Category Archives: Marketing & church growth

Church marketing 101

“Change something significant about the appearance of your church at least once a month.” –Standard advice from church marketing experts.

First Unitarian in New Bedford sits right at a busy intersection, the corner of Union and County streets. While you’re waiting on Union Street for the traffic light to change, your car is right next to a huge building made out of granite, with a sign saying “First Unitarian Church.” Yet over and over again, newcomers tell us, “You know, I’ve driven by this building for years and never really noticed it.”

We need to follow advice straight out of Church Marketing 101: change something about the appearance of our site and/or building every month, something significant enough that people will notice our building. Otherwise, our building blends in and becomes just another unnoticed historic building in historic downtown New Bedford.

Problem is, we have very little in the budget for this kind of thing. Even so, we have already managed to plan a few things that won’t strain our budget:

  • April: We hung new signs on our fence. The new signs are easier to read, and they (finally) have our Web site URL prominently displayed. Due to budget constraints, we had to go with relatively inexpensive plastic signs which we plan to replace in another fiscal year.
  • May: We’re planting bright spring flowers under the new signs.
  • June: We planted Dutch iris bulbs that should start flowering in June.

We’re also going to take a look at our other sign that’s right at the intersection of County and Union — maybe we’ll wind up hanging smaller seasonal signs under it, or perhaps displaying a rainbow flag for a month. It’s going to take some creativity to come up with ten or twelve inexpensive ways to change the appearance of our site and building!

Search committees and the Web

Since many ministers (and to a lesser extent religious educators) in my denomination, Unitarian Universalism, schedule retirements or resignations to take place over the summer — that means that many Unitarian Universalist congregations are forming search committees right about now, getting ready to search for a new minister or religious educator. Today’s Wall Street Journal has an article that job seekers and members of search committees should read. The article, “How Blogging on the Web Can Help You Get a New Job,” by Sarah Needleman (p. B1), is aimed at job seekers, telling them to think about how they can control their image using the Web:

Job seekers who blog increase the odds that a potential employer will find information online that the candidate wants to be seen, says Debbie Weil, a corporate blogging consultant…. “Everybody has an online identity whether they know it or not, and a blog is the single best way to control is,” she says. “You’re going to be Googled. No one hires anyone or buys anything these days without going online first and doing research.”

If I were on a search committee, that would make me think, “Hey, candidates are going to Google us just as we’re Googling them!” Therefore, as the Wall Street Journal points out, why not consider shaping the online image of your congregation:

Some companies encourage employees to blog because they can use them to recruit others. When recruiter Harry Joiner was hired to fill two positions at Musician’s Friend Inc. in November, he used an employee’s personal blog to help sell his client’s rural location of Medford, Ore., to job seekers. “Candidate were using Medford as a reason not to consider the jobs,” he says. “As a marketer, I thought, if you can’t change it, promote it.”

The blog, by So Young Park, the company’s director of e-commerce…, describes her move to the area a year ago from New York City. It includes details about her work, … a bear sighting near her home, and related topics. While she started the blog to share information with family and friends back East, she acknowledges that it has also been a good resource for attracting job hunters.

I wonder if that kind of idea could help congregations in rural regions to attract top-quality talent.

Clear Blogging

A while back, I mentioned I had started reading the book Clear Blogging: How People Blogging Are Changing the World and How You Can Join Them by Bob Walsh. Now that I’ve read most of the book, I want to say a little more about it.

This is quite simply the best book about blogging I have yet seen. We are ten years into the blogging phenomenon now. Technically, blogging has evolved from a few geeks hand-coding Web sites to carry entries in reverse chronological order, to wide availability of easy-to-use publishing platforms that require no technical knowledge. The result of this technical evolution is that millions of people are now writing and reading blogs, and blogging has really changed the way many people exchange information.

In Clear Blogging, Bob Walsh gives an excellent overview of the state of blogging today:– from the way blogs have changed the national political landscape to the way blogs have changed personal life. I’m going to focus on two chapters in his book, both of which apply directly to post-Christian congregational life. At the end of this post, I’ll give a broad overview of the book, and tell you why you should read it.

Congregational blogs?

While Walsh is really writing about the corporate for-profit world in the “Building Your Company Blog” chapter, much of what he has to say applies equally to congregational blogs. So when he makes his most important point — that a company blog can increase sales — that applies to congregational blogs as well. Blogs build Web site traffic; blogs give potential buyers (or potential new members) a personal sense of what you are all about; blogs are a very efficient and very directed form of marketing. All this means that congregations should be taking a serious look at incorporating blogs into their marketing mix.

However, in order for congregations to incorporate blogging into their marketing mix, it’s going to mean a change in the way most congregations perceive marketing. Walsh interviews Richard Edelman, a blogging CEO (my comments are in square brackets []):

Q. Corporations [and congregations!] tend to be known for their hierarchies more than anything else. How does the idea of people [e.g., ministers and staff] just saying what they want on the company’s dime at their blog go over when you talk to other CEOs? [or how about to congregational boards?]

