Monthly Archives: April 2006

Guerilla marketing for churches, pt. 2

More from Jay Conrad Levinson’s Guerilla Marketing Excellence, as adapted for church marketing. Part 1 of the series has a general introduction to Guerilla Marketing [Link]

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The designated Guerilla, Guerilla Marketing’s golden rule #27:

Marketing will succeed only if time and energy are regularly devoted to it [by church leadership] or someone [they] designate]….

We all know that marketing is a lot like flossing your teeth. It is not a whole lot of fun, but there’s agony ahead if you don’t do it. So too with marketing. Unless you market daily, there’s going to be trouble in the form of low or no visibility…. Unless you have the time and inclination to market [yourself] with verve, imagination, and intelligence, be sure you have a designated guerilla.

From the point of view of a church, I believe the designated guerilla has to be someone who is available several days a week; who fully gets the central mission and values of the church, and who sees the big picture; and someone who has “verve, imagination, and intelligence.”

Often, the designated guerilla will be the minister in a small church, or one of the ministers in a mid-size church. This will mean that the Board and other lay leaders will have to remove things from the minister’s task list so that s/he will have time to devote to marketing. (Large churches might think about finding a membership coordinator or executive director to be the designated guerilla.)

What if the minister of your small or mid-size church doesn’t want to be the designated guerilla? Maybe you’ll luck out and find a retired marketing genius in your church. Maybe you can count on a dedicated chair of a membership committee. Or maybe the minister should learn how to do marketing. Remember, it’s like flossing: if you don’t do it, all your teeth will eventually fall out.

Who is your designated guerilla? If you’re the designated guerilla, how much time do you spend doing guerilla marketing?

Meriam’s Corner

Yesterday, my sister Abby and I went to Concord (Massachusetts) for the annual Meriam’s Corner exercises. If you didn’t grow up in Concord as we did, you probably don’t know that Meriam’s Corner was where the colonial militia and minutemen engaged with the Redcoats on the afternoon of April 19, 1775, as His Majesty’s troops started on their way back to Boston. Every year there’s a ceremony commemorating the engagement the week before its anniversary.

We thought we were on time, but the fifes and drums were already playing when we pulled up. A park ranger showed us where to park on the grass, and we hurried over.

Abby’s husband, Jim, is a direct descendant of the Meriams who owned Meriam’s Corner. Jim was at work, but Abby tried to see if any of his family were with the Meriam contingent who were participating in the ceremony. She couldn’t see anyone.

Just in front of us, a man was trying to control a little boy and a big dog. The man had to keep shushing the dog, even holding her muzzle shut so she wouldn’t bark. The dog started barking when the little boy toddled past the rope that kept people out of the area where the Concord Minutemen were going to fire their muskets. The man turned to shush the dog, but then he saw why the dog was barking and grabbed the boy. The boy’s older sister was obviously a veteran of this event: she covered up her ears just before the Minutemen started to load their muskets. The dog saw the girl cover her ears, started to bark, the man grabbed the dog’s muzzle, she twisted away, was about to bark when —

Bang!!

— the muskets went off. Astonished at the noise, the dog didn’t bark thereafter.

Bang!!

It takes forever to reload an 18th C. musket.

Bang!!

Only a three-gun salute. Some dignitaries put a wreath at the commemorative plaque. Things were pretty much over. Abby and I walked over to get a closer look at the Meriam contingent, but there wasn’t anyone she knew. We waited until the Middlesex County Volunteers started off; their music is exceptionally good, and they always put on a good show to boot. By then it was time to head off to the Paul Revere capture site, to see the ceremony there — but that would be another story.

Parking

A friend came in to downtown New Bedford to meet us for dinner at Freestone’s restaurant, just up the street from our apartment. She said:

“I drove up and saw all these empty parking places. I kept looking for signs that said ‘No Parking.’ There was parking right in front of the restaurant, but I wound up driving down a block because I just couldn’t believe there would be all this parking in downtown New Bedford. Finally, I rolled down my window and asked this man about all the empty spaces. He looked at me and said, ‘Lady, this isn’t Paris, France.'”

Guerilla marketing for churches, pt. 1

Carol was cleaning out a bookcase, and came across a book she must have bought when it first came out back in 1993: Guerilla Marketing Excellence: The Fifty Golden Rules for Small-Business Success, by Jay Conrad Levinson. Perhaps you remember Levinson’s Guerilla Marketing books, a series of books written for people in businesses who didn’t have huge advertising and marketing budgets.

