Church Marketing: Market the Message AND the Community Formed by It

Posted on August 20, 2010 by Pastor Foley

Here’s a church-angled follow-up to our post last week, Marketing is what happens when relationship fails.

The blog site Q considers whether Christianity is amenable to being marketed as a “product”, ultimately deciding in the negative:

Let’s think for a minute about what Christianity is and why it doesn’t make a good “product.” For one thing, products must be subject to markets, yet God is not subject to the consumer needs or wants of any market. God only and ever deals on his own terms. His grace comes from within him and is bestowed on us as he pleases. It doesn’t come when we are ready for it or when we long for it. We struggle to fathom something that can’t be purchased “on demand” in this day and age, but Christianity is one such thing. God saves at his discretion and on his watch.

Good stuff. And yet the title of the post, Church: Marketing a Non-Commercial Message, implies an interesting assumption, namely, that what one would be marketing–were one to be marketing it (which Q suggests one should not)–would be “the message”:

Another reason why Christianity doesn’t make a good product is that it doesn’t lend itself to an easy commercial sale. Sure, there are appealing things about it, but there are also not-so-appealing things about it (um… taking up one’s cross, avoiding sin and worldliness, etc.). And although the Gospel is wonderfully simple in the sense that even a child can recognize its truth, it is also mind-blowingly complex in a way that doesn’t lend itself to thirty-second jingles.

The potential danger here is a slide into a conception of Christianity that can be adequately expounded entirely through propositions–a perspective on which Jesus makes an interesting comment in John 5:39-40 which is brought out nicely in The Message translation:

“You have your heads in your Bibles constantly because you think you’ll find eternal life there. But you miss the forest for the trees. These Scriptures are all about me! And here I am, standing right before you, and you aren’t willing to receive from me the life you say you want.”

So marketing “the message”–the propositional aspect of the Gospel–in disembodied form typically leads to “missing the forest for the trees”.

Marketing the embodiment of “the message”–the church community itself–is a concept that receives attention from Carol Howard Merritt in a Huffington Post piece from last week provocatively titled, Church Charity In The 21st Century. She relates a conversation she had at a party recently when a fellow partygoer asked her, “So what do you do?” When Carol answered, “I’m a pastor”, she received a notable reply from her interlocutor:

“Oh my God,” she responded. “I never knew why anyone would go to church. But last year, my mom got sick. She’s divorced, and I’m living hundreds of miles away from her, so I didn’t know what we were going to do. And her church totally took care of her. They brought her meals. They drove her to the doctor. They called me when anything out of the ordinary happened.”

“Yeah. That’s what the good churches do.”

“Really?” She looked completely confused as she continued, “I had no idea. You should really advertise that.” I laughed, and we talked for a bit more about her career. But, her initial comments stuck with me as I walked away and snagged a rare empty space on the couch. I looked at the crowd of mingling people, and the loud music triggered my thoughts. It never occurred to me that people wouldn’t know that churches care for the sick. What had church become in the minds of most people?

The last question is a fair one to ask and a painful one to answer. Carol posits a reply worth discussing:

While many civic organizations have become relics of the past, spiritual communities still thrive in our society, as a place of solidarity in all stages in life. In our sanctuary, there is a space where CEOs and homeless people sit together in the same pew. We’re a gathering where people from diverse ethnicities work with one another. It is a setting where the young and the old support each other when we’re in spiritual, emotional, or physical need. It is a place I can go to in times of faith or in doubt. When I’m too weak to hold any belief in God or myself, I know that a community holds it for me. And I can be strong for others when they falter. It is a sanctuary, in a broad sense of the term, where people can question and work to make the world a better place.

Two posts, two approaches to marketing the church.

The Book of Acts suggests a third and different approach, however: Since “the message” is incomplete unless it is embodied, the marketing of the church requires the presentation of both “the message” and the community formed by it if the transmission is to be complete.

