Category: Marketing

  • Easter Egg Hunt | Slam Dunk

    Gosh, I just got home and I’m having a hard time controlling my excitement. Today was a blast!

    The teams were all awesome. Set-up/Tear-down team… excellent. Band team… excellent. Hospitality team… excellent. We had never been a part of an event quite like this one.  Joyce from Park & Rec and her team seemed very pleased with how we complimented the event. She told one of our team, “I wasn’t sure what to expect with the band… they were great.”

    As parents and kids filtered in, the weather was perfect for what we had planned. (Sunny and mid-30s) Our hospitality tent was ready [big thanks to the folks at Caribou for all their help!] and people were thirsty for great coffee, hot cider, and hot chocolate. Oh my… we went through a lot of hot chocolate. (150 cups!) We had just enough as the last cups were poured with only 2 packets left in the box.  Autumn and Bob (our senior pastor) had a hard time keeping up with demand. Bravo to them for keeping their cool! They had a constant line the entire time… amazing job.

    What was today all about? It was all about changing minds. Forever we’ve been the “old baptist church” in town. Those who have lived in Romeo a long time think they know who we are, what we’re about… in marketing language the typical person in our community thinks they know our story and they’ve made up their mind. This was about us partnering with the community and showing them that we aren’t who people think we are. We aren’t fuddy-duddy. We aren’t old-fashioned. We don’t wear skirts and ties or are stuffy. We aren’t “against the world” and judgmental. Basically… we want to tell people the truth… we’re just like you. We’re parents, grandparents, neighbors, and friends you know from school. We like the music you like, we have the same dreams you have, and we like to give back to the community as much as everyone else.

    I loved the way we came alongside of the Parks & Rec department and worked with them. I hope we made them look good!

    I loved the songs that the band selected. They did music right off the radio. Switchfoot, Rascal Flatts, John Mellencamp, Daughtry, etc. I kept hearing people ask, “Is that the band from the church?” Yup. Jimmy and his gang are really, really good. I loved seeing people smile as they sang along to the music.
    Over at Romeo, we’re entering into this new phase we’re calling “God of this City.” It’s not about us and serving ourselves. It’s about bringing God to the city.  And we’re doing that in fun, unexpected ways. Today was one of them. Awesome job to all who helped. Thanks!

    I’m working on a video. It should be up later today.

    For now… rest.

  • Christian Alternatives

    Christianfamilytube logoLast night I got an invitation to put all of our church videos on a new Christian-only version of YouTube. First there was GodTube and now this.

    I laughed at GodTube’s claims that they were the fastest growing site on the internet… totally a joke of a statistic if you ask me… not like GodTube got bigger than Facebook did in 2007.

    As far as interface and design go… could this new site be any more cheesy? Technically speaking… a lot of the videos don’t even work!

    Let me share my opinion about “Christian only” content sites. I don’t mind sites that are geared towards Christians networking… heck, I own one. But I am against the idea that there should be a differentiation between the “Christian internet” and “secular internet.”  Both GodTube and this new video site claim to be “family safe.” While that isn’t a bad thing in and of itself I always wonder why people like this don’t just create channels of “family safe” stuff within the existing structure of MySpace, Facebook, or YouTube. Christians were never commanded to separate from the world or form our own sub-culture… we were commanded to penetrate the culture for God. Ephesians 5 teaches us to bring “light” to “dark” places. These sites are trying to do the opposite.

    I don’t plan on moving content to these new sites. If they offered services that were better than YouTube’s than I might consider it. But I’m not going to pull content off of a great delivery channel only to put it on a weaker and sorry to say cheesier delivery channel. That completely misses the point of using the internet for ministry.

    Plus, I don’t know how YouTube doesn’t sue these companies for trademark violations. That’s for another day.

  • Our Vision for Our Community

    I’ve had this video ready for a couple of weeks. Below is a description video for our churches vision.

    Since I already had a couple of people ask me how I made the video, here are the details.
    – Obviously, the animation is from Google Earth. I set up the points as a tour and clicked through when it came time to record. (Just timed it out in my head)
    – I recorded the Google Earth presentation using IShowU. This is a simple video screen capture tool available for OSX.
    – I used the Google Earth video as the background in Adobe Premier.
    – I did the voice over at the sound board at church. I recorded it using Garage Band, using some effects to make my voice more “voice over” quality.
    – The rest is just done in Premier. Titles, video layers, etc.

    It was a lot of steps. But I was pleased with the results. The fun part was doing some parts of the project in Premier (PC) and some with Garage Band and IShowU. (Mac) Before I started I actually took the time to make a project list… which helped me keep all of the parts in the right place.

    Where did the idea come from? I saw a video similar to this on Granger Community Church’s website. I based the outline of the script on that video as well as the idea of using Google Earth as the animation tool. Anything beyond the concept I came up with. It was a fun project!

    Since I’m sharing videos, here is the bumper video we made for the service too.