As I leafed through this book, I realized how much Carol and I learned from the Guerilla Marketing books. We started reading these books when I was a salesman and Carol was self-employed. From these books, we learned that you have to be in advertising for the long haul because results don’t come right away. We learned how to market through social networks. We learned that you can’t rely on just one form of advertising because people need to see your message in several different forms. We learned that you have to be scrupulously honest to get past the basic mistrust people have for advertising.

Rereading this book helped me remember something else: Marketing for church is very different than marketing for a small business. Churches don’t have promotions or sales or profit margins. Churches don’t have a customer base (we have people who are committed to church). Churches don’t have a product or a service to sell (we’re a convenanted community in which we transform our lives). And I also realized that marketing and advertising have changed in the past fifteen years — for instance, telemarketing is dead while Web sites are hot.

Yet as I read through Guerilla Marketing Excellence, I was struck by how much of the book was still timely, and how much of it was actually relevant to churches. So over the next couple of weeks, I thought I’d post some gleanings from this book — and maybe get you thinking about how you could do Guerilla Church Marketing yourself.

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Style vs. substance, Guerilla Marketing’s golden rule #15:

Emphasize the meat and potatoes of your offering rather than the plate upon which they’re served….

It is apparent that there is room in marketing for both style and substance. But the guerilla marketer sees to it that both are obvious and that the product or service always has the starring role.

This is a fundamental rule that sometimes gets forgotten in the church world. In my church, we like to put advertisements in the newspaper with this week’s sermon title. But I have yet to meet anyone who joined a Unitarian Universalist church because they saw a cool sermon title in a newspaper ad. We’re not even emphasizing the plate, we’re emphasizing the napkin.

But people do come to church because they have questions about the meaning of life, they come because they want to be transformed, they come because they know they could be better people than they are now. That’s our “meat and potatoes” (or rice and beans if you’re vegan). So why don’t we say that in our advertisements? What might that sound like?…

“If you want to transform your life, we’ll help you ask the tough questions. We help each other become the people we want to be.”

I’ll bet you can come up with something better. How do we emphasize the meat and potatoes, instead of the plate?

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What people really buy, Guerilla Marketing’s golden rule #3:

Gear your marketing to people already in the market, and know what they really buy other than instant gratification….

People do not buy because marketing is glitzy but because marketing strikes a chord in the mind of the prospect that makes that person want the advantages of what you are selling. Marketing does not work because it sells products or services but because it helps people realize the merits of owning the products or services.

To put this in church terms, we are not providing instant gratification. We are not trying to sell people on our “products” or our “services.” You come to church because your life will be transformed for the better if you do.

In churches, we are apt to advertise things like concerts, lectures, sermon titles, and programs. Those things fall into the category of instant gratification. Instead of coming to one sermon or lecture, we want people to stick around for at least three months of regular attendance at worship, because only then will they understand how church can change them. That’s what we need to communicate in our marketing: how our church will change them.

This may be why the most effective form of advertising for churches is word-of-mouth. Better than 80% of newcomers come to a church because they heard about it through a friend or neighbor. A friend or neighbor can show how church can change your life, in a way that a newspaper ad or a sermon title simply cannot.

I’ll bet you can expand on this further. How can we tell potential new members how church will transform them?

Next installment: “The Designated Guerilla”.

Prince Estabrook

After visiting my dentist up in Lexington today, I wound up with about an hour before my lunch appointment in Arlington. So I drove out to the Minuteman National Historic Park to take a quick walk. I wound up in the visitor center on the Lincoln/Lexington town line, and of course I had to stop in at their little bookstore. With some excitement, I realized they had a new book on the Battle of Concord and Lexington.

I grew up in Concord, Massachusetts, the town where colonial militiamen offered the first successful armed resistance against His Majesty’s troops at the Battle of the North Bridge. I love reading about that moment in history. So finding a new book about April 19, 1775, was an exciting moment.

Especially when it’s a book about Prince Estabrook, the African American who was one of the militiaman injured at the battle on Lexington Green, and later apparently won his freedom by serving in the Continental Army.

