Category: Marketing

  • Some fair observations

    I’ve now spent two full days on my feet telling people about KidsTown and RomeoKids.com. I’ve come up with a few interesting observations about "booth stuff."

    • Even though KidsTown is about kids, having kids in the booth doesn’t always help.
    • You have to have a reason for people to engage you in conversation. It can be as simple as a balloon or finger puppet, but they won’t give you more than a "hello" if you aren’t handing them something.
    • It’s obvious, but making a kid smile is the key to a parents heart.
    • Universally, parents are interested in teaching their kids about God… but they aren’t too sure about asking a church for help. (We’ve only had one flat refusal out of the 1000 or so people we’ve talked to.) Giving them a website where they can do it on their own… they can do that.
    • Having a steady flow of fresh helpers helps a lot. Since I’ve been there all day I really am feeding off their energy.
    • If you can get all the booths around you "awake" and just as excited as you are… everyone will do better.
    • Not every vendor is there for the same purpose. Some people are there to turn a quick profit and others are there for leads to follow-up on. For some, 1 lead a day is exciting. Others, 7 makes for a great day. Still others purely want to get their name in the community. For us… this is "a touch" in the process of getting people to the foyer. All we’re asking people to do is check us out. It’s a lead and a "get out" thing combined.
    • For every dad I talk to I talk to 5 moms. It’s an old story but dads aren’t leading their families in many ways. But grandma is! Grandma is very interested in the spiritual formation of her grandkids.
    • We’ve gotten into the most conversations with two types of people. First, the "mom/female" who is very friendly and engages. Second, the people who are really connected to the community. A fresh familiar face goes a long, long way.
    • People from other churches have been very engaging and polite. (At least 5 people yesterday told me they were children’s directors at churches.) I can pick out a Christian family in about .5 seconds. Interestingly, almost everyone who is involved in a church (even staffers) is also willing to be looking at a new church.
    • "It’s free" is the most awesomest words a parent will hear at the fair.
    • Stand up and smile. Sitting down is death to a booth. (Which is why volunteers help because everyone needs a break!)
    • 3Story. 3Story. 3Story. Everyone has a story and it’s just one open ended question away. Being creative, listening empathetically, and not having a script is still the best.
    • You can only communicate a single message. Everything else must be built on that. This is what Seth Godin calls "your lie." "What is it that you are trying to tell people about your business?" We’re telling the best kind of "lie." One that is simple and authentic. The best marketing "lie" is a true one.

    All-in-all, the booth at the fair is an amazing step for our church. I am learning tons about our community in the conversations we’re having and not having. The bottom line will be "does it work?" And the thing about marketing a church is that it’s not always immediately visible that it worked.

    A former student of mine recently blogged about a metaphor I use for evangelism. And I think it applies here. Everyone non-believer has a wall between them and God. In each interaction with a Christian we either have the chance to put another brick in that wall by being something they expect us  to be… judgmental, mean, secluded… or we can take a brick off that wall and be something they don’t expect us to be. [Insert your own] Each time we take a brick off that wall that brings a person one step closer to experiencing God. We don’t know what our role is… we may be the first person to ever take a brick off that wall or we may be the person who God has chosen to remove the last brick and introduce them to a life-changing relationship with a risen Christ.

    Romans 1:20 My mind has been focused on this passage lately. It’s not our job to convince people there is a God since God has revealed Himself to all people. It’s our job to show them how they can cannot with a holy God.

  • The Cost of Going

    Kidstown_generic
    I am so excited about all that has happened in the 24 hours leading up to the Armada Fair. Even at the cost of some people getting little to no sleep last night, this is going to be worth it all. There are dozens of volunteers lined up, stuff to hand out, a great looking booth, etc. It’s going to be worth all the hard work.