A. I think there’s a real trade-off between control and credibility. If you are too much of command-and-control kind of person [or congregation], blogging is probably not for you, but you’re also probably not in tune with what it takes to be credible in this world….

I hope congregations — and the Unitarian Universalist Association — take note. Congregations should really start thinking about credibility…. (For the record, I do not blog on company time — I write this blog solely on my own time.)

Blogging professionals

Every minister who is blogging or who has ever considered blogging should read Walsh’s chapter “Professionally Blogging, Blogging Professionally.” While Walsh focusses on the traditional professions of law, medicine, and ministry, all other religious professionals — directors of religious education, congregational administrators, etc. — will find much that is useful and relevant.

Walsh covers the obvious ethical questions, and gives us enough specifics to really make us think. Doctors actually have a code of conduct covering what they post on the Web; that’s something we ministers should be thinking about.

For ministers and other professionals, Walsh also points out how blogging can build your career. Most obviously, if you’re looking for a job Walsh shows you how a blog can help your job prospects. Yet for those of us who aren’t looking for a new job, a blog is still a way to communicate with various constituencies, and let people know who we are and what we stand for. As a working minister who has been blogging for more than two years, I found this to be the single most useful chapter in the book.

The rest of the book

Anyone who blogs will find lots of useful tips and ideas in Clear Blogging. For example, even though I think I know something about blogging, I learned a lot about feeds and blog usability and search engine optimization — indeed, I’ve already implemented several of Walsh’s tips on this blog.

And anyone who just reads blogs will find lots of useful information, from very practical things like how to post good comments on blogs, to big-picture ideas like the way political blogging is changing democracy.

Definitely, a book worth reading — just make sure you read it soon, because blogging is changing so fast this book will be outdated in a year or so. (Let’s just hope Walsh updates the book to keep up with changes!)

Do I need to remind you that this blog is completely non-commercial and ad-free? I reviewed and recommended this book because I wanted to, not because anyone asked me to do so, or paid me to do so.

Great theology, but…

Theology and society

Somehow, I missed Diana Bass Butler’s book The Practicing Congregation: Imagining a New Old Church when it first came out in 2004. Butler has excellent insight into the current state of congregations in North America, and I find myself returning to the book again and again First Unitarian in New Bedford and I navigate the changed religious landscape of the early 21st C.

One key insight that Butler offers is that when things go wrong in your congregation, maybe you shouldn’t try to point fingers at blame at anyone in particular:

In the midst of [congregational] conflict, people often fail to recognize the obvious. What if no one can be blamed? What if no one is at fault? Many changes, conflicts, and tensions do not arise from factors within religious communities themselves. Rather, these things are the result of institutions reacting and responding to larger cultural changes — trends, ideas, and practices outside the church building [emphasis in original]….

As I think back on some of the congregational conflicts I have witnessed over the years, that strikes me as a very useful insight. Even in conflicts that have arisen from identifiably egregious behavior — clergy sexual misconduct comes immediately to mind — I believe that in some cases the egregious behavior has been able to infect a congregation only because the congregation’s natural “immune system” has been seriously weakened because the congregation is no longer well-adapted to the world around it.

Butler points out that the past fifty years have seen major cultural shifts in the surrounding culture:

The congregational experimentation in the 1970s and 1980s was the result of cultural shifts that occurred in the two decades immediately following World War II: the rise of the middle-class meritocracy, suburbanization, the birth of the baby boom generation, expanded access to college and university education, the civil rights movement, feminism, Sunbelt immigration of whites and northern migration of blacks, and the turmoil over Vietnam. All these changes unhinged traditional American religious patterns and called for greater clarity about the Christian message and greater authenticity in Christian congregations.

Obviously, you could substitute “post-Christian” for “Christian” and come up with the same conclusion.

UU culture and theology

For most Unitarian Universalist congregations, these cultural shifts in the surrounding culture paralleled a theological shift within many or most of our congregations — the shift from liberal Christian to post-Christian positions. (Not coincidentally, 1971 is the first time I am aware of a Unitarian Universalist leader referring to our movement as post-Christian.) But what I see is that our social patterns didn’t get updated to match our theological changes.

Butler continues:

Some churches rose to the challenge, but many did not. In a wave of social change (and often unreflective resistance to it), many congregations lost their ability to retain younger members or attract new ones. Congregations often suffered because of the gap that developed between their internal inherited practices and external cultural realities.

