What if your online giveaway isn't working with guests anymore? (Facebook Live summary session 10)
As most of you already know, I believe an effective assimilation strategy has 4 componants:
One Place you send guests to get their contact info which drives them toward…
One Program they attend that automatically gets them into…
Two Processes (Your Small Group placement & Volunteer Placement Processes) which land them in…
Two Placements (A Small Group & a Ministry Team).
Now that most churches have an online campus (for some like us currently, that is their only campus), some are asking, “What is the future of our One Place to send guests when they are online and not physically present?”
Let’s start with the purpose of your One Place for guests, which is to get their contact info so you can begin building a relationship with them.
The purpose of the One Place you send guests to at every worship services is to get their contact info so you can begin building a relationship with them.
I often say, “She’s not your girlfriend unless you’ve got her phone number and they are not your guest until you’ve got their contact info.” You simply can not bring them from a seat to a circle, from spectator to guest, unless you can contact them and engage them in some kind of invitational conversation.
Since all our contact info is worth more than ever (think how people buy and sell contact lists for business purposes), it will cost us to get it. That’s why for years, most churches offer a welcome gift in exchange for that information.
But what if that giveaway no longer works in an online service?
If you are like me, you were confront with a big decrease in guests making themselves known to you during an online service. Every church I know by the 3rd week of the quarantine struggled to obtain what they needed from guests to begin a conversation with them. A phone number, an email, anything.
After much experimentation I have come to a new understanding of why people will share their identity with you online and a completely new perspective on the One Place for your Online Campus.
3 reasons why guests will share their contact info with you online
A Giveaway.
No surprise here. Except there is.
Giveaways (orange or steel tumblers in our case) were part of getting up to 6500 guests annually to make themselves known to us by sharing their contact info. Imagine my surprise when the first weekend of the quarantine when we were only online, a whopping 40 people made themselves known for a $5 Amazon gift card. The weeks that followed we had between 25 to 35.
What happened?
One thing I realized was that when it comes to value and relevance, perception is reality. The $5 Amazon gift card was over double the cost of our tumblers but probably perceived as less valuable. It’s relevancy was probably questionable too. An Eastside branded tumbler is visibly connected to our church and its vision. A small gift card to the largest online store in the world is a much weaker connection.
These were bread crumbs that led me to the second reason someone will share their contact with you online.
A Reason
The first exclusively digital Easter in history came on us all fairly quickly. Prior to it, we all felt the desire everyone had to stay connected in some and the drive to find hope, safety and confidence in the future. It almost felt like a modern day Cyber-Passover.
So Gene Appel our senior pastor began making a daily 4-minute video meant to anchor all of us to the hope God offers and to connect us to each other in whatever came next. We posted it on social media but offered it to the entire church via email by sign up. We were taken back as this reason to share their contact info revealed many guests signing up alongside our Eastsiders. We just kept track of those we had no previous profile for.
At Easter, we launched the 21 Days of Prayer. The whole church was going to participate as it offered videos from Gene and daily prayer prompts that tied into his new message series on Moses whose life demonstrated what it was like to walk with God while displaced, disrupted, and intimidated like we are were. Over a thousand people gave us their names that day, 295 of them were brand new to us. They just needed a reason, not a gift, to make themselves known to us.
This led to one more discovery as to why guests will make themselves known.
An Answer
After the 21 Days of Prayer were over, we shifted to another digital asset: our e-news. By May, we were getting around 15 people a week signing up to receive it just to get weekly info and a several more by signing up to find out when Next Steps was being offered and to get a zoom link so they could attend. They just needed some answers.
53 people made decisions to follow Jesus on Easter. Several others did in the weeks to follow. They all texted “Isaidyes” to get an answer to the question, “What is my next step in following Jesus?” We congratulated them all and sent them a link to Next Steps Online where they could learn about being baptized, reading the Bible, how to pray, getting in a small group, and finding a place to serve. They wanted answers to those questions so we gave them answers, obtaining their phone numbers so we could deliver them.
Answers can be generated from people who have not even attended a live service online or otherwise. Read about that here.
We are currently trying new things, things built on the lessons and pivots of the last few months of the quarantine. Learnings TBA. I hope you will share some of yours in the comments below so others can benefit. In the mean time, our One Place has become our “One Place of the Month” to reach the most people possible.
Staying nimble as we climb,
Want to go deeper?
Listen to the half hour facebook life that this summary came from by clicking here.
Take the Video Course that will soon get 4 new free bonus sessions added to it about online assimilation strategies, one of them based on the issue in this post.
