Great suggestions! I work for New Spring Community Church, also in South Carolina. We have grown to over 3500 since starting in Jan. 2000. We spend money on billboards, newspaper advertising, mailers, etc.... and consistently the "personal invitation" is the one thing people raise their hands to in our membership class as the reason they started attending.

We arm our people with "invitation cards," business card sized invites that they can hand to every cashier, waiter / waitress, or whoever they strike up a conversation with. It is extremely effective, and costs us very little. An example can be seen here.

Kevin,

Thanks for the Post - I look forward to getting all kinds of ideas flowing.

We have started using some incentives as a means of getting our guest cards turned in. Our worship guides (bulletins) are %50 invitation to the current series that can be given to a friend, %50 guest card. example here

We give a complimentary CD of a weekend message, a $5 starbucks giftcard and a great information packet to any first time guest who turns in a card.

This has definetly worked in getting more first time guests to turn in cards.

Another question I have. Are mass mailings something that we see as a sacred cow and so we all do them out of fear that if we dont we will learn how much they work...or are they a useful practice in building credibility and brand recognition as a church even though someone may not come exclusively because of them?

Thats is something I am really wrestling with...

I think mass mailings are like any other form of marketing/advertising... they work in some communities, they don't work in others. It's all about the audience.

Try it... see if there's enough return to make it worthwhile. If not, move on to something else.

We've had much success with postcards, especially in promoting specific events to specific people. The 2 main ingredients are the design and the list.

The design has to be something that draws people in enough for them to flip the card over...I like calling it the refrigerator test.

More importantly you have to be sending to the right people. It doesn't do any good to send the most amazing postcard promoting raising kids to someone who doesn't have kids.

Even then expect 1% return, be thrilled with 3%.

Michael

Ok, that's great. You’re bringing in new faces.

What about all of the people who have stopped coming or only show occasionally. What can you do to reach out, grab their hand and bring them back?

M

Tony Morgan e-mailed us with an article he wrote on inviting friends, "Is Your Ministry Strategy Creating Buzz?" Check it out.

To Mathis - great post!

I believe that there is a huge "untapped" resource called the church data base that has people who have:

1. Have made a choice to come before.
2. Know who we are...
3. probably would come back if asked.

In marketing language these are hot prospects! In the most importnat spriritual terms they are people who were seeking at one time and I think we at least owe it to them to make sure they are attending somewhere...

Besides the obvious personal re-invite or "gosh we sure miss you, guilt guilt guilt" post card, are there ways we can let them know we stil care.

I work with middle school students at a fairly large Church. A lot of emphasis is put on how many new students were added to the database.

Unfortunately, they are way to quick to remove the ones they have not seen for x months.

Yes Shawn, there should be some sort of strong program, using the database, to find out who is at the outer edge of your attendance circle waiting for somebody to ask them to step in a little closer.

Mathias

I'm an outreach pastor in the Greater Vancouver area in Canada, and as such I constantly wrestle with these issues. We have experimented with mass mailings (not very common around here), with little 'return'. The sign in front of the church seems to generate a lot more interst. However, we have recently discovered that getting the word out about bridge events through our local free papers is grabbing people's attention (note: the paper is free- not the advertising!). People in our area read these papers that are delivered to their door three times/week. We're quite happy about this discovery as it is less expensive than mass mailing.

In the meantime we are continuing on with a both/and strategy. We are encouraging people to be inviters (which is a bit of a challenge with our demographics), but at the same time we are going after people with whom we have no personal contact via advertising.

Rob

Since 1963, I have been engaged in mass evangelism events on five continents. My experience confirms that people bring people under the preaching of the gospel. Advertising creates awareness, but the majority of the people who are reached are brought by sensitive, concerned Christians who capitalize on the awareness created by the advertising, invite and bring friends, neighbors, class mates, business associates or family members. One of our most successful evangelism events is a dinner where the crowd is built by two church members bringing four guests. Those attending the dinner are, ideally, seated at round tables for six, resulting in 66.6 percent of the crowd being from outside the church membership. It is not the size of the crowd that determines whether you can reach people; it is the makeup of the crowd. You have to reach people to reach people.

