Bring Branding Full Circle – Engaging Members to Become Active Participants

It’s time to bring Presidential branding full circle by turning those brand and website visitors into fully engaged participants and members who promote your brand for you. Once you have created an effective brand across all channels and have funneled website visitors into church guests, now do these two things to complete the branding cycle.

• Turn visitors into members
• Turn members into active & engaged brand evangelists

Turn Visitors into Members

According to Andy Anderson, author of The Growth Spiral: The Proven Step-By-Step Method for Calculating and Predicting Growth Potential in Your Church, almost 90% of guests will return to the church if someone follows up with them on the same day as their visit.

And, Lifeway Research reports that 10% of first time visitors become regular attendees. What does that mean for you?

Each church should have a thorough plan to follow up with visitors. And this plan should be consistently executed each week. Here are a few tips for your follow up plan:

• Have a plan that helps visitors get from the parking lot all the way to the worship area
• Have a welcome center open before & after the service to help answer questions
• Gather visitor information
• Create a dedicated teamwilling to follow up same day:
  • You could include a care package with things like fresh baked goods, relevant ministry information, and branded print materials
  • Equip them for a little on the spot evangelism with items such as:
    • Links to a sermon series on their smart phone or iPad
    • Branded tracks
    • Training on how to answer questions about their faith & your ministries
• Enter visitor info and results of in person follow up – could be a CRM, a local database or hard files; whatever you do, keep track, follow up and invite more engagement

Turn Members into Active, Engage Participants

So once your team has knocked it out of the park and a new attendee comes back to your church a few times, what does it take to get them truly engaged?

Here’s two key ways to do it:

• Engage them to serve in an area they are gifted in. When someone is doing something they love…and a task they were created by God to do…they are more fulfilled and engaged than ever. And, this gets them working alongside like-minded believers, building relationships. This leads us into another way you can engage members.
• Help foster relationship. Leadership needs to be the bridge between new attendees and long-term members. Even though, as a church grows, we can’t have relationship with every new attendee, we can equip our teams to be absolutely excellent at fostering relationship connection and growth. To do this effectively, you need to:
  • Make it easy to plugin
  • Make it easy to stay connected (on and offline)
  • Make it easy to spread the word (social media, e-invites, print materials)

Revisit our Word-of-Mouth post for more tips on creating a brand evangelist which brings this completely full circle, as it encourages current members to start doing outreach for you.

Presidential branding spans from building a brand across every avenue to drawing people deep into your organization to turning them into brand evangelists who spread the word for you.

Equipping your team with the right tools to better engage visitors and members is a key component of bringing your branding full circle. To experience how software can actually propel your visitor and member engagement to a new level, try out Ignite CRM for free.

[Image via Anikaviro]

Eric Dye

Support Lead at Valet, and Proprietor of DYECASTING. Human by day, gamer at night, lover of coffee, and all things spicy.