Five Simple Ways to Make Your Church Stickier

Another one by Geoff Surratt:

Five Simple Ways to Make Your Church Stickier (Pt 2 Navigating the Maze)
Posted: 17 Jan 2012 08:54 AM PST


This week we are talking about simple ways to make your church stickier. The idea for this series came from attending nine different churches recently and running into the same challenges (except at your church). Yesterday we covered one of the biggies which is helping your people be friendly and hospitable to new attenders. Today we’ll look at an area that is so obvious that many churches overlook it.

Make your church easier to navigate
 One way to solve the personal debt crisis in America is to make stores as difficult to navigate as many churches. Just figuring how to park is often an irritating early morning brainteaser. At a church we recently attended the main entrance to the parking lot was blocked by orange cones. There was no sign, no parking attendant, just orange cones screaming, “No room in the inn”.  Because we were determined to attend we found a secondary entrance and parked in the lot with the blocked entrance.  We often see signs at large churches that say “Lot full” with no indication of where we might be allowed to park. At one church we kept following signs and lot full signs until we were eventually dumped back out on the main street. Again, we eventually found ample parking on site, but we had to be determined. I have seen Do Not Enter signs on auditorium doors with no explanation or alternative. Can you imagine a sign on the entrance to Target "Store full, do not enter"?

Once we park it is often difficult to figure out where we should go. Which building is the auditorium? Where are the children’s rooms? Should I bring a pee cup, or does this church have onsite restrooms? These are the questions that many churches do not provide obvious answers to. On more than one occasion I have stood in the lobby and waited to see where the majority of the people seemed to moving toward to find the auditorium. Imagine standing with the fam at the front gate of Disney World with no indication how to enter the Magic Kingdom. That’s how new attenders feel when they arrive at your church.

Once inside church the challenges continue. Can I bring my soda (or coffee if you are one of THOSE people) into the auditorium? Do I find my own seat (like a movie) or will someone find a seat for me (like a play)? When do I stand, sit, hand over my wallet? Will I be forced to sing a solo? Approximately how long will this service last? Am I supposed to wash down the stale bread with a big swig from the cup of wine? These are the kinds of questions that normally I have to figure out on my own. Printed program guides are helpful, but I'm not sure if I should really sit and read while everyone else is standing and singing.

The challenge is what the Heath brothers in Made to Stick call The Curse of Knowledge. All of the regular attenders know how to navigate the church experience and they’ve forgotten what its like not to know. So how do you make your church easier to navigate? Here are a couple of ideas:

Get fresh eyes
As often as possible ask new attenders what obstacles they faced when they first attended. Get someone who doesn’t attend to try to navigate a weekend and give you feedback. Hire one of those “Secret shopper” services and see what they say. You can’t know what its like because you have the curse of knowledge, you need an outside opinion.
Retrain your host team
Make sure your host team is thinking constantly about the new attender. What message does this sign send? If we have to close an entrance how can we best explain the alternatives? Are we always scanning for that bewildered look and are we proactive about helping? What can we do each weekend to make the experience for the first time attender easire to navigate?


Start Here
A very simple but powerful idea of I’ve seen is a Start Here sign for new attenders. Most churches have welcome centers, connect tables, get acquainted tables, but a very prominent place that clearly instructs new attenders to Start Here would be awesome. (Even awesomer would be a cookie crumb trail from the parking lot to the Start Here center) The center needs to always be manned with friendly volunteers who can help navigate the experience. A simple one-page guide would be great. Not every small group and upcoming event, but a Disney type map and explanation of everything you need to know to expertly navigate the weekend experience. And a clearly defined Next Step. But we’ll get more into that tomorrow.

The bottom line is we should do everything we can to make our church at least as easy to navigate as the local Target. How has your church tackled this challenge?

