church Planting Fellowship

Well sorry we didn't have more time to pick apart what Amy, TJ and Bryce were saying a little more, hopefully we will be able to work through some of the topics over the next couple of months. I will be starting a resource page on our mnaog.org page that we will link to from here as well that we will have the resources available to you. I wanted to recap a little what was said some of which will be on the twitter update that we did.

Some big take-aways from Amy Clausen was to evaluate whether or not your public presence ie. website, mailer or any promotional materials portrays effectively who the church is. Always ask yourself who what where when and why. Amy briefly touched on this why point but I think it bears further discussion. You need to communicate to your "audience" why they need to come to your event, or ministry. Really try to think of your advertisement the same way your target community would. This is where the contextualism comes into play. What are you trying to say in the context of your community.
As a side note, you have to be very selective about what you are going to put on your mailer especially because it will quickly go in the trash if you don't grab their attention and when you overload you flier with all of your information then people will get bored with it faster and throw it out. A helpful idea for a mailer is to get them interested by designing it to communicate effectively but be simple with the necessary information but then you can point them to a website that they can interact with. Remember you want to give them the necessary info in the mailer the who, what ,where, why.

Bryce gave us a lot of jargon pertaining to web development along with a handout that explains most of it. I would suggest you use that as a cheat sheet when you need it. I will break some of that down in another post and where those terms come into play as you develop your web presence.

Unfortunately we didn't have a lot of time for TJ to talk to us, but one thing that he tried to be clear about is that this really is important. You really need to set aside some budget to develop your web presence and marketing materials. Here is what I got. First get some people together and write the "end users" story think about who you are trying to reach and write their story, what do they need, what are they looking for and create your strategy around that. Then find someone, if possible to help you develop your web site or marketing materials. As a pastor keep a handle on the big picture, but allow the designer to design and don't try to do everything yourself.

Those are some of the take aways that I got from our presenters. Let me know what you came away with.