|
One of the questions we hear most frequently is "How many new people can I expect from a GenEvange campaign?". If there is one thing we have realized in the past 3 years, it's that almost every church grossly overestimates what can be achieved through marketing in a single year, and grossly underestimates what can be achieved in five years. The truth is, advertising is not a magic wand that will generate hundreds of people flooding through your doors. Advertising takes time, commitment, consistency, patience and financial sacrifice.
We like to describe it as a slow burn. If you are hoping to spend
$5,000 or $10,000 and retain 20 or 30 new families, don't use us - we
don't want you to be disappointed. We have without a doubt the finest
advertising tools available to churches on the market, and we aren't
seeing numbers anything like this on a regular basis (be wary of anyone
quoting such myth). Of course, we can dig out some extraodinary
circumstances where 3000 and 4000 people show up to a single event, or
a church sees 200 visitors from a single campaign, but these numbers
are the exception, not the rule, so we don't want to get your hopes up.
We thought the best way to demonstrate the practical nature of
advertising is to publish a letter from a pastor who has exhibited what
we would call "typical" results. Here it is:
"In answer to your questions about the effectiveness of Direct Mail as experienced at “the ground level” in church marketing, I thought it would be best to go over my numbers with you. I am a pastor now, but prior to my life in ministry I worked as a high-level executive for a large multinational software company based in New York. Because of my background in business I still tend to look at these sorts of things from a purely financial perspective – I hope you don’t mind the absence of “heart” in these numbers (I really do care about the people, but this just helps me make prudent sense of everything).
It’s necessary first for me to define a couple of terms that I'll use in this description. “Tithing Unit” is a family or group who have one principle tither, but maybe many people (children, for example, who are also encouraged to “Tithe” in our church). “Average Yearly per Tithing Unit” was initially $1600, but I find new people are much better at this and now, after 3 years this number is $2400 per year per tithing unit.
As you know, I have now conducted 4 campaigns with GenEvange according to the rough costs and targets as follows:
Campaign 1
10,000 homes 6 times
Approximate Cost including postage: just under 20K
Visitors: 24 families
Retention: 7 families
Campaign 2
15,000 homes 6 times
Approximate Cost including postage: just under 30K
Visitors: 28 families
Retention: 11 families
Campaign 3
15,000 homes 4 times
Approximate Cost including postage: just under 20K
Visitors: 18 families
Retention: 7 families
Campaign 4
40,000 homes 4 times
Approximate Cost including postage: 40K
Visitors: 30 families
Retention: 16 families
These 4m campaigns occurred over a period of 3 years. For analysis, if you look at these 4 campaigns you can see that we have added approximately 41 families at a cost of approximately 110K. If you look at the raw numbers, those 41 families have been responsible for contributing 132K directly through Tithes and Offerings in the past 3 years. They have also been directly responsible for bringing in another 250 families.
So, whereas I started 3 years ago with 16 people, we now average 600 people on a Sunday morning. Some people might look at the numbers and say “20K to get 7 families?” thinking that is expensive. This is a narrow and short-sited view. In reality the numbers don’t lie – they make perfect business sense. I have an annual budget from tithe now of just over 1 million, as a direct or indirect result of direct mail. And it grows. Those first 7 families have now been tithing for 3 years, so they have more than paid for themselves in terms of their “cost to acquire” (again, my apologies for the business lingo).
I tried television and radio, but my numbers from both were about ½ what I get with Direct Mail, so I’m using Direct Mail almost exclusively now. My intention is to target 100,000 homes within a 10-mile radius of the church, and continue to hit this area over the next 10 years so God can open up doors for our ministry.
We are in the process of planting 3 other churches right now who will be using this same model, although we are going to begin by targeting 30,000 homes 6 times for a big initial thrust (we didn’t have money for this in the early days).
It’s interesting to note that we have become much better at the retention side of things in the past 4 years – that was definitely a learning curve.
Looking forward to our next campaign.
Thanks for all you have done,"
Mike
|
