TABLE OF CONTENTS
WHAT’S IN THE NEW VISITOR SUCCESS KIT? 3
INVITING PEOPLE TO COME TO CHURCH 3
Getting your church to start inviting others 4
Motivating your church to invite their friends 4
Share testimonies in church 4
Thank people for inviting their friends 4
Creating a social media invitation strategy 5
Encourage social media use in church 5
Use the church’s Facebook page for invites 5
Update the church’s Facebook cover image 7
Put Facebook events to use 8
Invitation cards 9
Invitation card content 9
Invitation card sample 10
Flyers 11
Flyer sample 11
Creating a website invitation page 11
DELIGHTING VISITORS 12
Church signage 12
The parking lot 12
The lobby 13
Visitor/contact cards 14
Getting the info you need 14
Incentivizing contact information 14
Tear-off visitor cards 15
Sample 15
BRINGING VISITORS BACK - FOLLOW-UP EMAILS 16
Email #1: Thank you! 16
A word about church apps 16
Email #1 sample 16
Email #2: We’re looking forward to seeing you again! 17
Email #2 sample 17
CREATING A VISITOR STRATEGY 17
2
Any church that wants to grow will make sure it’s properly prepared for visitors.
Does your church have a clearly communicated strategy to invite new visitors?
What’s your plan once they show up?
It’s easy to forget that visiting a church is scary. Even if guests have some kind of
church background, they’re still not sure exactly where to go, what to do, or how
to act in your church. And if they’ve never been to church before, they’re even
more worried. They’re genuinely concerned that they’re going to do something
wrong and everyone will know they don’t belong.
For the new visitor, this apprehension can turn your simplest miscommunications
into reasons not to return. You might think that people can intuitively figure out
your system for childcare—not realizing that, in their tense state, the slightest
ambiguity can be overwhelming.
You also need a foolproof plan to get visitors’ contact information so you can
reach out to them again and get them to return.
WHAT’S IN THE NEW
VISITOR SUCCESS KIT?
We put together the New Visitor Success Kit so that you can create your church’s
ideal visiting blueprint. In the kit, we’ll help you think through strategies for:
ÎÎ Encouraging your congregation to invite more people
ÎÎ Creating a great first impression
ÎÎ Engaging with your guests after they’ve visited
ÎÎ Getting visitors to come back
We’ll also teach you how to create assets like invitation cards, contact forms, and
email templates that work.
Once you implement the suggestions in this kit, you’ll be on your way to be-
coming the kind of church people want to invite their friends to—and the kind of
church visitors can’t wait to come back to!
INVITING PEOPLE TO
COME TO CHURCH
Many churches have great music, powerful messages, and life-changing minis-
tries . . . but no one knows about them. No matter how wonderful your church is,
you still need to actively bring people through your doors.
That’s why you need a clear invitation strategy.
3
Back in 2009, LifeWay Research and the North American Mission Board found
that 67 percent of Americans would visit a church if they were personally invited
by a family member, and 63 percent said that an invitation from a friend would
likely get them to visit.
When you get down to it, there’s no outreach technique that is as effective as
inspiring your congregation to reach out to the people around them—and giving
them the tools to do so.
Getting your church to start inviting others
The hardest part of teaching your church to invite others is helping them get over
the awkwardness of asking. They’re worried about coming across as pushy or
aggressive. They’ve sensed resistance in their friends and family before, and they
don’t want to hurt the relationship.
They need to see the importance of inviting people to church. Everyone has a
responsibility to share the gospel with the people around them, and inviting their
loved ones and acquaintances to church is a low-risk, high-impact way to do
that. It’s also a way they can take part in helping the church to grow.
We’ll get into specific invitation tactics for your congregation to use in just a mo-
ment. But before we do, we need to cover an important issue: how to motivate
your church members to invite people.
Motivating your congregation to invite their friends
This is crucial. The best invitation card design in the world won’t attract any new
visitors if nobody hands it out!
You need your members to want to invite people. And that motivation might not
be as difficult as you think it is. Here’s how to make it happen:
Share testimonies in church
Provide plenty of opportunities for people to share their testimonies on Sunday
mornings (or during other events), and highlight the stories in which people dis-
covered a relationship with Jesus because of an invitation to attend church. This
will not only encourage church members to be brave in inviting others, but it will
also help them make the connection between their invite and the potential salva-
tion of people that visit.
Thank people for inviting their friends
When someone visits your church because of an invitation, praise the person
who invited them. Don’t do it during the service—that makes visitors feel like
they’re some kind of project. But give the person who issued the invite a phone
call or email, thank them for reaching out to others, and let them know how im-
portant it is.
Positive reinforcement goes a long way!
Now that we’ve covered how to get your congregation to want to invite people,
let’s take a closer look at ways they can pull this off.
4
Creating a social media invitation strategy
When it comes to inviting others to church, social media is infinitely helpful—if
you’re using it well. With one Facebook status update, your church members can
reach nearly everyone in their sphere of influence. This is a huge opportunity.
