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.
There are 6 Comments to "A Proposed Framework for Assessing Church Marketing"
Amen!
I’ve seen too many churches who are skittish about anything to do with marketing as though it’s an ‘evil secular’ thing that should be avoided, lest we judged as being of the world.
I would only suggest that SMART element be more prominent. Too often the marketing activities are undertaken with a lukewarm, almost wait-and-see attitude, without any concrete objectives. In absence of such objectives, it’s virtually impossible to assess the degree of success of any program. Putting any future supporting resources (read $) at risk.
Thanks for your comments Andrew. Hopefully we can locate a middle ground between a fear of strategic communications a love of it.
I’ve seen too many churches fail to effectively communicate to external groups (or internal for that matter), and I’ve had conversations with a few too many ministry leaders who seem to wish they were in marketing!
Hey, just a really quick note right now and perhaps I can leave something a little more in depth later. I think this is a great plan to implement within churches (I especially like “Don’t use stock photos of shiny people”). One thing I have noticed about churches and their attempts at marketing is an over-reliance upon paper products coupled with a disregard for the amount of paper used in making flyers, business cards, sign-up sheets, etc. I think any future attempts at church marketing should be overtly sensitive to the ecological state of affairs and seek not only to be good stewards of those resources but to also be a good model of ecological responsibility the people of the church. I’m not exactly sure what this looks like, and I’m pretty sure that it will be different in each church, but I guess I do not necessarily have to be, I’ll leave that up to you. Great work Patrick!
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