    Let me rephrase to be more accurate.     The last 24 hours have been insane. Hectic. Tense. Head scratching. Dynamic. Loud. Not mean or bad, just in a "Om my goodness, lets finish everything right away" mode as a very quick plan had to finish 24 hours early when we were told Friday that we had to be ready Tuesday morning and not Wednesday.

    "Going" to reach our community. It has been about 4 years since I felt this church feel comfortable going out to reach the community. Kristen and I move 2000+ miles to a little town north of Detroit because God wanted us to join forces with people equally insane about doing the impossible… in a lot of ways "it’s time" to start fulfilling that mission. A reason most churches don’t do anything about the 90%+ people who walk daily away from God is because they don’t care enough to "go." The major reason I am so excited about the next 6 days is that we, the church, are going. We’re not hiring "go-ers" and we’re not expecting others to magically "go" for us. We are going.

    And it will be fun!

  • KidsTown on Church Marketing Sucks

    Banner_mock_up_4This week we finalized a lot of stuff for next week’s Armada Fair appearance. One important detail was getting a banner made that will be a part of our display.

    For some help, I submitted my idea to the Center for Church Communications labs. I knew the concept I wanted but didn’t know how else to make it work.

    Long story short, I got loads of help and I ended up with a design that I like very much. I think it will represent us quite well at the Armada Fair and other future events.

    Then this morning I was reading through my blog reader and found out that our process got mentioned on CFCC’s flagship site, Church Marketing Sucks.

    I have to be honest. I was just happy to get some help from professionals. One of the coolest things on the planet is that through the internet you can get access to people that it generally costs money to get access to. I’m no designer, but I get asked to design stuff for the church. (That’s just part of working for a small church… you get asked to "Jack of all trade" stuff.) Being able to go out and get peer review for something is amazing and a gift.

    For anyone finding this site because of the mention there. Welcome! The little orange button to the right will help you subscribe and keep up with me.

  • Fairs!

    Fairs!

    One of the things we’ve decided to do as a church this summer/fall is get involved in some public events to help tell people about what we’re doing.

    Why are you doing that?
    One of the problems of being a 168 year old church is that people who have lived here for a long time have a pretty established viewpoint on each organization in town. Someone might drive by your place 500 times a year for 5 years and have no clue what you are really all about. So we feel like we need to go where the people are and tell them about what’s happening at Romeo.

    What events are you doing?
    The idea is to have at least one per month for a while. We may do more and we may do less, but for the next 5-6 months we want to be out at a big public event. The first two “big events” are both fairs. In fact, where we live the fairs are really about as stuff gets. Tens of thousands of families will make their way to both the Armada Fair and the Romeo Peach Festival and we’re hoping to get a chance to talk to them.

    Isn’t Romeo a pretty churched area?
    No. As I pointed to in my message last Sunday… Romeo is actually more of a mission field than anything else. With about 5-6% of people in our area attending a local church, there is plenty of work to be done. It’s our prayer that more churches in town will also jump on the bandwagon and do some innovative things to reach the lost here. While we want to grow our church, we don’t think we have the corner on the market for “good church” in our community. To make a significant impact for Christ all of the churches are going to have to work together.

    What are you going to be doing at fairs?
    I’m not much of a fair guy myself. Essentially, at both fairs we’ll have a booth and we’ll be talking to people who drop by. We won’t be canvasing the fairgrounds with tracts or putting stuff on people’s windshields. I don’t feel like that’s an honoring way to present our church or Jesus. Instead, we are doing more of a permission based thing as people who are willing to talk to us will talk to us and those who aren’t, we’ll just be friendly.

    Aren’t you going to do _________?
    Well, if you go to fairs and you have ideas… let us know! Likewise, if you know of a big event in the Romeo area that we should have a booth at or participate in, let us know.

    But we’ve never done this before!
    I know, isn’t it cool to do new stuff? I agree with my friend Jonathan, change and growth are signs of a healthy organization. We should expect that a healthy organization would morph and grow and otherwise change.