    Someone asked me today how long these videos take. Here’s a ballpark.
    Our Vision for Our Community: 20ish hours. (Conception through completion)
    Lean In Bumper Video: about 1 hour (Conception through completion)

  • God of This City

    Here’s the video I sent out with our weekly email update. Seriously, if you aren’t a part of a local church and you are looking to connect somewhere… this Sunday is a great place to jump on board.

  • The new signs are here!

    church signI can’t even say how long we’ve worked on this. We started talking about new signs for the church about a year ago. And I think we went through 40-50 revisions. So, here is what one side looks like.

    Best part, within 2 hours of them being installed I already received a phone call asking about our kids ministry. The signs work!

  • Airborne Doesn’t Prevent the Common Cold

    Airborne SettlementTeachers swear by this product. It’s their secret weapon. Parents who found out about this secret weapon made it popular. What is it? It is Airborne. It prevents the common cold… or so people who took it swore.

    The claim has always been that Airborne kept you from getting sick. I’ve heard friends say, “I feel a cold coming on, I need to take an Airborne before bed.” It turns out Airborne is nothing more than well-packaged and expensive Vitamin C.

    On the one hand, this was brilliant marketing. Here’s a marketing tip: People will always pay a premium for a secret weapon. Because it seems exclusive to a population, in this case teachers, people don’t mind paying more. On the other, it was false advertising. It turned out Airborne didn’t prevent the common cold. While it’s perfectly acceptable to trick people into believing that more expensive paper gets your resume` to the top of the pile or that buying premium bottled water is somehow more refreshing than normal bottled water, the FDA has rules for labeling health products. Oops!

    If you got suckered by Airborne you can go to this site to learn about the settlement. Essentially, you can get your money back.

  • Interior Signs are Here

    This is something someone like me gets excited about. We ordered new interior signs for the church building… and they are here! The pictures here are from my phone so the quality doesn’t do them any justice. But when we get them mounted it’s going to look smoking cool.

    kidstown welcome signinterior signs 3

    The big one of the left will go behind the welcome counter to our kids ministry. It’s HUGE and the quality of it doesn’t come through in the picture. It’s so much cooler than we thought it would be. When Jimmy and I picked it up we sounded like broken records… “That is so cool.” “Wow, we love it.”

    The picture on the right are the signs for the elevator. Obviously the one on top goes in the “adult area” and the one below is for down in KidsTown.

    And for those who live locally, you’ll be seeing stuff that looks like this around town soon.  If you haven’t been to Romeo in the last two years or so, the interior is not like you’ve seen before. Most of the public areas have been completely remodeled. Shoot me an email and I’ll show you around.

  • Simply Youth Ministry is Getting It

    I consider the folks over at Simply to be my friends. I will admit that when I first started to get to know them they were a bit intimidating. But they are great folks that any youth worker should get to know.

    They are a couple of year’s into a competition with Youth Specialties for convention dollars. YS has run the very popular National Youth Workers Convention for years and then Simply partnered with another publisher to create the National Youth Ministry Conference. Let me make a quick observation about Simply’s marketing efforts.

    YS has found an edge (in the Seth Godin kind of way), their conference goes after the arts and goes after social justice and those types of things. From a marketing standpoint that’s their angle and they are doing quite well with it. The Simply/Group folks have found a different edge as they try to catch up to YS. They are going to appeal to their audience with silly stuff and videos like the one below. They must have discovered that this is what their audience likes.

    When it comes to marketing, there are two initial things that have to be done before you can succeed.
    1. Define your audience, including what they like.
    2. Define your competition

    HT to Andy

    This post was edited on 2/27 to clarify what I was saying a little better. It could have been misinterpreted, and for that I’m sorry.

  • 30 Day Sex Challenge

    Relevant Church in Tampa, Florida has certainly attracted some media attention. Check out this challenge.

    • “An openly edgy Christian church is launching what they’re calling a 30-Day Sex Challenge to help members improve their relationships and rediscover themselves.”
    • “Single folks are to abstain from sex for 30 days…Married folks, on the other hand, are supposed to have sex every day for 30 days.”
    • “Relevant Church leaders know the campaign may shock, even disgust, some people in and outside the church. But that was the idea. Create a buzz about a topic a lot of people don’t like to talk about.”

    What do you think? (No debate here this is pretty close to what the Bible teaches about sex.) Is this too far ? Not far enough? Are right on with the culture?

    HT to Tim Stevens

  • Hope for Me Yet from Married Life

    I just featured this in the brand new weekly newsletter we’re sending out here at the church, and I want to share it with my readers since I know many of you are not yet on our e-mail list. This is our worship leader, Jimmy Savage, performing at our Married Life event last weekend.

    Feel free to join our free e-mail newsletter for a fresh video each week from romeochurch.com, a preview of this week’s services, and notes from last week’s message. Even if you don’t go to our church or live in our state… I think there will be something there each week worth checking out.