Simon Sinek’s Start With Why is especially relevant in this regard. If we keep the “why” in mind, we’ll market neither the propositions nor the community separately, as the “why”–why do we feed the sick and visit the shut-ins, why do we gather together across age and economic boundaries, why do we stay together when we’re weak–links the two:

Any organization can explain what it does; some can explain how they do it; but very few can clearly articulate why. WHY is not money or profit– those are always results. WHY does your organization exist? WHY does it do the things it does? WHY do customers really buy from one company or another? WHY are people loyal to some leaders, but not others?

Q is right that we can’t just market the “what”. Howard Merritt’s “how” is compelling but incomplete. Church marketing–and Christian nonprofit marketing, too, for that matter–depends on the “why” for its power and persuasiveness.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

What’s The Best Donation You Ever Made Through a Nonprofit?

Posted on August 18, 2010 by Pastor Foley

The folks at WiseBread are running a contest where readers write in to identify the best purchase they ever made in their life.

While I was initially simultaneously transfixed and unnerved by readers responses to date–“6 years of school” and “a small house during grad school” sit side by side with Sara3903’s note that her best purchase ever was “laser hair removal”–I eventually came to and found myself asking:

What’s the best donation I’ve ever made through a nonprofit?

Two realizations initially emerged:

  1. I could think of a lot of meaningful donations I’ve made. None of the really meaningful ones that came to mind at first were ones I made through a nonprofit, however. That’s telling, and not in a good way for us nonprofit fundraiser types.
  2. For the number, variety, and amount of donations Mrs. Foley and I have given over the years, it was pretty sad that this was a hard question.

I know the folks at GiveWell might cluck their tongues that I didn’t rank order my donations by their effectiveness and efficiency, but as I reflected on the giving Mrs. Foley and I had done, I came to the conclusion that I would consider effectiveness to be necessary but not sufficient, and I think efficiency is typically defined in cold and dehumanizing ways.

In the end, I concluded that there were three types of donations Mrs. Foley and I had given that were my most favorite:

1.  Donations of personally meaningful gifts-in-kind

I’m talking here about really good stuff we hated to part with, not  junky stuff on its last leg. I thought of two cars that my family and I had donated to different homeless shelters over the years–cars that ran well and that we could have used for several more years, but cars that we felt we were under-using at the time and thus were better used by people who couldn’t afford them. I also thought of one Christmas when I was a student pastor, and how I and the family had purchased and anonymously donated through our church a brand new Nintendo video gaming unit to a woman whose husband had left her high and dry with four kids. We were dirt poor at the time, would have enjoyed the videogame unit ourselves, and spent our Christmas bonus to buy it. I’m not sure if that was effective or efficient, but the memory of it has stayed with me for more than 20 years. Maybe that’s why I like With This Ring so much. They teach people to give away their coolest stuff in order to help dig clean water wells in Africa and to teach others to give radically, too.

2. Donations that made a strong statement about a particular way we felt like a cause should be addressed

Here I thought of the gift Mrs. Foley and I made in the wake of the Haitian earthquake. I wrote about that here. What made it one of the best donations I’d given wasn’t just that I feel like the gift was efficient and effective. It was that I prayed about and deeply considered all the possible options and then chose the way that I myself felt the cause should be addressed. It was a gift of affiliation, a concept about which we wrote recently.

3. Donations we made as part of an overarching plan.

What also came to mind for me were our efforts to think through and carry out an overarching plan for giving, one that moved beyond causes about which we were already passionate and into causes about which we knew we needed to become more passionate and involved. It wasn’t the particular donation in and of itself that was the best; rather, it was the sense that we were maturing in our giving, carrying out a thoughtful plan of involvement that was comprehensive, proportional, and maturing in terms of the causes it encompassed and how it encompassed them.

The most interesting thing to me about the list I created was its repeatability. I had thought that “best gifts” could only occur once in a while, and that expecting each gift to be a best gift would be an unreasonable standard.

