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.