Publicity advice
A practical guide to planning your parish communications
David Marshall introduces the issues to consider when planning your church communications.
On this page you will find some pointers for parish communications covering:
Types of people
Attitudes to communication
Planning communications
Techniques and times to act
Ignore these issues and you will miss some opportunities to maximise the response to your communications.
Types of people
I have a way explaining the difference between people. but simply, there are three types of people in the world and they all have different communications needs:
70% are browsers-need the information to be short, to the point, well designed or they will scan over the detail.
15% of the population are readers-they love words, will make time to read and not too bothered about layout or design. Most clergy and bishops are readers. The Church is very good at producing reader communications designed for other readers. However, many readers are now behaving like browsers because they are too busy to sit down for hours reading.
15 % are non readers-wordy document for this group are avoided unless there is an overriding interest (hobby magazines for example)
Mission is about targeting the browsers.
Attitudes to communication
There are three key starting points when promoting church events. To illustrate this imagine a carol concert run by a church. The choir sings every year, but the congregation numbers for the concert have started to fall. There are three ways to approach this:
1. We are wonderful (Product orientation)
When people encounter the organisation, product or service they will be attracted and ‘buy’. The carol concert would continue as before hoping it picks up.
2. We will convince (Sales orientation)
People may not want to buy at first, use persuasion and communication tactics to convince people that this is right for them. The carol concert content would remain the same, but the publicity for the event would be improved, ads in magazines, pewsheets, banners outside church, on website, articles in local paper.
3. We will listen and change (Marketing orientation) Wants to satisfy people. Market intelligence used to identify demands and then the ‘product’ is designed to satisfy them. It is not an attempt to change what people think but rather to give them what they want.
For the carol concert-a survey with the congregation is taken-it is discovered that the biggest complaint is that the choir sing nearly all the carols-people want to sing. They would also like a warm drink after the service.
The structure of the event is now changed to meet the demands of the target audience, publicity is then produced highlighting the fact that people will now sing more and a warm drink afterwards- ads in magazines, pewsheets, banners outside church, on website, articles in local paper.
The above is a real case study. The choir were shocked to discover how simple the solution was. It was agreed to make the changes-some choir members left because they wanted to do most of the singing and did not want to compromise, those who stayed had the joy of seeing a full church.
Adopting a Marketing Orientation can be quite threatening for the Church. How far do we go to change things?
However, many argue that God has often worked through those outside the Church and sometimes the spirit will communicate to us through them, asking us to change and welcome the stranger.
Planing your communications
Once you have deided if you are selling or marketing to browsers or readers, you can plan how you will tell them. You need to be ablt to write a positioning statement which looks something liek this:
For (target 1) …………………………(Your event) …………………………… provides/makes/gives/offers/brings etc (Their top benefit) ………………………
So, using the carol concert example above the positioning statemen might be:
For non-churchgoers the carol concert offers a chance to experience what christmas is really about through singing carols.
Use this document to work through how you can plan you communications.
Techniques and times to act
Having produced a strategy that targets browsers and has been research with your target audience, here is a check-list of techniques and timings.
Timetable
• Always give people at least three months notice
• Tell people about your event is a consistent way at least five times
Publications • Leaflet
• Poster
• Freebies
• Newsletter
• Magazine
• Prospectus
• Letter
Events • Display/presentation
• Award/launch
• Lecture
Press coverage
• Event
• Competition
• Survey
• Press Release
• Advertising (paid)
Electronic
• Email
• Web site
Budget
People judge the quailty of an event on the pre-publicty. Spending next to nothing on poor posters/leaflets can put browsers off. Go for full colour posters (30p per poster), use good photos (10p-£5 per photo), write the information to target browsers.
Evaluation
Often overlooked. How didi it go. Did you get the numbers of people you were wanted?
