Unity Church Marketing

As you can guess, I do a lot of traveling on my job. As such, I spend a good amount of time at airports both reading and writing articles. In the course of just trying to be aware, you end up hearing things that occasionally hit you over the head like a ton of bricks.

Living in Atlanta, that is my airport. I have literally flown in and out of there hundreds of times. And without naming names, you know there is only one airline that is headquartered there.

But I digress. I was actually on the second leg of a flight into Lansing, Michigan last week. Everyone was lined up to board when I saw this person in the “breezeway lane” For those unfamiliar with the concept, this was developed as a courtesy to frequent fliers that lets them board at their leisure.

So as the person tried to board using the breezeway lane, the gate attendant told him that they weren’t doing that anymore. Which I was a little surprised to hear since I had just used it myself the flight before. The gate attendant then said: “They don’t do that anymore…they change things every week…”

I am not here to comment on the gate attendants approach for all I know she may have been having a bad day. Because upon checking, I found out that she was misinformed at least about that particular item.

But what struck me is the comment…”they change things every week”. And I am afraid that she may have been right about that. Too many times, I have seen good marketing campaigns get shelved because the organization was onto the next “big idea”.

And why shouldn’t they? They gave the last campaign a couple of weeks and look at the lack of results!

Folks, as I often say to my clients, in many ways church marketing is like having a baby. It is a process that you have to go through. Just because you want a baby (but name your objective here…church growth, recognition in the community, etc) doesn’t mean you can go out and get 9 women pregnant and have a baby next month.

You are going to need to have a start, middle and end to your campaign. And if you aren’t ready to do all of those, don’t be surprised when you get the results you do.

I will create more in depth articles about:

Start – Here I am writing this article about beginning, middle and end and as I have told you in other articles is to begin with the end in mind. Know what you want to accomplish. Then do your research to determine the action you want to take. Set your objectives and time frames here. This is the planning part of the process.

Middle - Where you put your plan into action. You really do need a start date to get people, resources and thoughts into motion.

End – Evaluate and re-tweak if necessary. By checking on your milestones regularly, you will know if you are on target or not. Don’t be one of those folks who say, “this isn’t working” and just give up on the project. So many projects die an untimely death that could have been winners had they had not been given up on too soon. And if you haven’t re-tweaked at least twice before giving up a project, you probably gave up too soon.

Bottom line. Most marketing campaigns can be successful if given half a chance. Keep in mind that when you are running from one marketing campaign to another in search of the “silver bullet” you not only lose confidence from with your church, but also how others outside the church view you as well.

Want to learn more about church marketing? Or did you read something here that you want to discuss more? Perhaps you have a project that you need help on or at least want to bounce ideas off. We are there for you!

We welcome your feedback at Unity Church Marketing.   Or follow our tweets on Twitter at http://twitter.com/John_Panico

We think church can and should be more. We hope you do as well!