Focus For Healthy & Sustained Growth
Joe Cala

As we continually study the trends of church growth and visitor retention we’ve nailed down a few areas in which we need to examine in order to maximize our opportunities in building healthy sustained growth.
 
I want to emphasize HEALTHY and SUSTAINED growth simply because there are many churches that are growing in an unhealthy way, compromising their message to bring numerical growth, along with other churches that have peaked fast, couldn’t handle the growth and instead of sustaining, they quickly diminish. Then there are the churches that are steadily increasing and growing strong in numbers as well as growing strong in their spiritual development.
 
The goal is Healthy & Sustained Growth. So what does that mean? Healthy growth is growth that is sound & prosperous. This is growth that comes from a healthy balance of nutrition from the word of God to the congregation, through services, ministries, conferences, and other channels used to allow the influence of the Word and the Spirit to minister to the person and affect a change in them. This is also achieved through social connections, groups and intellectual activities. This is a church that ministers to the spirit, soul and body. The ministry to all areas of humanity will provide a healthy balance to life, which in turn creates an atmosphere to attract people to stay and invite others to be a part of what’s happening there.
 
As we look at healthy and sustained church growth I’d like to focus on three areas. These are not the only areas that need focus but the three areas of focus today. Although we won’t touch on this one area involving the right people, the people and relationship aspect must always be front and center to aiding in providing healthy and sustained growth. So as we look at these three areas we are not dismissing the other areas not mentioned or fully focused on today.
 
Here are three areas to focus on:
1. Visitor retention is far more significant than visitor volume.
2. The right process translates to forward progress.
3. Listen to your visitors.
 
1. Visitor Retention is Far More Significant than Visitor Volume

This point in no way minimizes the importance of visitor volume. However, visitor volume is only maximized if a process for visitor retention is in place. Thank God for visitors coming in, but if we don’t have a process in place to harness them and channel them into the flock then we’re not handling God’s most precious treasures properly. God is sending the people and we’re just barely retaining between 10-17% of the ones that are coming in.

Years ago we didn’t maximize the opportunities that we had in our church as best as we could regarding visitor retention. We had a fantastic, God inspired idea. Our Pastor decided that we as a church were going to have a Fall Festival in October. We would rent the park in the center of town and have FREE Games, FREE Inflatable Rides, FREE Food, FREE Giveaways, FREE Drinks, FREE Face Painting, FREE Balloons, FREE Shirts, FREE Concert, FREE EVERYTHING for EVERYONE! It was incredible! We registered over 5,000 people in one day! Let me say that again! 5,000 people! A church of 200 members had 5,000 visitors experience our church event! Holy Cow! We actually had MORE than we expected for the first time ever! In usually being disappointed with the turn outs of past events this one actually worked. It worked so good that for some reason we weren’t going to do it the next year but the town pretty much made us because it was so good! Imagine that! An ungodly, non-Christian based Chamber of Commerce called us to have it! WHY would they do that you might ask? Simply because we were serving the community? As awesome as this was, we were in great anticipation to see how packed our service would be the next day and we couldn’t wait for the tremendous growth we were going to experience. However, to pretty much all of our surprise, we had only 1 visitor come to service the next day. After that, we never reached out to the people who came and filled out their registration cards. We just thought that they’d surely come to the church after we were so nice to them, but instead only about a total of 5 or so showed up in the next few months to come.

So what happened? We had an awesome opportunity but never maximized those visitors by putting together a process to retain them and get them connected into the church in which the Lord most likely drew them to. We prepared more on the event, then on how we would channel them back through our doors within the next few months after the event. We were more excited about the one time opportunity then we were working on helping them become a lifetime member.

Can you relate to having an event or function at your church that drew many people and afterwards never be able to fully maximize the guests that attended by getting them to continue to come back to services on a consistent basis? Have we forgotten why we do fundraisers, have conferences, have events and fellowships and every other thing we do? Yes to minister the Word! Yes to plant seed! Yes to water seed! Yes to harvest souls! But once we do all of that one time, what are we doing about getting them back again to do it again, and again, and again, and AGAIN!

“OUTSIDE THE BOX” THOUGHT OF THE DAY!