This was certainly true of Unitarian Universalism during the 1960s and 1970s — those were the decades when we saw a precipitous drop in membership, and when young people stopped being a part of our congregations. In the next passage from Butler’s book, but I’m going to substitute “Unitarian Universalist” for Christian, and change a few other phrases, so that it sounds as if she’s talking directly to us:

…Congregations often suffered because of the gap that developed between their internal inherited practices and external cultural realities. And, more than occasionally, they suffered because their particular pattern of congregational life was considered coterminous with “Unitarian Universalism” or “liberal religious theology,” hence confusing a historical moment in American culture with theological vitality and eternal truths. In short, many mid-twentieth-century Unitarian Universalists enshrined the social pattern of their congregations as something akin to eternal truth!

And that’s just what happened in the the 1960s and 1970s.

Then in the 1980s and the 1990s, social change continued and even accelerated, through the twin processes of detraditionalization, and the disestablishment of the 1950s civic religion. The end result? Many or most Unitarian Universalist congregations today follow social patterns straight out of the 1950s. Our post-Christian theology is increasingly relevant to the world around us — but that theology is trapped in outdated congregations.

I hope I have piqued your curiosity enough that you will now go read the rest of Diana Butler Bass’s book, and find out how to update your congregation to match the changed society around you. It’s available from the Alban Institute.

Just a reminder — this blog is completely non-commercial and ad-free? I discussed this book because it interested me, not because anyone asked me to, or paid me to do so.

Post-Christian congregations in post-Christendom

“Post-Christendom” is a term used by a small group of theologians (primarily European Anabaptist theologians, from what I can see) to describe society after the death of the 1700-year-old concept of “Christendom.” The Roman emperor Constantine linked Christianity and Empire, and in Europe and European-dominated lands they’ve been linked ever since — until recently.

Here in the United States, with an avowed Christian in the White House and Christians dominating Congress and the courts, it may sometime feel as if we are becoming a more Christian country. But even here, church attendance has been dropping slowly for decades, and we’re seeing increasing numbers of persons affiliated with non-Christian religions, as well as seeing increasing numbers of persons with no religious affiliation at all. Now when someone offers a prayer at a graduation, it’s no longer unremarkable; instead, it has become an act of defiance. At the moment, Christendom in the United States appears to be dying.

So where does that leave those of us in post-Christian congregations? For some post-Christian congregations, the death of Christendom has probably helped somewhat, because now it is more socially acceptable to join a post-Christian congregation.

I can’t speak for all post-Christian congregations, and really I can only talk about what I’ve seen in a handful of Unitarian Universalist congregations that have become post-Christian. Mostly what I have seen Unitarian Universalist post-Christians who seem pleased that Christendom is dying, but who forget the extent to which Unitarian Universalism has been supported by Christendom.

And yes, we have been supported by Christendom. Here’s one example: Up until very recently, most of our best new members were “come-outers,” those who had “come out” to us from Christian churches. They found it easy to enter Unitarian Universalist worship services, because our worship services felt very familiar — we have hymnals and sermons and things like that, and the come-outers knew how to do hymnals and sermons and things like that. But as Christendom slowly dies around us, more and more of our new members have never set foot in a church before, so that our worship services may feel a little strange or uncomfortable. Yet we are not good about trying to integrate these newcomers into a Unitarian Universalist worship subculture that is increasingly divergent from mainstream culture.

Take another example: Sixty years ago, such a large percentage of the population went to church that it was easy for Unitarian Universalist congregations to get new members. Tons of people just walked in our doors to check us out, and we barely had to advertise. It was as if dump trucks full of potential new members backed up to our doors each Sunday, and unloaded more people. Sure, we didn’t have a great retention rate and we lost a lot of these visitors, but who cared? –the dump trucks would be back next Sunday to dump more through our doors. Unfortunately, we didn’t notice that those dump trucks stopped running between 1960 and 1970, and we have few ideas about how to integrate the kinds of newcomers we now get.

And one more example: In the 1950’s, at the height of what has come to be called “civic religion,” children had prayers and Bible readings in public schools, families read the Bible and prayed together at home, and there was a rich ecology of religious education throughout society. So when children came to Unitarian Universalist Sunday schools, they had lots of knowledge about religion and all we had to do was teach them that Jesus isn’t God, the Bible isn’t literally true, and that there are other religions out there besides Christianity. Today, typically the only time children learn anything about religion is when they come to Sunday school — which means most kids get about 20 hours of religious instruction a year. Yet we still run our post-Christian Sunday schools as if it’s the 1950’s.

So you can see that on a pragmatic level, we continue to act as if Christendom is in place, and we continue to act as if our place in Christendom is to offer an alternative to Christendom. Even though we think we are post-Christians (and in our hearts, many of us are post-Christians), we run our congregations as if we were still in 1950’s congregations, in a land dominated by the civic religion of Christendom.

So what do we do about this? On Wednesday, I’ll offer some suggestions for post-Christian congregations in a post-Chrsitendom world.

