Develop a strategy and use this site to the fullest. Once you’ve mastered this site, then consider branching out. If you join too many sites at once you’ll feel overwhelmed and your post quality will suffer.

While visiting churches in their new area, they may spend one Sunday at your church. The impression they get that morning is how they’ll decide to come back or not… unless you find a way to give them a bigger picture—like e-mail.

How E-mail Can Bring Them Back
The best practice is creating something called a follow-up series: a set of auto-delivered e-mails sent to new subscribers, designed to get visitors comfortable with your church.

Follow ups are easy to create if you use an e-mail marketing service that provides pre-designed e-mail templates. You can just drop your content in and specify how many days you’d like to go by between messages.

Then every new visitor will receive all the details you’d like to share about your church. That is, after you get their e-mail addresses.

Getting Their Addresses
Most likely, you already have a method in place to welcome first-time visitors.

If you have assigned greeters, encourage them to find out if visitors are just passing through or if they’re looking for a new church. If they’re church-shopping, have the greeters ask if they’d mind getting a few e-mails with more information about your church.

If you use welcome cards and have people fill out their information, make sure to include a note on the card that they’ll be getting e-mails about the church, or if you want to e-mail them on a personal basis, have a box they can check if they’d like more information.

Then you can send them e-mail.

What to Put In Your Follow Ups
After you’ve thanked your visitors for stopping by, you’ll want to give them information to make them feel as welcome and comfortable as possible, while at the same time, representing your church accurately. You may want to send:

• Greetings from your church leadership, with pictures so they can recognize a familiar face if they return.
• Service, small groups and ministry schedules.
• Stories of what God has been doing in your church.
• Details about upcoming events (or where to find that info—if you truly automate this process, you want to use content that doesn’t have to be updated every few months).
• Opportunities to volunteer.
• Baptism and membership procedures.

Note that you’ll want to keep the series short. Even if it takes a while for someone to choose a church, you should be able to give them a good idea of your church’s attitude, beliefs and practices within a few messages. (Plus, if they’ve ruled your church out, you don’t want them reporting you as spam. Be sure to include an unsubscribe notice—most e-mail services do this automatically.)

Moving Forward
Those who do choose your church as their regularly scheduled service, however, may want to keep getting e-mails from you.

If you already send weekly broadcasts to your congregation, you’ll just have to add your new recipients. You can either ask in person if they’d like to be added, or you can send them an invitation to subscribe to those e-mails. You could also include a subscribe option in your last follow up e-mail.

With an auto-response follow up series you’re giving one-time visitors a reason to come back.

WARNING
Be careful not to rely completely on an auto-response follow up.  This is a great tool to introduce a visitor to your church information, but lacks real value when it comes to relationship building.  Make sure you also include real person replies and responses to your email list and those who communicate back to the church.  Nothing says, “we don’t care” like a form letter or form email.  Make it very personal and you’ll win the hearts of people with your genuine outreach.

Don’t forget to share your comments and thoughts below.

Business leaders say that their biggest employee-related concerns are: discouragement, burnout, feeling overwhelmed, losing the positive culture built over the years, and how to encourage employees with reduced financial resources available. It is much the same way in the church staff…

Take time this week to appreciate your ministry team.

When people feel appreciated, they are excited about their work and responsibilities. They are committed to the church and ministry, and their performance is likely increased. But remember… One size does not fit all.

I heard an amazing talk recently by Dr. Brian Fikkert, author of When Helping Hurts and Community Development Director of the Chalmers Center. His basic premise was that when we try to help the poor without having a proper definition of poverty we often do more harm than good to both those we try to help and to ourselves.

He gave the example of a church who handed out turkeys and toys in a poor neighborhood every year at Thanksgiving and Christmas. After several years of charity they discovered that the neighbors felt more poor and more shame, and the church people felt more self-righteous and more superior; each worse off then they were at the beginning.

Dr. Fikkert’s bottom line is that root of poverty is broken relationships going all the way back to the Garden of Eden, and in reality we are all poor. He says until we can sit down together as poor people and figure out what we can do to do help each other we won’t do much good and we might actually be doing harm.

I think this has huge implications for church planters and leaders. Do we really understand the needs of our community? Are we handing out bookbags and grocery cards because that is the best way to help the people around us, or are we just looking for a quick attendance boost. Is “missional” just a code word for “marketing”? What are the real needs of our neighborhood? What are root causes? How can we help?

We have to do the hard work of a missionary. To really understand the fabric of our community, not just the demographics. To get involved with those we want to serve rather than just giving hand outs. To focus less on winning people and focus more on loving people. To sit down together with other poor people and help each other find our way back to God.

What a great opportunity we discover in this article.  We must connect in a very real way to our community.  Social media offers a great bridge from the church to where people live each and every day.  Obviously, many of our community are not connected online in a social media community.  We must reach people online and with our feet on the pavement.  What an opportunity our generation has been given.

Spotlight Church is a powerful online community of pastors and church leaders, combining the experience of our member community, the resources and knowledge base of our partners and the momentum of social media to launch innovative ministry ideas.

Our newest opportunity for churches: The Spotlight Church Academy is a powerful membership program for Pastors & Church Leaders. In this environment, we learn together the important changes of the Internet, Social Media and other online evangelistic and relationship building tools.

I look forward to working with leaders around town and around the globe to reach more people, make a greater impact and share the good news with a new generation of people who are searching for hope and purpose!

-BG