Social media is great for piquing the curiosity and interest of friends. You can use it
to give people a sense of your church’s culture and values. You can talk about the
service projects you’re involved in and build hype for an upcoming sermon series.
The only problem with platforms like Facebook is that they’re too impersonal
for the actual invitation. It’s a lot more difficult to look someone in the eye and
turn down a verbal invitation than it is to simply scroll past it on Facebook. That
means you really need to be strategic in the way you use social media.
Encourage social media use in church
I’ve been to a lot of churches where congregants are encouraged to turn their
phones off and put them away. Stop doing that! If people have their phones out,
it doesn’t mean they’re distracted—it could mean they’re involved. In fact, their
phones probably house the Bible they brought to church.
You want people tweeting things that are said in the service. You want them tak-
ing pictures of the service and posting them to Facebook. This kind of posting is
helping communicate what your church is like, and, more importantly, it says that
people who go there are excited about their church!
Use the church’s Facebook page for invites
When you’re starting a new sermon series, post a teaser and an invite on the
church’s Facebook page. You can use a video or text. If you decide to use text,
make sure that you include an image, too.
Encourage congregants to share and comment. This is how the invite is going to
get pushed into their friends’ news feeds.
Here are a couple tips for this teaser:
ÎÎ Ditch church language and Christian jargon. You don’t want people
without a Christian background to feel like this isn’t for them.
ÎÎ Focus on the benefits. If you’re teasing a series on marriage, you don’t
necessarily want to talk about the biblical text you’ll be using. You want
people to know how this series is going to help their marriage.
ÎÎ Include the important details. Even though this is getting shared from the
church’s Facebook page, make sure to mention the church, the service
times, and the church website. If you’re expecting the person reading/
watching this to look up the pertinent information, you’ve lost them.
ÎÎ Issue an invitation. Don’t forget to actually invite people. The invitation
can be as simple as, “We’d love to see you this Sunday.”
You can use the same strategy for creating shareable invites for major services
like Easter and Christmas, or for events like baptism services and church barbecues.
5
SAMPLE:
6
Update the church’s Facebook cover image
Use your Facebook cover image as a place to communicate stuff that’s going on.
If you have a designer working on assets for a new sermon series, have them put
together a Facebook cover image, too.
The nice thing about regularly updating your cover image to reflect what’s hap-
pening is that people in your congregation can share the image themselves and
use it on their own profiles.
Since you want this image to get shared and used by others, make sure you in-
clude the church’s name and service times.
SAMPLE:
7
Put Facebook events to use
Events are Facebook’s secret weapon. They’ll allow your church to put together
an event and invite everyone who’s liked your page to attend. What’s particularly
awesome is that attendees can invite people as well.
You don’t want to overuse it, though. It’s probably best to save Facebook events
for really important church gatherings: Christmas and Easter services, baptism
celebrations, neighborhood barbecues, and really special sermon series.
Here’s what you’re going to want for your Facebook event
1. An official name: Don’t be generic. You don’t want to just call it
“Barbecue.” You want a fun and attention-grabbing name like “All-day
community shindig and soirée!” You want it to stand out, and you want it
to be easy to remember so people can talk about it.
2. A clear description: If you want people to come, you’ll invest time in
writing a really informative and catchy description. Don’t just give them
the facts; entice them.
“Relationships are what make community so important, but only around 20% of Americans in-
teract with their neighbors at all. Let’s change that! Come to Redeemer Community Church’s
All-Day Community Shindig and Soirée and start building the kind of relationships that can
make our community a safe, fun place to live.
We’ll serve the typical barbecue fare: burgers, hot dogs, potato salad, chips, and soda. Feel
free to bring a side dish or a dessert, or just show up! We look forward to seeing you! The
event is FREE and will be held on the grounds of Redeemer Community Church.”
3. A recognized venue: If it’s at all possible (and it usually is), use a venue
that Facebook recognizes. This way, when people hover over the location,
the page for that venue will pop up and give attendees more information.
4. A stunning event photo: It’s important that you have a photo that really
makes people want to attend. A poorly rendered, stretched, or bad
photo isn’t going to encourage people to come to your event. You want
an inviting and eye-catching image. The ideal image dimensions for
Facebook events are 1920 x 1080 pixels.
5. Permissions to post on the event wall: When you’re creating the event,
you have the option of only allowing the host to post. Fight the urge. You
want to be able to answer questions that come up and build community
and excitement around the event by having people talking to each other
in the comments.
6. An end time: Facebook requires a starting time for your event, but end
times are optional. And although you titled your event the “All-Day
Community Shindig and Soirée,” you’re going to want to have an end
time listed. Having an ending time will help potential attendees not feel
like they’re expected to hang out longer than they want to.
Once the Facebook event is up and running, you can also invest some money
into running some targeted Facebook ads to people in your community.
