Building a church community can be a difficult task. Part of this is being more reliant on an almost entirely word-of-mouth approach to advertising and marketing. Technology and the internet are the fastest ways to implement the word of mouth style of advertising and can be a huge help in increasing traffic to your church. Here are a few key ways you can use technology to help grow your congregation.
Social Media Ministry
A church isn’t just someplace where people come to worship. At its core, the church is a community, so taking advantage of social media can strengthen that community. Having a social media page for your church is a great way for your followers to communicate and interact with your church on a more regular basis, rather than just every Sunday for the service.
You can also keep your members informed about events and share special moments and even words of encouragement and prayer. Having a social media connection ensures your church members remain actively involved with one another and, if their activity is shared on their news-feed, it can lead to others looking at your church and potentially becoming a member.
Collecting Data
Marketing is important for any growing business, and you should treat your church like a business. With any business, it’s important that you are moving and growing in a direction in line with the values of your customers, or in this case, your congregation. Focusing on relationships in marketing can boost your retention rates. Collecting data can help get a feel for what your congregation is looking for, and what their core values are. While you can’t please everyone all of the time, you can at least use this data to move your church in a direction that benefits the majority of your congregation.
Develop an App
While social media groups are a great start, developing an app can open a lot more options for communicating with your congregation. Another hidden benefit is that developing an app will drastically reduce your printing costs. Any informational handouts you’d normally provide to all of your members at Sunday service can be uploaded and displayed right on the app. Since most of your congregation already uses smartphones anyway, you’ll have no trouble communicating essential information to a majority of your church members.
Promote Your Online Presence through Printed Media
Having a host of technological tools to communicate with your congregation requires them to know about these tools. Make sure you provide information in your weekly bulletin (and make sure you have a reliable printer for them, like one in Canon’s new DX series of copiers and MFPs, and a reliable team to assist you, like OFFIX!), have banners outside your church (you can print them for pennies, with a wide format printer) and by adding that information in the emails you send to your congregation.
There are a lot of of ways that technology can help increase traffic to your church. While it’s good to hold on to many traditions regarding the church, a lack of technology shouldn’t be one of them. Using technology to reach out to your congregation will help your church grow, which was the goal to begin with.
If you mail bulletins or other material to your congregation, let us show you how we can save you time and money through the use of mailing equipment.