Five Simple Ways Ways to Make Your Church Stickier

          Five Simple Ways Ways to Make Your Church Stickier

For the first time in our lives Sherry and I have the freedom to choose what church we attend. When we lived at home our parents chose for us, and after we got married we always attended the church I (and sometimes she) worked at. But now we are free to visit any church we want, so over the past couple of months we have visited nine different churches. In most cases we have gone as anonymous visitors and it has been an eye-opening experience. We have been surprised how difficult it is to fit in and connect at a new church. (If you know we attended your church recently I’m obviously talking about one of the other eight.) So this week I thought I’d share some tips on how to attract, connect and retain new attenders: Five Simple Ways to Make Your Church Stickier. None of these ideas are new or revolutionary, but I bet you think you’re church is a LOT better at each one than you really are. Trust me on this, they're not.
Let’s dive in with Simple Way One:

Make your church friendlier
I’m sure you assume your church gets a pass on this one; your church is one of the friendliest churches on the planet. When you walk in everyone says hi, you have a built in greeting time in your service when all the new people feel welcomed, and after church people hang around forever laughing and connecting. You’ve got the friendly thing down.
Let me give you an outsider’s perspective on the friendliness of your church. When I arrive one or two assigned people with big nametags smile and say hi. (At some churches the assigned greeters are either engaged in conversation with someone else, grunt hello, or just frown and hand me a bulletin.) Once I navigate past people in the lobby talking to people they already know I am placed in an isolation bubble called the auditorium. I sit with people who don’t acknowledge my presence in any way until the forced greeting time. “Turn and greet your neighbor before you sit down.” At most someone might crack a half smile, give their name and shake my hand. Normally I get a grimaced look, a quick handshake and a short, “Hi”. I don’t realize it at the time, but that is the last time anyone will make any contact with me at your church. After service I again have to navigate the lobby where people who already know each other have exclusive parties with other people who already know each other. Sometimes I stand in the lobby looking bewildered and feeling as out of place as a bikini in aDenver snowstorm, but no sees me. Finally I find my way back to the car feeling more alone than I did when I arrived. And in case you think its because I’m an introvert, my extroverted wife feels the same. Feeling alone and disconnected is the one experience we’ve had at almost every church we’ve attended.
So how do you make your church friendlier? Here are a couple of ideas (most of these I stole from others):

Teach on hospitalityTake a weekend (or a month) and teach your congregation how to be hospitable at church, in the workplace and at home. Hospitality has always been a hallmark of Christianity, so we need to teach on it.

Create a “gorilla greeter” team
Get as many people as possible to be gorilla greeters. Their job is to make sure they talk only to people they don’t know for the first ten minutes after they arrive and for the first ten minutes after the service is over. They don’t need lanyards or nametags (in fact that would defeat the purpose.) Their job is to find people who seem disconnected and figure how to connect them.

Adopt a “neighborhood”Divide your auditorium into sections and get leaders to adopt a section as their neighborhood. They commit to attend the same service each week, sit in their neighborhood and watch for new people who sit in the section. They become the small group leader of that section.

Give the greeting time a purpose of kill itFind a way to make the greeting time in your service purposeful. Why are you doing this? How can you make it more effective? Is it accomplishing the purpose you designed it for?
How has your church worked on friendliness? What has worked and not worked?

How an Idea Becomes a Reality - Mark Driscoll

How an Idea becomes a Reality

1. Vision
   1. Can come to a leader or from the leader
   2. Something new to try, a new idea, a new goal or plan
2. Plan
   1. Answering the questions
   2. Can we do this
   3. Should we do this
   4. Who will it involve
   5. What will it cost
   6. What staff or volunteers do we need
3. Implement
   1. Date is set
   2. Resources allocated
   3. Notification given
4. Manage
   1. If not managed well, will die
   2. Volunteers drop off
   3. Money dries up
5. Review
   1. Evaluate the goals and performance
   2. Is there a good return on investment
   3. Has it lost its mission and vision
   4. Corrections made here
   5. Modify or Kill happens here
   
   

Adapted from Mark Driscoll