Professionalism

Anybody can make things look professional now. Computer programs can make anything you print or media you edit look really fancy and expensive with minimal investment of time and money. That's why sometimes it's nice to see something that's not quite perfect. Love this post by Seth Godin on getting noticed by not being so polished and profesisonal. JM

Acts 8:5-6

People don't care about my message. At all. No matter how well I present it or how I package it, it doesn't really matter to them. That is, until I back it up with actions.
We were talking about how to publicize an upcoming event at our church today and several different ideas came out: newspaper, radio, direct mail, door-to-door flyers, etc. All of these will see very little return. They're all just spam because the information is outside of the context of relationship.
I suggested just creating really nice invite cards and giving them to our people to invite their friends and neighbors. Blank stares.
The point is that any message we try to communicate will have very little retention if it is outside of the context of relationship. I guess the old cliche is right: you have to earn the right to be heard. JM

Location

I've been meaning to post this, but kept forgetting. This is a screenshot from when I was updating my fantasy football team last week. Take a good look at it:

Notice anything odd? The ad is for "Chic Nursing Covers". My guess is that the average fantasy football player is not breastfeeding in public. Maybe I'm wrong. I'm sure it's a great product, but why not advertise it in a better spot where mothers of newborns might be online? If you're going to go through the trouble to build a website and promote it, you might as well do a little bit of research to find out where to promote it.
Taking that further, I bet this ad didn't get a lot of click-throughs because it wasn't relevant to the audience. Sure it might be a nice product, but why should I care about that, I'm not breastfeeding? This is so how the church acts. Let's do our presentation and get it out there. It's such an amazing message that people will accept it. Well, not really. You have to tie it back to their life. Show them how it's relevant. Make it meaningful to them. Make them want to hear it. If the church is going to be survive, it must be relevant to its audience. JM

Radiohead Debut

Radiohead will make their debut at my church on Sunday. I used one of their songs as a background on a promo video I made for an upcoming MS event. They're putting TV's all over our church - big ones in the hang out rooms and smaller ones in all of the classrooms. So here's the video I made. Radiohead create such a cool vibe. JM

Church Web Sites

Right now we're working on updating our church website. Before we spend the money, though, we are trying to determine what we want our site to accomplish. My thoughts are that it should simply give basic information about our church, show ways to find out more, and the home page should communicate no more than 3 opportunities for visitors to our site. The overall site should be focused on non-members, especially on the home page, with click-throughs to more member-specific content.
Not everyone shares that same idea, though. I know some people want it to always have 4 main items on the home page, even if they are not current opportunities. I know other people want it to talk about current events, whether or not they are available opportunities. Case in point - I was told to put something up on the student ministry camp trip coming up this week. Registration has been closed for several months, so it is listed as a way to pray for our students. I think that's great, but don't want to see it on the home page.
I just think the home page should be reserved for basic information for visitors, and should be laid out as simply as is feasible. Hopefully, I'll win. JM

Support Groups

Our church has a ministry called Grace Life that is basically support/recovery groups for various addictions and troubling life experiences. It's a great ministry, but few people use it. Today, the minister in charge was talking about his frustration in getting our church aware and accepting of it. He mentioned that he had advertised in the paper and various other outlets, and received little to no response.
His desire was to see "Grace Life" mentioned from the pulpit. He mentioned that after informally mentioning Grace Life to several people, they had no idea what it was. I wanted to interject that it was probably because the name of the ministry was changed within the last 6 months from Celebrate Recovery. When CR was first introduced to our church, it received tons of publicity and was the focus of a 6-week sermon series. But there was not much publicity over the name change or focus change.
So with this desire to see Grace Life mentioned more, they hoped to create more word-of-mouth advertising. This can be extremely effective, but only if people can put a face to what the ministry does. If you just give people words, then they can't visualize anything. But if you show them a changed life and attach that to the words Grace Life, then people will remember it, be able to talk about it, and recommend it to people who might be struggling with the same issues. JM

Take What They Give You

So many churches and organizations are looking for publicity and marketing ideas, but they don't know where to find it. I just ran across one for my community (south metro Atlanta). The local paper now lets you upload user submitted videos to their site. I'm going to video our Easter egg hunt coming up this week and see if I can upload it. It should be fairly easy to edit.
Cool idea by the local paper to use youtube to host the videos. JM