Here is a way to have low cost but highly effective follow up on every visitor that comes to your ministry.Simply get their email address and send them a free audio email from the leadership team from your church letting them know what, where, who, why, and how to get more involved in the church. You may want to not only get their email but more detailed information so when you send them an audio greeting it will be packed with specialized information from the ministry that fits their bio.Example: New comers teens Sally and Johnny visit an youth rally and fill out their email info card for visiting and entering into a drawing for some prize like a new cd player, and all the info is filled in are now forwarded to the Youth Pastor Steve .Pastor Steve sends a email with his personal audio message to all the new youth that visited and let them know the winner of the cd player and sharing with these precious visitors how much they blessed Him and the youth group by attending and further sharing by audio a short encouraging message as applies to singles,followed up with a closing prayer for the week that moves them into action and finally inviting them to return with a friend to recieve a free gift with contact info,dates and times for them to attend the next event coming up. Or how about Senior Pastors sending a weekly audio email to your congregation keeping the fire burning message till we meet again on sunday?.Or how about sounding the alarm to all the intercessors with an emergency call to arms in prayer for that sick member.There are also many other features like testimonial lines that you can use to inspire and ignite revival to everyone in your church. Why wait till next sunday to get a hold of them. We need daily inspiring messages and with this audio email oyu can do just that. Jesus moved amongst the market place and spent many hours ministering outside the four walls of the church to reveal the Father God's heart to them .Here is a tool where you can reach hearts that need to hear what you have to say from God in the privacy of their email.I hope this adds to you and your ministry for the Glory of God.

The usage of this form of media and user friendly steps to take are so easy that anyone can use this audio to advance,expand increase and multiply the good news message about Jesus you want to send; thereby getting souls for Jesus.
You can now reach around the world or locally with this media.

That is what it is all about Souls, Souls, and as many Souls you can reach with the gospel.Reach them today use what you can! plunder hell and populate heaven! just do it!

Prayers and Blessing,
Pastor Shane Brown
727-434-0305

Hi! I am also from South Carolina. Our church has just formed an evangelistic group to come up with fresh/new ideas for reaching the lost in our area. I believe God sent me here to this blog to see these great ideas...sooo...keep them coming. I will share mine later.
May God continue to deeply bless y'all!!
-Roger

These are very insightful ideas. Anyone have suggestions for creative evangelism in the inner city? It seems that the majority of information I read pertains to surburban or rural settings. Continue the good work and God bless.

Hi I have just moved to Chattanooga TN. My mother & father in law started a new work here about 4 years ago. My wife is the only child and we left our home and security blanket many miles away to help with this small church. Please give me some directions to go. We have about 19 people , 4 older couples and 1 middle age couple and 2 young couples. 3 children.....and a beautiful church building and land..... Thank God.....

I would like to know how can I increase the population in the church if the people don't want to come?

As has been said many times before, the most effective form of publicity is word of mouth/personal invitation. Personally, I feel anything beyond that is just about a gimmick. Granted, sometimes they work, but the percentages of success lean WAY toward personal invitation. Our church has tried mass mailings, commercials, ads, you name it. Two things we found to be successful in inciting personal invitation...t-shirts with some clever design, and invitation cards, which we called TipSlips. Much like what New Spring mentioned in an earlier post. Inexpensive and effective. What's not to like about that? By the way, although I did the design, I don't consider these proprietary in anyway. See something ya like and want to use, I'll be glad to send a hi-res file. Examples can be seen here.

Great blog site. The congergations where I severe is 90% older generation, that is 55+. What can we do about church growth.

Hi thank you very much for this great blog! Come on guys keep it flowing we need good advertising for the greatest message on earth! I made this very simple website which took a couple of days with a mate we've seen a lady give her life to Christ and connected with a local church already we made simple contact cards based on the London tube tickets check out www.discover-jesus.co.uk "The church has nothing to do but save souls so save as many as you can!" - John Wesley

I am really glad i have found this blog. I am currenlty in the process of sending out personal invitations and was searching the internet for some advice. I like the samples that Tod Jones has at his Url address. I would love to use one that i see on it. Can you forward the hi-res file?