Over our 20+ year history, we’ve had the following measure in place: How Did You Find Out About CCV?
You would think our website, visibility from the major highway running through our target area, or direct mail advertising would be the highest contributing cause. Nope. Not even close.
Are you familiar with the use of Pareto Analysis as part of any continuous improvement process? I know, it sounds technical! It’s pretty basic, though. It’s a bar graph arranged from the highest bar to the lowest bar. The purpose of the analysis is to determine and illustrate the “highest contributing cause” of something. In this case, the graph shows the highest contributing cause of church growth.
By far and away, it’s “Invited By A Friend Or Family Member.” Surprised? Sometimes I think we underestimate the significance of “a person with skin on them” personally inviting their friend or family member to church.
OK. So now what? What do we do with this knowledge? The first step is understanding that the people who are attending our churches are our best tools for growing our church. Now, we must do several things to equip them and help them succeed.
First, we must put a service together that our people wouldn’t be embarrassed about asking someone to attend. Also, we must create a warm and welcoming environment. The list is long and requires us to re-think everything about our churches. In most cases, the stuff we must do is difficult and takes a significant amount of time to get in place.
But there’s one thing we can do that’s pretty easy. The Invite Card. Yes, it’s a simple business card sized tool that we can print for our people that equips them to hand someone a card that provides the needed information. Here’s an example:
We print a pile of these cards and put them on high-top tables all around the auditorium during all of our services for several weeks leading up to Christmas services. It works!
Of course, in today’s world, paper isn’t necessarily the way to go. Do it virtually! Send HTML e-mails to the congregation that they can easily forward to 10+ friends. Put something on your mobile app that allows them to “share” it with their friends. You get the idea!