The book is called Prince Estabrook: Slave and Soldier, and it’s by Alice Hinkle. The book tracks down all the sparse information that remains about African American Revolutionary War soldier. Of equal interest, the book also offers a portrait of Charlie Price, an African American man who has played the part of Prince Estabrook each year for many years now, during the annual re-enactment of the battle on Lexington Green. I have seen Price in that re-enactment many times, and I always liked that the group of re-enactors had paid attention to the fact that it wasn’t just white guys out there shooting the muskets. (In the book, Hinkle lets Price tell how meaningful it is to uncover the contributions of this black patriot.)

So there I am, standing at the cash register in the visitor center buying the book, talking to one of the nice volunteers who work there. When he sees the book I’m buying, he says, “Hey, Charlie Price is standing right over there. Why don’t you get him to autograph the book?”

I turn around, and sure enough, there’s Charlie Price. I recognize him, not just because his picture is on the cover of the book, but because I have seen him during the re-enactments. Wow!

The nice volunteer goes over and says, “Charlie, here’s someone who wants your autograph,” and Mr. Price walks over. He’s tall, almost as tall as I am, and even though he’s wearing a National Park Service uniform, for just a moment I get him confused with the real Prince Estabrook. We talk for a minute about how we both were moved when we found Estabrook’s grave in the cemetery out behind the Unitarian Universalist church in Ashby, Massachusetts. Then he signs my book:

We kept our powder dry!

Prince Estabrook
Charlie Price
6 April 2006

How cool is that?

From frogs to creation

A couple of weeks ago, we went in to Seven Star books in Central Square, Cambridge. Though it’s known as a New Age bookstore, Seven Stars has the best selection of new and used books on world religions that I have found in eastern Massachusetts. I found a two-volume copy of Hymns of the Rgveda translated by Ralph T. H. Griffiths, from Munshiram Manoharlala Publishers, New Delhi. The book is simply a wonderful artifact in and of itself: the typical off-white paper used by printers in India, fingerprints where the printer picked up sheets before the ink was fully dry, a dust cover with a tessellated leaves-and-flower motif in pale green.

This week, I’ve been dipping in to the Rig Veda. The Rig Veda, a collection of hymns to ancient Vedic gods and minor deities, is considered one of the oldest religious-literary works in the world. I find some of these hymns fairly incomprehensible, like this one which praises frogs (Book VII, Hymn 103):

1. They who lay quiet for a year, the Brahmans who fulfil their vows,
The Frogs have lifted up their voice, the voice Parjanya hath inspired….
3. When at the coming of the Rains the water has poured upon them as they yearned and thirsted,
One seeks another as he talks and greets him with cries of pleasure as a son his father….
6. One is Cow-bellow and Goat-bleat the other, one Frog is Green and one of them is Spotty.
They bear one common name, and yet they vary, and, talking, modulate their voice diversely….

According to Griffiths, Max Muller saw this hymn as a satire on the priestly class. Maybe, but it seems more likely to me that we are simply missing some cultural referent that prevents us from really understanding what the hymn meant originally. Some words from the past must remain forever obscure.

Yet there are other hymns in the Rig Veda which I find moving and thought-provoking, such this hymn about creation (Book X, Hymn 129):

1. Then was no non-existent nor existent: there was no realm of air, no sky beyond it.
What covered in, and where? and what gave shelter? Was water there, unfathomed depth of water?
2. Death was not then, nor was there aught immortal: no sign was there, the day’s and night’s divider.
That One Thing, breathless, breathed by its own nature: apart from it was nothing whatsoever.
3. Darkness there was: at first concealed in darkness this All was indiscriminated chaos.
All that existed then was void and formless: by the great power of Warmth was born that Unit. …

6. Who verily knows and who can here declare it, whence it was born and whence comes this creation?
The Gods are later than this world’s production. Who knows then whence it first came into being?
7. He, the first origin of this creation, whether he formed it all or did not form it,
Whose eye controls this world in highest heaven, he verily knows it, or perhaps he does not.

These are words from the past which still speak to me with the same sense of wonder, the same sense of confronting the unknowable, with which they spoke to the priests and followers of the ancient Vedic religion, when this hymn was first sung three millennia ago.

Spring watch

On Sunday it was sunny and warm, flowers were starting to bloom, the birds were singing. Yesterday the high thin clouds move in, and a south east wind blew damp and chilly across the harbor; stopped any more flower buds from opening. It rained all night, and this morning dawned gray and wet and dismal; the only birds that were out were the seagulls. By this afternoon the sun had come out, and it was cold with a brisk breeze out of the west; felt like winter again.

