Things We’ve Done to Connect with Our Community – Part 1

At our multi-site staff meeting the other day, we were discussing what some campuses are doing to get the word out about their church. I made a long list of things we did at FOSM. Some worked and some didn’t. I want to share a few here now. I’ll do the other parts later…

1) Mailers – These work for some churches and not for others. We’ve had really great success with mailers. Our last mailer went out before Easter. We had our best attendance ever.

2) Cable TV – In our area, local network TV reception is very spotty. We are not a major media market. We are in the middle of two big cities, Austin and San Antonio. There are roughly 30,000 cable “homes” in our market. Pretty crazy when you consider that our town has about 50,000 people. A little over 20,000 are households and the rest are dorms at Texas State. For a couple hundred bucks a month we could advertise in the dorms at Texas State on ESPN and MTV. With auto-fill spots, our money would buy us about 600 spots a month! We would get visitors just about every week who came because of the commercials.

For Easter, we did a spot that matched the look and feel of the mailer. I think that increased the effectiveness of both forms of media.

3) Newspaper – not much luck here. Our local paper is a good paper, but it has low subscription rates. They only sell a few thousand a day. We never saw much return when we advertised in the local papers.

4) Local Theater – Our local theater gets close to 1/2 million visits a year. It’s a nice, modern, clean, etc. theater. It’s the only one of it’s kind within a 20 mile radius. For about a hundred bucks a month a non-profit can advertise on all 12 screens before the movie. We would consistently see visitors at FOSM because of these ads.

We have a good relationship with the local guy who sells the media for TV and the theater.

In Part 2 – Facebook, flyers in businesses, business cards, and breakfast tacos….

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