Church public relations strategies and practices

¶ … annual public relations strategy for a church in the area. The writer explores ministries offered by the church, evaluation of strengths, an inside public relations program as well as an outside public relations program. It also explores media mixes of television, radio and print ads. There were five sources used to complete this paper.

Whether we like it or not churches must compete to gain members. While the mission is to go out and to share the word of the gospel and to draw in God's sheep it cannot be done easily in today's technologically advanced world without some type of promotion. Our public relations and marketing departments have been working hard on a public relations strategy and campaign which will be implemented over the next year. The purpose will be to attract new church members while at the same time retaining the current members.

Public relations efforts work to provide reasons for people to come to or tune into the place or person that is the subject of the public relations campaign (Public, 2003).

This church offers a significant number of ministries for the members to belong to. This is done in the hopes that every member's spiritual need will be met through one or more of the ministries. Our ministries include the toddler ministry, youth ministry, teen ministry, college ministry, young adult ministry, married couple ministry, divorced couple ministry, single parent ministry, middle aged ministry, and senior ministry, and childless married couple ministry.

The ministries are geared toward age groups and lifestyle choices made by our church members. The public relations strategy will involve understanding the church's strengths so that we can build on those strengths to continue to service our members as well as attract new members. The strengths of the church include several services for all needs, a benevolence committee to help those who are in need, our pastors provide excellent services that are thought provoking and interesting, we have contemporary music while many of the churches around this area are still using old fashioned gospel music.

The church is easily located because it is right off the bypass on the only highway that goes through the entire town. Another strength of benefit of the church is that we are a come as you are congregation. When we sent out questionnaires to the community several years ago we found that many people do not attend services because they do not have clothes to dress up in or they do not feel comfortable dressing up. Soon after we promoted casual dress services for the first service of the morning and our membership almost tripled until we had to provide casual dress services for the first TWO services each Sunday as well as the evening service. This has become one of the strongest draws to get newcomers to attend a service and then the excellent work of our pastors keep them here. Another strength of the church is the youth program. Many youth programs include all ages but we limit our youth program from 5ht to seventh grade so that interests can be kept close together.

If you don't understand the differences between marketing, advertising, and public relations, it could be keeping you from using the best communications tool for maximum results (Hart, 2000)."

This expert advice is what we will use to develop our next year's strategy for public relations.

Our public relation strategy is going to be two fold. The first leg of the strategy is going to involve an inside public relations program. This program will be a new newsletter that will encourage members to go out into the community and tout the benefits of the church. The newsletter will be provided during each church service and will announce birthdays, awards of recognition, interesting trivia facts about the pastors as well as history tidbits about the church itself. This public relations campaign will be aimed at providing some feel good news each week to the members and staff members who attend the services on a regular basis. The newsletter will also have a comment section that members can fill in and drop into drop boxes with suggestions about how to present the church in the best light to the community.

The suggestions will be compiled and then reviewed by the public relations department of the church to determine which ones should be implemented and on what time table.

This inside public relations campaign will begin within the next month and will be mad a priority throughout the church departments. It will also promote many of the programs that the church offers so that members can be reminded the programs are their for their use. It will also provide the information so that members have something to discuss with newcomers as they welcome them to the church.

The outside public relations strategy will be different than they have been in the past. In the past we have used traditional church messages to try and attract new members and visitors. In the age of technology, rock and roll and other new age events in the world the traditional approach is no longer effective. We are going to blow it wide open with some extremely contemporary messages and challenges to the area residents.

We will stay in keeping with the doctrine in whatever we do but we will now begin to utilize many more contemporary measures in the attempt to attract people to the church. These measures are going to include a rock band that performs regularly and very loudly in local parks throughout the summer. The band will sing contemporary Christian rock songs and will open for secular groups. This is in the hope that those who come to listen to the secular music will get excited about the Lord when they hear our band and they will come to the services that are promoted through the show.

In addition, there will be billboard designs that will use extreme color and technology daring passerbyers to look at our web site and answer three trivia questions correctly. If they do we will send them a free pass for their entire family to eat free dinner on Wednesday night. This will be in the hopes that they will then attend the Wednesday night service and activities.

We will also provide colorful brochures in the local newspaper that will have scratch off prizes. The prizes will include free Wednesday dinner passes, church hats and bibles and other prizes that require the winner to come to a service to pick up.

The media mix for this upcoming public relations campaign will include newspaper ads that will be run weekly, Radio spots that will run every Friday evening and Saturday on a rotating schedule, television spots on our local free cable channels. The television spots will include skits and other performances by our various Sunday school classes.

We will also publicize several events in the upcoming year. We are of course going to provide heavy advertising about the rock group performances. We are also going to promote and advertise our Summer School and vacation bible study. In addition we are going to promote our Sunday school summer trips in local print and radio spots to entice newcomers to attend church so that they can attend the trips as well.