We’re supposed to get snow tonight, rain tomorrow, and it’s supposed to be warm and sunny again on Thursday. It’s turning into a typical New England spring week: bouncing back and forth between wintry weather and warm weather. After the warm sun over the weekend, I felt drained of energy by the sudden change to overcast skies and rain this morning — all morning in the office, we were talking about how we all felt slow and stupid. Then the cold wind this afternoon dampened my energy further, brought me to a low unthinking state of being: I just wanted to take a nap.

Yet tonight a church committee meeting turned from routine business discussions into a long conversation about reincarnation, God, what happens after death; we all wound up talking about people close to us who had died, and what their deaths had meant to us. It was an amazing conversation, a richly religious conversation. The uncertainties and vagaries of the weather seem to have opened up this conversation for us: and why not? We respond to the world around us in ways we pretend not to notice. But truth has a way of bursting in unexpectedly, like spring weather in this part of New England.

Progressive religious education

A couple of days ago, I wrote about what philosophies might underlie religious education in a liberal religion [Link]. Now I’d like to explore what religious education might look like if we used a truly progressive philosophy of education.

First, a quick definition of progressive educational philosophy. My definition of progressive education is a kind of education that educates for democracy, that aims to help kids be good citizens and able to function in a democractic organization (adult learners, too, but I’m going to focus on children in this essay). Thus progressive education emphasizes social problem solving, since that’s what a democracy involves. Furthermore, progressive education isn’t preparation for life, it’s life itself. That means that the social situation the kids find themselves in (their class, their church, their community) is part of the subject matter for their education.

(There are other possible definitions of progressive education, but this is the definition I use. I do not define progressive education as “letting kids do whatever they want”; to me, that would be a part of an overly individualistic romantic naturalist philosophy of education.)

So if that’s how I define progressive education, what results might that definition provide in a real Sunday school in a real liberal church? Here are some possibilities:

In terms of the social setting of the class (or group) itself, we might expect these kinds of outcomes:

  • Kids would have to solve problems together, and teachers would be as likely (more likely?) to assess the learning of the whole class as that of an individual learner.
  • Kids would have to make some decisions that affected them directly (e.g., what to have for snack, how to deal with problems).
  • Kids would fill leadership roles within their own class (e.g., taking attendance, even leading portions of a class).
  • Kids would have to speak up for their ideas, and verbal expression would be as important (more important?) than the written word.
  • In older age groups, kids would learn how to speak in meetings: when to talk, when to be quiet, how to think on your feet, etc.
  • Kids would learn conflict management skills.
  • Kids would learn how to read simple spread sheets, and how to manage a budget.
  • Etc.

You can read descriptions of actual implementations of these ideas in the book Exploring religion with eight year olds by Helen Firman Sweet and Sophia Blanche Lyon Fahs (New York, H. Holt and Company, 1930). I have personally incorporated all these ideas into Sunday school teaching.

In terms of the wider church, we might expect these kinds of outcomes:

  • Kids would give regular public performances of their learning for the congregation, involving social problem solving (e.g., performing in plays, leading worship, opening their classrooms to adults during an open house, etc.)
  • As a result of the preceding, kids would learn how to speak in public to large groups; and learn skills like using a microphone.
  • Kids would learn how to serve on adult committees, by serving on such committees.
  • Kids would come together several times a year in a business meeting of the entire Sunday school, just as other groups in the church (the Women’s Alliance, CUUPS, etc.) meet periodically for business meetings.
  • Older kids — teens — would be invited to attend Board meetings; teens would have at least one voting representative on the Board.
  • Kids would be allowed to become full voting members (who would also be required to pledge) no later than age fourteen.
  • Over the years, kids would learn how to sit through committee meetings, and how to listen to sermons, so that by the time they are allowed to become full voting members of the church they have the skills needed
  • Etc.

You can read descriptions of some of these ideas in books like Homer Councilor’s Junior Church (New York, Century, 1928), Worship in the Junior Church by Anna and Dan Huntington Fenn (n.d.). I personally have implemented all these ideas in actual church settings.

By now, you should get the general idea, and it should be obvious how to apply this kind of learning to the world beyond the church community. It should also be clear that this kind of progressive education is most emphatically not “letting kids do whatever they want.” Instead, it is a way of educating kids into a specific religious tradition. At the same time, because of the democratic nature of this education, when kids become adults they will also have the ability to think for themselves and to make their own rational decision of whether or not to remain in your religious tradition.

