Promoting Your Community Event

It's very strategic to leverage Easter to reach out to your community. As you know, Easter is the highest attended Sunday of the year. We do our egg hunt on the Saturday of Easter weekend. I believe we have a higher attendance at our event, but a lower percentage actually attend on Sunday morning. So, there are benefits to connecting your community event to your worship service. A higher percentage will attend your service. Direct mail is effective. You could see a response rate of .5% - 2%. If you send 5000 mailers, that's between 25 to 100 people depending on the frequency your area has been hit by church direct mail in the past and the quality of your mailer.

But you shouldn't just rely on the mailer, multiple touches are even better. Door hangers have a higher response rate, maybe 3%. They're less expensive, but require more people power. That can also be an advantage because it involves people in the process. Door hangers also stand alone apart form a stack of mail.

If you live in a smaller town, you should advertise in the local paper. Check to see if they'll let you put a "blow-in" in the papers. You can print a flyer and have them placed in each paper for less than the cost of an ad. You can also print posters to place in local businesses. Electronic advertising is very inexpensive, but remember that you usually get what you pay for. It's very easy to delete an email. You can shoot an email announcement to your contact list (and ask them to forward it to their friends.) If you add something about Obama or some other urban legend, it could travel the planet in a few days! Check to see if you can post an announcement on community bulletin boards, online or otherwise. Also, we have advertised some of our events through schools, if they don't promote the church, but focus on the event itself. The best advertising is word of mouth. Resource your people to talk it up. Buzz marketing is cheap and it works.

You can have a great event, but if no one knows about it, they won't come. My suggestion: get out the word in every way you can.