  • Pfttlwbwbwbwbwb… and things that change the game

    It’s been one of those weeks. And I still have mountains of stuff to do for this weekend.

    Yesterday I talked about goals and benchmarks. It was funny because I worked hard on a benchmark thing that will make the new RomeoChurch.com mucho better than the existing church website. Unfortunately, that benchmark took more than 8 hours when I had hoped it would take less than 1 hour.

    Web 2.0
    As I’ve mentioned before here… Web 2.0 is changing the way the internet works. From an end user perspective you see what you want to see which often leads to that weird feeling of seeing a Coke in a Pepsi machine at the mall. Those two things don’t go together do they? Web 2.0 has really started to change "who owns what" and "what does it mean to ‘own’ something that exists digitally?" Getting to see the the internet the way that you want to see it simply changes the game. And any time the game changes… users tend to benefit. For example… DSL and Cable internet changed the ISP game. While there are still loads of people on dial-up, many more now pay very little for unlimited, wireless, high speed internet. That changed the game and created a whole new market. Web 2.0 is doing the same thing. Now that content doesn’t "live" on a site forever because it can go anywhere… this has changed the game.

    What that means for web developers (Which I don’t really claim to be but get a bird’s eye view of a lot) is that people collaborate now when they wouldn’t have before. Just yesterday I was working on this "benchmark" for RomeoChurch.com and I ran into a wall. I couldn’t get the thing to work! I scratched my head. I tried it a bunch of different ways. I even had to talk a walk around the building to clear my head and pray for an idea. Just then, literally in that moment, a person from YMX contacted me about a website problem he had with his youth group site. I said, "Sure send me a link." When my AIM screen flashed my jaw dropped as I could see he was working with the same exact code he was working on! And he was having the same problem and had been banging his head against the wall for 2 days.

    So, we did what anyone living in a Web 2.0 world would do. We contacted the guy who published the code to ask for help. Within an hour both of us were smiling as our websites were now doing something we had long hoped for.

    In a Web 1.0 world, that collaboration wouldn’t have happened. Certainly not for free. But Web 2.0 changed the game. Now you see loads of novice developers having access to experts as we all share ideas.

    Which leads to the question the church has to deal with… "How will the church adapt to a Web 2.0 environment?" How will the church be the authority when we can’t even control content anymore? Is there biblical justification for collaboration? And what about churches who refuse to collaborate?

    Anyone have answers? Let’s here ’em.

  • When Goals Wake You Up

    SuccessA lot of people make goals and set benchmarks. I am the same way. No matter what area of my life, I hear a little birdie telling me "You need to get ____ done by _____ to know that you are accomplishing ____ goal." I’m not sure where it originated but I that little birdie doesn’t come naturally… I’ve learned to listen to the little birdie. I am where I am at today because I listened to the birdie and got stuff done.

    A good goal will wake you up in the morning. It’ll make you stay up late at night. And it’ll be within your reach.

    A bad goal leads to fatalism as you realize that not only can you achieve your goal, but you were stupid to even try. It won’t keep you up late are wake you up in the morning because deep inside you feel like your goal is unattainable.

    I’ve made both kinds of goals in my life… I’ve given up on good goals to strive for bad ones and I’d like to think that as I become a better, smarter leader… I am refining my ability to distinguish. But I think choosing a good goal over a bad one will be something that I struggle with for the rest of my life!

    Ambition
    I have goals for all the major parts of my life.     My marriage, my job, my business, my home, my own development. Along the same lines, I have benchmarks… little celebration moments… that go along the way as well.

    My observation is that most people say the have goals… and they probably do. But they either have goals that are actually dreams or they have goals set with no benchmarks for achieving their goals so they give up. And this lack of benchmarking leads to failure.

    My focus in accomplishing goals is never to work to finish the goal. I think in focusing on the big goal too much, you act like a dreamer, instead I just focus on reaching the next benchmark.

