Marketing A Church In Canada
Canada is a different culture from America.
There is a completely different perspective of the Christian Church in Canada.
We are a large country geographically (second largest in the world), yet our population is comparatively small. Across this great land, churches are shrinking and closing their doors. It is not that there isn’t a hunger for spiritual things – it may be that there is little respect left for “religion”. In many ways there is a backlash to traditional churches (Catholic and Anglican) which were the foundational denominations of many of our country’s forefathers. I think there is a hunger for spirituality, but seldom is there the reflex for someone to turn to a Christian Church when searching for spiritual significance and answers.
So what is a Christian church to do to promote itself in Canada? How can a church effectively reach it’s community?
Print Advertising Doesn’t Work
Using traditional print advertising to invite someone to your Sunday morning church service doesn’t work – at least from my experience.
I was part of the church launch team five years ago for a church in Halifax. When we were promoting our “grand-opening” we sent 22,000 professionally designed and printed postcards by mail to homes around our community, inviting them to attend our grand opening on Easter Sunday. Twenty two thousand. We had only seven (yes, seven) people come to our first service because they received a postcard in their mail. There was some trickle effect…over the following couple months we probably had 30 new visitors because of the cards. From a marketing success standpoint, the ROI (return on investment) was poor. Not a great response.
We tried advertising in newspapers, yellow-pages, and more even more postcards over the following three years. All this was good for “visibility”, but produced very few new attendees based on the time and dollar expense.
Service, Not A Service
What I have discovered is that for churches to reach their communities effectively they have to be relevant and provide a “service” that is deemed high-value. Not a church service on Sunday morning, but a service to the needs of the demographic of their community.
Our church is based in a middle class suburban neighbourhood. The core demographic is young families. So, we created two seminars. One on “marriage” and one on “parenting”. These were relevant needs in our community. Couples need practical help building stronger marriages and learning useful parenting skills.
One of our promotional strategies was another print postcard distributed to about 2500 homes. One-tenth of the reach. The response was about 40 people who were not attending our church. Over the seminars, we were able to make deeper relational connections with these couples and many came out to Sunday services and eventually came to our church regularly.
So, one important and proven church marketing strategy is to invest in a relevant, practical outreach. This shouldn’t surprise you really. Church communities are supposed to be relational…and connecting with people relationally and building into them a practical skill set that meets a real defined need…that’s the ticket!
What do you think? Have you tried any specific strategies that have garnered success for your church?
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