Who Gives Them a Plan [Building A Storybrand Book Club: Chapter 7]

[This post is part of a Book Club book series where we take a deep dive into Building A StoryBrand by Donald Miller. To check out all of the posts, view the table of contents here]

In this chapter, we start to get into helping the character take action. That’s important as having a clear message is good, but we can then put people off with a confusing message on how to implement those ideas.

The plan provides evidence that you can deliver and how someone can take action. If these are clearly expressed, then you can provide evidence that you will help someone and the reader will know exactly what they need to do.

Don shares that we should provide, ideally three and no more than five, simple steps for what they should do next. These steps can be broken down into further action steps as well (so maybe your middle step is “set up your account” which has five different action steps).

To help provide proof that you will deliver, Don suggests having an “agreement plan” which states what each side needs to do.

Applying to ChurchMag

Being honest, this is probably an area where we don’t do so well in ChurchMag. Ultimately we want to provide consistent value over time with useful articles and even premium resources. To do that we need people to follow us or join our community on Facebook.

We have email-sign-up forms and we guide people on our podcast, but we could be clearer and we don’t have to leap to using a pop-up.

Some simple ideas are updating our about page to clearly state why people should subscribe and updating our option forms below our blog posts would be good first steps. Next, we could provide some clear paths of content to fulfill readers’ needs.

Applying to your Church?

There are a couple of simple ideas where this holds true for churches. For my church’s website, I added a “plan a visit” page which had a clear statement of our beliefs which is part of an “agreement plan”.

While I believe these are useful practical steps for churches, these ideas don’t stop here. Having a church member’s agreement can lay out the responsibilities of Church member’s as well as having the church leader’s responsibilities to the congregation too.

We can also provide plans for tithing, signing up for a conference or how to join a homegroup. By providing simple clear steps, we can help overcome inaction.

Provide a plan

Overall, I believe this lesson is very valuable for churches and not that difficult either. A quick simple step might be to create a “start here/visit us” page on your church website and coming up with simple steps to sign up for a ministry.

What are the details of “a plan” for your church?

Chris Wilson

Senior Staff writer, holder of the keys to the newsletter and writer of app reviews

I'm an English language teacher based in Krakow, Poland, writer, web designer and photographer. Get a free set of Stock bible photos here. Get "The Vital Church Website Checklist".