Visitor Follow-up
Joe Cala

Joe Cala is the author of, “Living Your Life Today—The Fool Proof Way!” and “The Proven Formula of Success!” traveling minister, seminar leader, creator of “The Next Step Visitor Follow-Up System”, contributor of Personal Excellence Magazine and the founder of ChurchSync and Joe Cala Ministries. Visit www.churchsync.com or contact Joe at 848-248-0730 or by email at [email protected] to set up a time for a FREE Strategy Session or to schedule on site training, leadership training and guest services training.

 

How Many More People Do I Want to Be Attending My Church By the End of This Year?

So many Pastors live week-to-week, month to month and year to year just waiting to see where they’ll be in regards to church growth. In talking to many Pastor’s they truly have a desire to see numerical growth in their churches but just sit back and see how it all turns out without putting together a plan. How many would you like to increase by? 50 people, 60 people, 100 people, etc…? 10%, 20%, 50%, etc…? Whatever the number or percentage is, by the end of this article you will have a solid plan to reach it.

It’s time to start being proactive and not just reactive in regards to visitor follow up. Faith without works is dead. If we never put an action plan together to help us move towards what we believe, then how do we expect to see the provision we are looking to achieve. Here are some strategies to help you get started.

1. Take Inventory
In other words; see where you are right now. Find out how many people on average attend your church on a weekly basis. If you don’t do this already, then start taking attendance each week. How many are really coming. In most cases, Pastors “evangelastically” increase their numbers when someone asks them how many are attending their church. If 100 people were there, about 150 or so attended according to them. Be truthful to yourself and find out where you are so you can begin to put together your plan for increase and growth.

2. How Many Visitors Came to Your Church
Find out how many visitors attended your services this year. Then find out how many stayed. This is vital. These numbers prove to you that God has been trying to grow your church. We don’t believe that people show up to our services by coincidence, right? No, we believe that they were someway or somehow led to our services by God. It is a Divine appointment. He is the best recruiter for our churches. He is constantly drawing people in. So how many people visited last year? Count all the visitor cards. If you don’t have them then here’s how you can find out how many visited and stayed.

For example: If you have 150 people currently attending on average, about 100 people visited last year and 10 stayed and became consistent attendees, then you originally had 140 people attending starting at the beginning of the year and increased your growth by 10% of the people who visited and 7% of the people who were consistently attending.

It’s so important to measure and track your data and records. This will help you see your results, strengths, weaknesses and opportunities in visitor and member retention.

3. Utilize “How Did You Here About Us?” on Your Visitor Cards
Why is this so important? Because this will help you see where your most effective avenue of influence is in bringing in new guests. This will also help you see where your not so effective areas are as well.

For example: If you are spending $500.00 a month on the Yellow Pages and most of the guests are marking that they heard about you through a web search and no one has marked yellow pages in 6 months then start redirecting those funds over to digital marketing to expand your presence on the web to be more effective in driving people through your doors.

Here are some, “How Did You Hear About Us?” lines to put on your Guest Cards. You can choose a few or use them all, it’s your call.
If you are marketing on radio:

If you are marketing on Radio _____ What Station? ______________________
If you are marketing on TV: TV ______
What Channel? _________________________
Driving By _______________________________
Friend or Relative _________
Name of Friend or Relative ________________________
Internet ___________
Which Search Engine or Site?
Google__ AOL __ Yahoo __ Bing __ YouTube __ MSN __ Facebook __ Twitter __
If you are marketing with Billboards: Billboard ____ Location ____
Other ____
Please tell us what other source you heard about us from: _________

4. Project How Many People You Want to Be Attending By The End of Next Year!

This is beginning with the end in mind. This is how faith works. Faith begins with the end in mind. It starts off seeing the provision and creates a plan to help allow the provision the easiest access to manifest into our lives.

For example: Your goal is that you want to grow by 50 people by the end of this year. That is the end result you want to reach.

So if you had 100 visitors this past year and want to grow from 150 to 200 attendees then based off of how you increased last year, (10%), you will either need 500 visitors to come in so you can retain 50 of them to grow to 200 from 150, or you will need to come up with an aggressive strategy to help retain visitors at a higher percentage. To break it down in months you then divide the number you want to grow to, (50) more, by 12 months and you come up with (4). This is the number of people you aim to grow the church by each month. If you break it down even further you are aiming to grow your church by 1 person every week to reach 50+ by the end of this year. This is not impossible. As a matter of fact it is very realistic, especially when you have a process in place to make it come to pass.

How many Pastors are really doing this? If you have your faith hooks sunk into a solid number to believe you will increase to then God has something to put substance to. Let’s start believing for specific increase not just increase with no number on it.

5. Start Putting Together Strategies & Outreaches to Attract Visitors to Your Services

Now that you know what you are aiming at and what you are believing for, then start having staff, board and creative meetings to come up with ways to attract guests. Here is a list of ideas you can visit and use. http://www.churchsync.com/how-to-get-visitors-to-attend.html

6. Follow Up & Follow Through

Have your Guest Services team develop a strong follow up process in order to retain those guests. Put together a detailed map of follow up from the same day they first visited till 40 days after they visited to keep your services, functions, encouragement and ministries in front of them.

7. Go After the One Which is Lost Until He Finds it!

Luke 15:4 (New King James Version) 4 “What man of you, having a hundred sheep, if he loses one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness, and go after the one which is lost until he finds it?

Notice it says, “What man of you, having a hundred sheep, if he loses one of them…”

This tells us that the sheep was in our flock first before it was lost. In other words, the sheep, the visitor, came into our church. When they leave and never come back, it’s not their fault. This verse doesn’t blame them for getting lost. It doesn’t say, “What man of you, having a hundred sheep, if one of the sheep gets lost, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness, and go after the one which is lost until he finds it?”

No it says, “if he loses one of them…” Who’s “HE”? The Shepherd of the sheep. If the visitor doesn’t come back the blame doesn’t fall on them, it falls on us. We lost them. This is why it is so important to do the rest of this verse. “Go after the one which is lost until he finds it!”  This is why it’s so important to come up with a short and long term follow up system that can continue to guide the visitor back through our doors and into the fold.

As you apply these strategies you will see growth in your church by the end of this year!

1. Take Inventory
2. How Many Visitors Came to Your Church
3. Utilize “How Did You Here About Us?” on Your Visitor Cards
4. Project How Many People You Want to Be Attending By The End of Next Year
5. Start Putting Together Strategies & Outreaches to Attract Visitors to Your Services
6. Follow Up & Follow Through
7. Go After the One Which is Lost Until He Finds it!

To discuss these strategies in further detail feel free to contact me today. Working together to make your church better.