Friday video: Non-standard promotional video

My week of vacation doesn’t officially start until tomorrow, but because I didn’t have to be in the office today I stayed up late last night figuring out how to make a video. It turns out to be insanely easy to learn how to use iMovie, the video editing software shipped with all Mac computers. So just for fun, I made a promotional video for First Unitarian, splicing in images I happened to have on disk, and adding a soundtrack I had made a while ago in GarageBand….

(Note: video host blip.tv is defunct, so the original link to this video no longer exists. The above image is a still photo that was used in the original video. I still have a copy of this video, but have not put it online again.)

If the clicking on the picture above doesn’t work, try this: Link. (If you tried earlier and it didn’t work, try again — I uploaded a bad file at first.)

After I checked out some other videos on You Tube that promote Unitarian Universalist congregations. Most of the other videos take a documentary approach, with warm friendly shots of kids, choirs, ministers, etc. Most of their soundtracks use hymns, piano music, ministers talking, etc. From a sales and marketing standpoint, such videos are probably much better than mine. I guess maybe my video reflects a different understanding of Unitarian Universalism, more like that in the video for The First Unitarian Universalist Church of Second Life: Link (did Christine make that video?).

I’d love to hear your thoughts on what constitutes a good promotional video for Unitarian Universalist congregations. What demographic would you target? How would you get approval from your congregation’s Board (or would you even try)? Would you do a documentary, something more like a music video, or what?

This is for you, Craig

Two winters ago, Craig and I were both serving at the Unitarian Universalist church in Geneva, Illinois. We liked to stand out in front of the church and greet people as they came in. Since both of us have a bit of a competitive streak in us, we kept on standing outside to greet people nearly every week right up through the end of December, no matter how cold it was (rain was a different matter — we stood inside when it rained). And we managed to brave the cold at least once a month through the entire winter.

So last week I got a challenging email message from Craig. He’s now at a church in Wisconsin, and he said that he had been standing out in front that church on Sunday morning greeting people. As I said, we’re both a little competitive. Of course I had been outside that morning — I nearly always stand out in front of the church here in New Bedford to greet people before worship. But now, clearly, the gauntlet has been thrown down. So Craig, I’m making this public:

Sunday, February 4, 2007. Stood outdoors to greet people for 15 minutes, from 10:40 to 10:55 a.m. Weather at 10:53 as reported by the National Weather service Web site: clear, winds 17 mph (gusts to 25 mph), temerature 24 Fahrenheit.

How about you, Craig? Any other ministers or religious educators out there want to take the challenge?

I’m not qualified

The annual Unitarian Universalist blog awards process has begun again. I do not plan to nominate or vote. There are something like 200 Unitarian Universalist blogs, but I can only seem to keep up with two or three them on a regular basis. So I don’t feel qualified to say which is the year’s best blog, or which is the year’s best blog entry.

Sometimes I feel guilty that I don’t read lots of Unitarian Universalist blogs. But I like to read blogs written from other religious perspectives, like the blog entries aggregated at The Daily Scribe, with authors who write from Jewish, pagan, progressive Christian, Emergent Christian, humanist, and Buddhist perspectives. That kind of thing broadens my mind, and my mind could use some broadening.

And I am just as likely to read non-religious blogs: my two sisters’ blogs (Jean, Abby); the Horn Books Magazine blog Read Roger; and maybe Boing Boing and Bad Astronomy. Then there are the many newspapers, magazines, books, and the reading matter I get from Carol. Sitting on the dining room table waiting for me right now are: The Small-Mart Revolution (from Carol), The Shorebird Guide, rattapallax 13, Asimov’s science fiction magazine, The Post-Corporate World (also from Carol), Boswell’s Life of Johnson, a book on religions of the African diaspora, and Harvard Business Review.

Not that I’ll get around to reading everything on that list. But I never wanted to be a specialist, and I can only do so much specialized reading. The pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus said, “Those who love wisdom must be inquirers into very many things indeed.” Not that I’d count myself wise, but I’m certainly not qualified to judge Unitarian Universalist blogs.

Update: An attempt at defining a set of criteria for what constitutes a “good religious blog” here.

Church marketing blog

Peter Bowden of UUPlanet sent me a link to Church Marketing Sucks, a blog that is devoted to creating good church marketing. Some good material on this blog. For example, I liked this recent entry:

January 5, 2007
New Year Poll
(Filed under: Poll Results)

Last week we asked about your church marketing hopes and dreams for 2007. The perennial favorite, a web site that doesn’t make people cringe, took the top spot with 34%. Next came the novel concept of planning with 25%, followed by braqnd consistency at 21%. More of the same and as few typos as possible tied for 8%, and only 4% are planning a church name change in 2007. [Link.]

(You have to think that typo is in there just for laughs.)

The top three hopes and dreams are probably a good starting place for many churches, although I’d say planning should be in first place.