    When you are focusing on getting from benchmark to benchmark instead of focusing on the big goal… you accomplish that goal faster plus you are still looking to work hard on future goals when you cross the finish line.

    Gettowork
    Too vague? Think of it like this, a goal can be a dream…     "I want to be more effective in reaching students in my community." A benchmark is a measurable success… "I will start 4-5 house small groups in September 2007." The goal isn’t to start house small groups but I’m going to celebrate that as a benchmark towards accomplishing my goal. Celebrate the benchmarks and you’ll accomplish your goals.

    And I mean celebrate… there is nothing worse than seeing someone not celebrate a benchmark in their life. They brush it off as no big deal… why? Because they are too focused on their goal to enjoy the benchmarks! You see it in sports and you see it in high school students when a success just isn’t good enough. Take a few moments to enjoy the benchmarks and it’ll energize you to keep going. Skipping that step will just contribute to another year sliding by stuck in the same place you were a year ago. Don’t do that.

    Got goals for 2007-2008? If so, what are some of your benchmarks?

    p.s. The photos come from Despair.com.

  • Marketing the church

    My friend Patti started a discussion over at the YMX forums about church marketing. (Not getting marketed to at the church by companies, but churches marketing to their communities.)

    Here are some questions that have come up that are worth wrestling with:

    • What are the boundaries for a good marketing campaign? Is this too far?
    • Is your church marketing aimed at believers looking for a new church or non-believers uninteresting church?
    • Should every marketing piece feature the churches name?
    • Is marketing the church biblical? If so, how do you justify it? If not, how do you justify it?
    • How do you justify spending money on marketing at the expense of other ministries of the church? From what account?
    • Should you depend solely on word of mouth from your people?
    • How do you measure the effectiveness of any church marketing campaign? (Obviously if you spend $50,0000… you aren’t likely to get $50,000 return.)

  • Managing a virtual community

    Designing_online_community
    Or congregation for that matter.

    I’m trying to sort out the meaning of three things I’ve read this week. All three have to do with the big question, "What is community?" and "How do you help people form balance in an online community?" From a 10,000 foot perspective the question doesn’t really become "What is it?" or "How do people find balance?" It becomes "How do I manage to maintain an community in a healthy, productive way to become something enduring and profitable?"

    Here are the three articles/posts I’ve read that have me trying to connect the dots.
    Virtual Reality = Virtual Community = Virtual Relationships by David Garrison
    Jobs of the future, #1: Online Community Organizer by Seth Godin
    Second Life and Multiverse by Bobby Grunewald

    On one side of the discussion Garrison, a youth pastor, is questioning the value of virtual relationships in comparison to online relationships.     He says that online communities are morally neutral, yet are often being used in unhealthy ways. That’s a good point but I wouldn’t go so far as to say that all online relationships are somehow more or less dysfunctional that real world ones. My experience in more than 13 years of using online community is that it’s just as possible to form real relationships online as offline. You can be just as fake in real life, you can block people out of your life just as effectively, and dysfunctions in your personality will always evidence themselves in all areas of our lives.

    Lifechurch
    From the perspective of Lifechurch.tv, Grunewald lives out an attitude that online relationships are not only "real," but they can also be redemptive to reaching people for Christ.      That’s why Lifechurch.tv, one of the most innovative churches on the planet, operates a campus on Second Life. As the article mentions, a lot of "virtual people" who experience church at their internet campus, eventually reach out and make one-on-one connections with a local church or even one of their locations. In my experience with online communities this is a natural outgrowth. A sign of a healthy online communities is the "meet-up." Converting online friends into offline friendship has been an amazing experience for me. Online communication has some limitations as it fails to capture many of the nuances of language. After all, how much of our communication is non-verbal? How much depends on you knowing me personally so that when you read my words your brain says, "I can see Adam saying that, I know what he means despite his ability to articulate it clearly in writing." And in my role with Youth Ministry Exchange I can verify that nearly 100% of disagreements that occur in that online community have to do with misunderstood context and things that wouldn’t have caused conflict when combined with non-verbal communication.

