It’s a busy month for all of us in church communications. Our Easter services are coming quickly. Some denominations are also promoting Lent too. One common issue is how churches can promote their services more effectively both to their congregations and to the broader community.
Here are five ideas that will help you (Well eight if you count out the extra three in the social media section 🙂 ):
1. Photo Booth
How could a photo booth possibly help spread the news? In our last Twitter chat for church communicators (find out more about #cmschat here) one of the community mentioned how they used photo booths to help their church community invite their friends to church. (Here is a great Easter photo booth idea I wrote about recently).
2. Invite postcards
Invite cards or postcards have been around ever since I’ve been in church communications. Leveraging the power of the personal invite is probably the smartest thing a church can do. In fact I would say that it is actually a sign of a healthy church that people are inviting people to church. Download here an example of an Easter postcard invite we did.
3. Social media
If you have a creative promo video that you are using for your Sunday services ensure you upload it into your social channels. Good video posts will reach a lot of people. Check out how we leveraged video on Facebook here and the brilliant results. (We also used email to boost our social media posts. You can do the same to help people share the invites for Easter. Check out this example of how we did it.)
In the lead up to the services you can go behind the scenes a bit and tell the story from the inside out as a way of getting your church community excited about the services. Read more here: 3 social media tips to promote your Easter services.
Check out this awesome Social Media List from NewSpring Church by Chris Dunagan and his team. Perfect for resourcing their congregation to post their own content.
4. Be newsworthy
Are your Easter services newsworthy? Local papers love covering events that many of their community are participating in and attending. If you are organised earlier enough you can get better story by providing a photo opportunity of the local cast. Read 7 Practical Public Relations Tips For Churches first and then contact your local journalist.
5. Email invitations
Last year we switched to a free reserved seating policy because of significant overflows that we couldn’t accommodate (A nice problem to have). Email is a great way to drive bookings as you can create scarcity by emailing in advance to let your congregation know when tickets are available. I was surprised how quickly we became fully booked. It worked so well and didn’t cost us a cent with the booking system. This also meant people were booking seats for their friends which was an incentive for them to fill the seats.
I’ve also used another tactic which was to have my Senior leader personally invite our congregation via email to share a social media video post of our Easter promotion to invite their friends. It worked really well.
Church Marketing Sucks has a whole list of different ideas you can find here.
Your turn
What tips or ideas do you have that could help others promote their Easter church services? Or are you stuck for ideas? Or have questions about the different ideas I’ve written about. Comment below!