Here’s a great idea to help capture visitor information and allow you as a church to become more socially visible, that I can probably say with confidence that MOST CHURCHES ARE NOT DOING!

Have an area set up in your Guest Services Center with some iPad’s, tablets or laptops setup to allow people to Tweet that they are at your church, or check in on Facebook or Four Square that they are at your church and if they do provide them a gift BEFORE service in addition to the one they will get after service for visiting. Reward them for their participation.

2. The Right Process Translates to Forward Progress

So at the end of the day, we need a process to help us stay on track in retaining the people God sent to us. So what is a process? A process is defined as: A sequence of interdependent and linked procedures which, at every stage, consume one or more resources (employee time, energy, machines, money) to convert inputs (data, material, parts, etc.) into outputs. These outputs then serve as inputs for the next stage until a known goal or end result is reached.

So what is our known goal, or end result that we are aiming at to reach. Without this being clearly defined the process will not work properly. So for this purpose, our known goal is generally visitor retention. For example, specifically we want to grow by 50% this year. So now that we have the end result, what do we need to do to achieve this and reach our desired results? We now need to put together the individual interdependent and linked procedures necessary to turn our guests in to consistent returning members.

To help determine this process let’s see what we will need in Resources.

Resources:

1. The Right People
2. Visitor Card
3. Phone
4. Computer
5. Church Email Account
6. Church Youtube Account (optional for emailing links)
7. Email Templates
8. (Generic, Specific, Special Event, Guest Speaker, Testimonies, Happy Birthday, Happy Anniversary, Bookstore Discount Coupons, Café Coupons, Updates, Surveys, Questionnaires, Holidays, Video Links to YouTube)
9. Library of Letters
10. (Generic, Specific, Special Event, Guest Speaker, Testimonies, Happy Birthday, Happy Anniversary, Bookstore Discount Coupons, Café Coupons, Updates, Surveys, Questionnaires, Holidays)
11. Phone Scripts
12. Visitor Gifts
13. Program to store new visitor, potential and existing member information and data
14. Visitor email addresses, mailing addresses, phone number and contact names
15. Web-site (Updated and Fresh)
16. Invitation Cards (Events, Outreaches and Service)
17. Search Engine Optimization
18. Digital Marketing Campaigns
19. Facebook & Social Media

Now that you have your resources, here is an example process to help manage the follow up of a first time visitor after they visit. Your process is your action plan to reach your new visitors, potential members and existing members. Most churches only follow up with a guest for one week, sending an email, a letter and making a phone call. Here is a sample 40 day follow up process. This is only an example and can be changed and customized per church. You can adjust the amount of emails, phone calls, letters sent and gifts as you want, but let this give you a guide to start you in the direction of thinking of a long term follow up campaign.

16 Emails 4 Phone Calls  2 Letters 2 Gifts

The third important area of focus is:

3. Listen to Your Visitors

Your visitors will tell you how they want to be reached if you ask them the right questions on your visitor cards, when following up with them and while they’re at the church that day. I wrote about this last time on Tony Cooke’s Website under, Have You Looked at Your Visitor Cards Lately? This will also help you in developing a strategy to assist in your visitor retention processes. You can ask the right questions when you make your follow up calls after they visit to determine how people want to be handled, how they were handled and how you can adjust to properly handle them the next time they and other visitors come back. Your people and the community you live in will help you reach them if you will listen! As the scripture tells us in James 1:19 (NLT)… “You must all be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to get angry.” There is great wisdom in this verse that will help us in achieving our goals to reach Healthy & Sustained Growth for our churches. I trust these areas of focus will help work together with you in making the church experience for guests better!

Joe Cala is the Founder & CEO of ChurchSync and Joe Cala Ministries. He has authored, “Living Your Life Today The Full Proof Way!” “The Proven Formula of Success!” and Has created “The Next Step Visitor Follow Up System!” He is a seminar leader, traveling minister, contributor to Personal Excellence Magazine and editor of automotiveinternetsales.com. Visit www.churchsync.com for tons of Visitor Retention Strategies. Contact Joe at 848-248-0730 or by email at [email protected] to just say hi, schedule a seminar, on-site training, leadership training, and guest services training.