    Sethgodin
    I had all of this swirling around the grey matter (Is it good? Is it moral? Can it last? Is it enduring and helping the trade?) between my ears when I read Seth’s Godin’s post.     In Seth’s opinion, forming, managing, and growing trade-based online communities is one of the big jobs of the future. See, it’s one thing when you feel like the only guy on the block who thinks your idea is worthwhile. It’s another thing when one of the premier business minds out there says the same thing. (Hey, when is this guy going to appear at the Leadership Summit?) See, I think places like YMX are valuable to people in Youth Ministry… but I am just one person and a nobody. When other people start saying that trade-based online communities are important now and will be super important in the future, I start to believe it!

    Ymx_nofullname
    I know online communities are important.     (Why else would I operate one?) And I know they can be redemptive. (Why else would we have joined the Gospelcom Alliance?) The hard part of managing an online community is this: Creating an online place where everyone feels valued, feels like they can contribute, and is still narrowly focused enough to effect growth and change in a specific sub-culture or trade. Put that in a bottle and you will make millions.

    Questions: When it comes to online communities from YMX, to Facebook, to the now dead and dying MySpace, what is the community value? How does an online community keep out of the grave? How does it keep going and become something enduring for an entire tribe of people?And how do I manage a community for long-term and not short term profit in the way MySpace did?

  • Wonder why we want a new sign?

    Here’s why.
    Romeosign
    At first I thought… "Should I post this?" Then I realized… somewhere between 9 PM and 9 AM a few thousand cars already saw it. I’m posting it to make a couple of points.

    Interestingly, both Jason and I noticed it immediately. It’s funny because you don’t often notice the text of a sign as you drive. That is, until the text is different.

    You see, our eyes take in billions of pixels of information an hour. Our brains automatically ignore most of the images we see because we’ve already seen and processed that. We can ignore what we already know. But our mind draws our attention to things that are different.

    This is why marketing is such a fascinating science. How do we develop a message that both lasts and is different all the time?

    And the new sign we want. It won’t have moveable letters for this reason. Only problem with that is that it won’t have moveable letters to draw your attention to it. Which mean, we need to design the new sign in a way that is memorable for other reasons.

  • My only iPhone post this month

    Iphone_and_jobs
    I promise to not talk too much about the iPhone. It’s got some pluses and minuses. And the simple fact is that while I would love one if it were free, I will never make enough money to justify getting one. (Unless it were for resale alone.) That said, I do know one person in my life who is desperate to get one. He will remain nameless. Wink wink.

    Here’s a funny iPhone diary that came from the New York Times. Yes, the New York Times did something funny. Write that down.

    Seth Godin has an excellent post on how Verizon screwed up the marketing of the iPhone release as well as what they should have done. I like the fact that Seth isn’t just smart enough to articulate why a marketing campaign sucks, he also takes the time to let Verizon know how they should have turned this into a positive.

    Here’s the best argument I can make against lining up to buy a $600 cell phone:
    – I already have a smartphone that I like. It’s too big, but so is the iPhone
    – I already have an iPod nano that I like. It’s not like I want my big old phone strapped around my neck when I’m moving the lawn!
    – I already have a laptop. It’s not like I could use the iPhone to do web administration or open up PhotoShop or upload via an FTP client to my web server.

    With those 3 factors, there is no sensible reason to get a phone like that.     I do predict that it will be good for Apple and it will be good for the cell phone industry. But in 12 months, AT&T will still suck because they always have.
    I also predict that the first generation iPhone will look like a massive brick in 12 months compared to the new, smaller, colored iPhone to come up Christmas 2008.

    That said, when people do buy the iPhone and it breaks. I suggest sending it to PodDrop and not Apple. You’ll get faster service and it’ll be reasonable… and it’ll get done faster.

    HT to Billy for the video