforts in light of our theology.

Rather than simply transposing the existing marketing framework in its entirety, I propose a set of measurements that transcend measurements of reach, frequency, and ROI and move towards benchmarks that reflect a Christian ethic.

This is a work in progress, so feedback is welcome.  I give you the AEE Benchmark.

Church marketing should be:

Authentic

• Honest portrayal of church or event
• Creative fits personality of the people
• Reflects the culture of the church
• No edgy graphics if the church is old and traditional
• Don’t use stock photos of shiny people
• Don’t make the church look big if it’s not

Efficient

• Design effectively communicates the message
• Costs reflect wise stewardship
• Plans are thorough and smart
• Don’t spend money without having a solid rationale
• Don’t do what other churches around just because
• Don’t engage in marketing activities that fall outside the strategy

Engaging

• Beautiful design inspires and informs
• Initiates a dialogue
• More 2-way/multilateral than broadcast/1-way
• Don’t create ugly things
• Don’t violate the people’s trust or annoy them

The AEE Benchmarks should be used as a guide during the planning process of any marketing activities. Existing goal setting processes, such as SMART (more on SMART marketing objectives here), should be still be used.

Rather than a standalone method, the AEE Benchmarks provide a set of checks and balances that will help you

ensure your church marketing efforts remain consistent with your values.

The Importance of the Design Process for Church Marketing

When most people hear the term “design,” the words “graphic” or “web” are often added to the beginning, and the criteria for good design is often “does it look clean/edgy/cool/etc?” But design as a discipline encompasses a much broader perspective.

The goal of design in your church marketing efforts should focus on one objective: to effectively communicate.

A problem I’ve encountered with church marketing over the years, however, is the lack of planning many churches put towards a design project. Either it’s bland and uninformative or really cool looking, but equally uninformative

One of the areas in which church leaders can learn from Business World is in the implementation of a design process. Design processes come in a few different flavors, but these are the major points:

• Planning – what are the goals and objectives for the design (info on goals, objectives, strategy, and tactics)? what do we want people to do? how should they feel?
• Research – what are the design goals and objectives? what are the technical requirements (e.g. software programs) and talent requirements (e.g. a web design expert)? what’s the timeline?
• Concepting – based on the goals, objectives, and requirements, begin exploring creative concepts that fulfill the requirements and meet the goals (i.e. don’t just make things look pretty)
• Execution – print the cards, take the website live, mail the letter
• Evaluate – did the design achieve our goals?  how much did it cost? did it accurately portray our personality and mission?

Following a design process helps you and your staff spend your time more effectively and hopefully reduce wasted marketing dollars.

Considering the Language of Church Marketing Planning

The discipline of marketing has developed a rich vocabulary over the years to describe processes, facilitate planning, and enable tracking and measuring. A deep set of terms enables marketers to track everything from consumer sentiment to number of times you saw that billboard on the highway.

So what role do the terms of Business World play in the planning processes of Church World?

The thing about words is that they carry semantic freight from context to context. It’s difficult for our minds to differentiate between the current context and most common context for a given word.

For example, what do you think of when you read “Twitter?” What if you’re discussing bird watching and someone mentions a bird tweeting?  If you’re involved with social media at all, chances are your perceptions will be colored by your experiences.

Certainly some phrases lose much of their original meaning over time (like if someone is “point man” on a project, I doubt many people envision the jungles of Vietnam), but marketing terms are much more frequent and recent.

What happens when churches begin defining target audiences and developing their unique selling proposition?  What happens when they begin to develop a pricing strategy and attempt to measure ROI on their different outreach efforts?

Because our choice of language affects our perception, ministry leaders must move towards an intentional vocabulary when defining marketing activities for the church.

Is it easy to appropriate existing terminology?  Yes, but the path of least resistance is rarely the most fruitful course.

Do I have a set of terms ready for you to use? Not yet (didn’t I just say I’m not taking the easy route?).

The Intersection of Marketing and Theology

To think about Church Marketing is to examine ways churches leverage various media to communicate their message. At least for now, when we talk about Church Marketing, we must do so in light of the traditional practice of marketing, much like it’s difficult to discuss post-modern architecture without doing so in light of modern architecture.

So until a new language is developed for church marketing, we’ll call it that—church marketing—in full acknowledgement that the term lacks the fullness of what happens when the message of Truth connects with a world in need.

So why can’t we simply be satisfied with the term “church marketing?” The difference can be seen in the opposing universes of Church World and Business World and the ultimate intentions each universe has at its core.

Opposing Worlds

Business world seeks above all profits. Sure, some companies are making the world a better place to live, but profits will always drive business activity. One of the ways businesses achieve their goals is through marketing activities. Marketing as a discipline exists to serve the intentions of Business World.

If you’re reading this article, you know doubt acknowledge the differences between the profit-seeking Business World and the cosmic transformation sought by Church World.

So the question for ministry leaders, then, is can we impose the framework of Business World onto the structure of Church World?

Not without damaging the integrity of church world. Can we design logos and print brochures and have a great website? Yes, but only when done in light of the values and principles of Church World.

It is this tension and this relationship we seek discuss. May we venture forward together, earnestly seeking truth in all our endeavors.