We Have Shifted Our Method

For many years, we have equally promoted every weekend series. Every month we have introduced a new series, printed thousands of postcards, and mailed them to our community to invite them to join us.

That worked really well...for a long time. Our full-color postcards have been an effective invite tool for our people to hand to their friends.

But sometime last year we realized the effectiveness of that method was decreasing. Many of our people would get a postcard, glance at it, smile and throw it away. It had become just more noise in their life. It no longer grabbed their attention. It no longer motivated them to invite their friends. So, we stopped printing them.

That's right, we decided we could get more people to our series if we stopped spending so much money on advertising. So, for most series, that means we no longer print or mail the full-size color postcards.

Instead, we will put all of our advertising dollars into two series each year--we'll call them the "Big Deal" series. This year we are doing our first Big Deal series in March. Taking an idea from CedarCreek Church, we will make two series each year a big deal. And we'll ramp up everything we do to make a big deal out of our guests during those series.

This month our entire Go Fish series is for the purpose of preparing our congregation for the big deal series. You might say we are turning up the evangelism temperature in the church. 

So what is the Big Deal series? I'm glad you asked...here is Mark Beeson introducing the idea to our crowd this past weekend.

Nearly 1100 people voted by text for the promotional graphic. Which idea would you have chosen?