But as I looked at the list, I realized:

  • I can regularly give away items of value to me.
  • I can regularly make thoughtful gifts that express affiliation and particular ways of addressing a cause.
  • I can regularly give as part of an overarching strategy that moves my giving in the direction of my involvement in causes becoming more comprehensive, proportional, and mature.

The other thing I realized about the list was that no fundraiser could have made any of those things happen for me. They were intrinsic to my life and to the meanings therein. The nonprofit served as the platform, but not as the solicitor or meaning maker.

And how about your best gift?

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | 4 Comments

Can’t Figure Out How to Get Your Donors Involved? Try Videogames!

Posted on August 16, 2010 by Pastor Foley

So if you ask people to volunteer in your cause before you ask them to give to your cause, you’ll double your donation dollars.

But what if your cause is helping the people of Argentina and you’re trying to reach people in the United States?

Solution: Try videogames.

Check out this 20 minute TED masterpiece by Jane McGonigal entitled Gaming Can Make A Better World. McGonigal’s bio summarizes her approach:

Jane McGonigal asks: Why doesn’t the real world work more like an online game? In the best-designed games, our human experience is optimized: We have important work to do, we’re surrounded by potential collaborators, and we learn quickly and in a low-risk environment. In her work as a game designer, she creates games that use mobile and digital technologies to turn everyday spaces into playing fields, and everyday people into teammates. Her game-world insights can explain — and improve — the way we learn, work, solve problems, and lead our real lives.

In the TED video she describes three games her team has thus far created. My personal favorite:

We did a game called Superstruct at The Institute For The Future. And the premise was, a supercomputer has calculated that humans have only 23 years left on the planet. This supercomputer was called the Global ExtinctionAwareness System, of course. We asked people to come online almost like a Jerry Bruckheimer movie. You know Jerry Bruckheimer movies, you form a dream team. You’ve got the astronaut, the scientist, the ex-convict, and they all have something to do to save the world.

But in our game, instead of just having five peopleon the dream team, we said everybody is on the dream team, and it’s your job to invent the future of energy, the future of food, the future of health, the future of security and the future of the social safety net. We had 8,000 people play that game for eight weeks. They came up with 500 insanely creative solutions that you can go online, if you Google “Superstruct”, and see.

What can you do if your cause is so impoverished that <sniff> it doesn’t yet have a videogame associated with it?

Try Googling the name of your cause coupled with the word “videogame”. I Googled “North Korea videogame”, for example, and discovered a half a dozen titles that immediately began to foster ideas in me about how they could be used to promote one of Seoul USA’s core causes, supporting the underground church of North Korea. You might be equally surprised to discover that a game exists that relates to your cause.

A fair question to ask:

Does videogaming lead to real world involvement with the cause…or does it preclude such involvement by virtually “scratching the itch” to make a difference?

McGonigal contends that if it does the latter–if, in other words, the game is more immersive than reality–then that’s an indictment of the reality into which we invite donors:

Instead of providing gamers with better and more immersive alternatives to reality, I want all of us to be become responsible for providing the world with a better and more immersive reality.

Another solution is to check out Blitz Bazaar, which incentivizes real world involvement through an intriguing game structure–making us “jealous unto good works”, as it were.

Last word to Blitz Bazaar’s Lloyd Nimetz (who, by the way, not only spotted the McGonigal post in the first place but also is applying these concepts to getting people involved in helping Argentina):

What would happen if organizations put more energy and creativity into recruiting people’s time and skill instead of their money?  More concretely, what if civil society and government did a better job of tapping into the power of game-mechanics to drive civic participation?  My proposal:  social leaders should step up and set goals for ourselves.  Community leaders should set operational goals i.e. 10% increase in volunteerism & civic participation, and we should keep clear metrics.  Every university, school, organization, corporation, church, etc. in the nation could be put to the challenge.

How about you join me in making this a two-player game?

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , | Leave a comment