Wednesday, December 03, 2008

Marketing Our Campus

After 20 weeks in I'm looking at marketing our campus in our area.

On our first try at it, we sent out a mailer during the week of our grand opening. One problem though...Hurricane Ike was coming right at us when that went out. So in our opinion many of our mailers got lost in the frantic rush to possibly evacuate or board up. (It still has been our highest attendance to date though)

So now I'm looking at doing a few things:
  1. A Billboard - this is to mainly get some campus recognition and position our name...we should have ours up by December 15th.
  2. Bus Stop Bench Advertising - This is a cheap way to get our campus info into several places. I'm looking at about 3 to 5....we'll see.
  3. Church Sign - One thing that has kept people from finding us is not having a sign. That is changing as we are fixing to have a 10 foot by 8 foot sign up front.
A couple of other ideas I'm thinking of are:
  • T-Shirts - to all those that attend and asking them to wear them on the weekends when they are out. This will probably be simple shirt with logo and website address....thought about some cool graphic map to the campus but that might be overkill
  • Door Hangers - Want to print up 10,000 and hit the beat with the campus.
  • Another Mailer - This time it will be positioned not when there is a Hurricane coming.
What ideas might you have of getting our name out to our community?

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

I don't know if this counts as "marketing," but something that my church frequently does is got out in the community--usually to local businesses--and gives something away along with a business card or something like that with the church name, website and contact info on it. We've had pretty good success in the community.

Anonymous said...

I remember when LifeChurch.tv first came out to the AZ. They ran an "infonercial" on late night TV. I say look into that. It's what got my wife and I (not to mention many of my peeps) to come see what it was all about.

brandonearly said...

I guess billboards are good to gain some recognition and if done well they help give some credibility to your congregation when asking their friends to church (hey want to come to my church...oh yeah , I saw that billboard...bla, bla, bla) If it is churchy though it might only be good for taking people from other churches...you don't want unsatisfiable "hoppers" anyway. Church people look for church...lost people look for what they think they need. This is not the link I am remembering and maybe too edgy but check this out...http://www.local6.com/news/15109415/detail.html...I gues you do not want to repel your current congregation either, they need to be on board. We have done billboards, table tents at the mall food court, screen time at the movie theater...nothing works like attenders building relationships, maybe the best thing is making church business cards (not tracts) and giving them to your peeps.

Jason Curlee said...

Deneen and Brandon...business cards was one of the ideas we used to grow our youth ministry a couple of years ago. Each month I would put the series graphic with ministry info and then a map on the back...It worked extremely well.

Jason Curlee said...

I've never thought of that...if done right that might be excellent when going into an area no one has ever heard of you.

Noel Heikkinen said...

Actually, the most successful advertising we've done by far has been radio advertising. Each time we've done a campaign, we've had a serious spike in attendance.

They key in any of your marketing is to really sell who you are, not who you want to be.

Jason Curlee said...

Good point Noel....sell who you are as when people come that is what they will see.

If you sell something else it will be noticeable.

Anonymous said...

As a a long time staff and first time planter...let me tell you everything you are talking about is awesome and will work if done right...

But nothing ever replaces the connection you have with people and the community. What I mean is people out in the community meeting and greeting new people...