And it should be noted that this progressive approach can be combined with more traditional curriculum-based Sunday school — study of the Bible, of one’s own religious tradition, and of world religions can go hand-in-hand with these progressive educational goals. Indeed, they should go hand-in-hand, since so much of the intellectual background for the kind of democracy that we see in local liberal churches comes right out of Bible study, denominational traditions, and how we interact with world religions. (Actually, this might be an interesting intersection between the progressivist and the perennialist, or Great Books, educational philosophies; but that’s an essay for another day.)

That’s a quickie outline. Any thoughts and reactions from people out there who are involved in local churches?

The Telling

I didn’t post anything to this blog yesterday because I started reading Ursula K. LeGuin’s novel The Telling (New York: Harcourt, 2000). It was so compelling that I stayed up late reading, and that left me no time to write….

The Telling begins with a vision of a future when a theocracy controls all of Earth. It’s a fundamentalist theocracy of a kind that sounds all too possible:

In late March, a squadron of planes from the Host of God [the theocratic political party] flew from Colorado to the District of Washington and bombed the Library there, plane after plane, four hours of bombing that turned centuries of history and millions of books into dirt. …The beautiful old building had never been attacked [before]; it had endured through all the times of trouble and war, breakdown and revolution, until this one. The Time of Cleansing. The Commander-General of the Hosts of the Lord announced the bombing while it was in progress, as an educational action. Only one Word, only one Book. All other words, all other books were darkness, error. They were dirt. Let the Lord shine out! cried the pilots in their white uniforms and mirror-masks, back the the church at Colorado Base, facelessly facing the cameras and the singing, swaying crowds in ecstasy. Wipe away the filth and let the Lord shine out! [p. 5]

Earth under the Host of God is a horrendous place for anyone who doesn’t fit into the theocratic mold — including the heroine of the story, one Sutty. But Sutty manages to get a job away from Earth, serving as a representative for the Ekumen, a kind of interstellar government. She thinks she has escaped the kind of authoritarianism represented by the Host of God, only to find herself as an emissary to a planet with an equally authoritarian government, the Corporation. Ironically, while reminiscent of the Host of God, the Corporation has outlawed all religion as a part of their policy.

Sutty winds up traveling to a remote province of this planet where she encounters the religion that flourished before the Corporation took power. It is not a religion like the Host of God, and Sutty spends a great deal of time trying to figure out what kind of religion it is:

It did not deal in belief. All its books were sacred. It could not be defined by symbols and ideas, now matter how beautiful, rich, and interesting it symbols and ideas. And [this religion] was not called the Forest, though sometimes it was, or the Mountain, though sometimes it was, but was mostly, as far as she could see, called the Telling.[pp. 111-112]

They [the religious leaders] performed, enacted, or did, the Telling. They told.

The religious leaders of this religion know books, and commentary on books, and stories that come out of books. Before the Corporation government took over, the religious centers were much like libraries — places filled with books, and religious leaders, resident experts, who Told what was in the books. (Need I add that the Corporation destroyed the libraries in just the same spirit that the Host of God bombed libraries on Earth?) But while religious, the Telling is not a dogmatic telling; “all its books were sacred”:

The incoherence of it all was staggering. During the weeks that Sutty has laboriously learned about the Two and the One, the Tree and the Foliage, she had gone every week to hear… a long mythico-historical saga about the explorations of Rumay among the Eastern Isles six or seven thousand years ago, and also gone several mornings a week to hear… the origins and history of the cosmos [and] the stars and constellations… from beautiful, accurate, ancient charts of the sky. How did it all hang together? Was there any relation at all among these disparate things?

Of course, you’ve already figured out by now that The Telling is partly a parable about the excesses of our own world — the excesses of creedal belief-based religion on the one hand, and of the free-market mythos that glorifies corporate dominance on the other hand. But in the midst of the parable are tantalizing visions of what religion could be, if we could only steer clear of absolutism — even though even this tantalizing religion winds up having its own blind spots and rigidities.

I like Le Guin’s vision of a religion that emphasizes books, not the Book; a religion that is willing to encompass all aspects of human knowing including bodily wellness and meditation and practical knowledge. I even like the vision of an incoherent religion, that gains its coherence from the simple act of telling, of speaking aloud.

Heck, I’d join a religion like that.