Know Your Market

Our worship gathering this week was different than most of the ones that we've been planning. It started with a choir singing an anthem that had a gospel feel to it. Then the worship host talked for like 4 minutes and started singing the anthem again. The music was fairly normal otherwise. The thing that was interesting was that the people seemed to love it. More than a normal worship experience for us.
I hated it. I thought it was one of the worst worship experiences that we've created in a long time. But I'm beginning to realize that I'm not our market. I'm kind of an anomaly at our church. So if I'm going to continue to be on our worship planning team, then I need to change my mindset.
Now I just need to begin to prepare ideas for when we have the ability to do a worship experience for the students and those that desire a more experiential, contemplative gathering.
JM

Brilliant Media Usage

I love how lifechurch.tv uses marketing. Their new series is satanhateslife.com. The series by itself isn't all that attractive to me, but the use of billboards to direct people to an informational website is nice. And the site itself is genius. Just enough information to find out what it's all about along with the opportunity to find out more if you want. Well executed. JM

Know Your Market

I hate Fox News. I'm conservative and all of that, but I would rather get a view of the world from the opposite perspective. I already know what I think, why do I need someone to agree with me. Plus I don't really watch the news.
What I love about Fox News is that they know their market. All of their commercials, all of their programming, even their slogan "Fair and balanced" says they will not put a left-wing viewpoint on anything. CNN doesn't say that. MSNBC doesn't say that. Whoever else has a newschannel doesn't say that. Fox News knows their market, they market to it, and they forget about the rest. We could learn a lot from Fox News. JM

Meeting Of The Minds

This morning I had the opportunity to meet with Mark Batterson of National Community Church for a small group discussion of his thoughts on church and leadership.
I have a standard fear of meetings like this because they have a tendency to quickly devolve into "What's your favorite color?" or "What's on your ipod?" sort of discussions. This was not like that, thanks to Walker Maginnis for that. The other thing that tends to happen is that people say things just to hear themselves talk and so that the celebrity (Mark) will say something positive about them. We also, for the most part, avoided this as well.
It was a great time and it was awesome to hear his humility. He had some excellent thoughts on branding and marketing. My take-away from this morning is what he said about internal marketing. They try to produce all of their pieces with a commitment to quality and creativity as opposed to just producing external pieces with those traits.
Lately, I've been focusing on external pieces, but have neglected doing high quality internal marketing. I really enjoyed his insight on that. JM

Office Depot

Have you seen the new office depot ad campaign? Their new slogan is "lending you a hand" or something like that. The commercial I've seen is two swamped office employees discussing how they could really use a hand. Out of a box pops a hand that takes them to Office Depot so that they can get all of their supplies, become organized and efficient, and discover cold fusion.

I have two issues with this:

1. It is remarkably similar (potentially intellectual property level) to the Staples easy button commercials.

2. Hands coming out of boxes not attached to anything are creepy.

Oh, and after messing around on office depot's site, I can't even find the hand. They still have their old slogan. Horrible marketing. JM

Mountain Dew MDX

Just saw a commercial for Mountain Dew MDX pumping their new site. What's cool about it is at the end of the odd commercial there is a random question on items that were in the commercial. Pretty cool concept for them. It's an energy drink, so in theory it should help me stay alert and notice stuff like that. Plus it turns it into a challenge. People love challenges. It would be cool to transition this idea into church marketing somehow. JM

Church Promotion

So I love looking at other churches print promotion for upcoming series or events. It helps me get ideas as I critique what other people have done. A church near us does lots of direct mailings.
The two most recent are both 1/2 sheet postcard flyers. The first was an inviation to their Christmas eve service. On the front was a picture of "Santa", but he was bent over and the focus of the picture was on his butt with the caption "No ifs, ands, or butts". On the other side it explained what to expect at their service.
The other card was describing a series they are doing on sex. The front of the card had two sets of feet poking out from under a blanket with the words "pure sex" under it (a not so slight rip-off of the my lame sex life series at Granger Community Church).
Both cards had their slogan/catchphrase "We're a church for anyone, but not for everyone."
Now I know that all marketing is, or at least should be done, with a specific market in mind. But I always wondered how people outside of that market would respond. I just found a little bit of insight into this.
I was looking for something on the middle school hall at our church. This hall is shared by middle school at one hour an senior adults during the second hour. On one of the bulletin boards were both of these postcards taped with a copy of a letter from one of our members to the pastor of the postcard church. The letter basically said "I am so offended." It also said that our member would be praying that the pastor would get right with the Lord and that she would never set foot in their church. It also noted that she had kept the card and looked at it occasionally with disgust, which is pretty funny.
Obviously the cards need to come down and have the reason why explained to our member. But I hope that the pastor of the other church wasn't discouraged by the letter from our member. Marketing and churches are for specific markets. While I don't think we should necessarily try to offend other markets, I think it is important we shoot for our market unapologetically. If we don't, then we're unremarkable, and that's not the kind of Christian that I desire to be. JM