8
Invitation cards
Lots of churches are using invitation cards because, frankly, they work. They give
church members something physical to accompany a verbal invite. For some
people, this can make an invite feel a little less awkward. And it gives people
who’ve been invited a tangible reminder about the service.
Training is the key to getting people to use invitation cards. This includes rein-
forcing the importance of inviting others and even role-playing different sorts
of conversations that will help congregants get over the anxieties of extending
invitations.
But the most important thing that can be done is to draw attention to the invi-
tation cards every Sunday. This is about more than simply mentioning them. It’s
about devoting about five minutes per service to pointing them out, connecting
them to the church’s vision, and encouraging people to put them to good use.
Invitation card content
Invitation cards are relatively cheap to produce, which means that you can create
generic ones and have cards made for specific sermon series or special services.
Your invitation cards should include at least the following elements (and not
much more):
ÎÎ Eye-catching images: You want people to actually read and save this
card, so it needs to be visually arresting. If it’s for a sermon series, you’ll
want to have an engaging image that really speaks volumes about the
series’ content. If it’s a generic invite, you can focus on your church’s
brand as the design’s central element.
ÎÎ Captivating text: You want to communicate the most important things
in the most compelling way possible—but the key is to focus on brevity.
If it’s an invitation for a sermon series, you want the series title and a
snappy, one-sentence summation of the series. For generic invitations,
you can put the tagline your church uses on the front and an invitation or
information about the church on the back.
ÎÎ Important information: Make sure you include
• Church name
• Service times
• Address
• Website
• A call to download your church app
9
INVITATION CARD SAMPLE:
10
Flyers
Laugh if you want, but flyers are still a good way to get information out about an
upcoming sermon series or special service. It’s likely that your town has a lot of
bulletin and community boards where you can put up handbills for your church.
Check out places like Starbucks, Panera Bread, laundromats, or anywhere in
town that puts flyers up in their windows.
FLYER SAMPLE:
Creating a website invitation page
As you make new flyers and invitation cards, it’s not a bad idea to put them on
your church’s website where people can download them. In fact, this is a helpful
place to have training materials, testimonies, and links to helpful posts and arti-
cles about friendship evangelism. Consider putting these resources on a page
with a URL named something like RedeemerCCSeattle.org/invite.
11
DELIGHTING VISITORS
Once you get people visiting your church, you need a strategy for making them
feel comfortable. Think of it as removing all the obstacles they might use to talk
themselves into not returning.
This means walking through a church service with the eyes of a potential guest.
What do they experience as they pull into the parking lot? Do they know what to
do next once they step into the foyer? Are the expectations clear for checking in
their children?
Church signage
I was doing some consulting for a church and immediately noticed that there
was no signage inside. It was a very nice lobby area, but a visitor would walk in
and have absolutely no idea where to go. When I pointed this out, I was told that
there were a number of people who felt that signage would make the church look
tacky and that they opted for elegance instead.
When it comes to a church’s mission, clarity is elegance. The ultimate goal isn’t
to make people think, “Wow. This is classy.” It’s to make them feel comfortable.
Besides, if you do it right, you can create signage that doesn’t clash with your
church decor.
The parking lot
When the church service is about to start, walk out to your parking lot and take a
look around. If you were a visitor pulling in right now, what would the experience
be like? Would you have to circle the lot to find a place to park?
It’s wise to have a section up front that
is reserved for visitors. This will stop
regulars from taking up the best parking
SAMPLE:
spaces and make room for important
Sunday morning visitors.
Depending on your parking lot size, you
can put up individual signs over a few
spots that say “Reserved for Visitors.”
If your lot is larger and you’re able to set
aside more than a couple spaces, you
can set them apart with a larger “Visitor
Parking” sign and colored spaces. This
gives well-positioned greeters the ability
to see visitors coming before they make
it to the door.
12
The Lobby
Once they’re inside the church, visitors should be able to see signage pointing
out the following:
ÎÎ Sanctuary (You may use another name for this, like “auditorium” or
“worship center.” No matter what you call it, it should be clear to
visitors—especially if the door is kept closed.)
ÎÎ Restrooms
ÎÎ Child care
ÎÎ Children’s and youth ministry rooms
ÎÎ Sunday school classes
ÎÎ Visitor center
For larger buildings, some churches have created really attractive directional
signposts that help visitors get headed in the right direction.
SAMPLE:
13
Visitor/contact cards
Getting your visitors’ information is important. Knowing how to get and use con-
tact information offers your best opportunity for getting visitors to return to your
church. But many churches will tell you that they’ve struggled to get people to
actually fill out and turn in the contact information.
A lot of that stems from contact cards that require too much information. Many
contact cards want a physical or mailing address, age group, children’s names,
marital status, etc. People aren’t always ready to give out that information when
they’re not committed to a church.
To really excel with contact cards, you need to make it as simple as possible for
visitors to give you their information and, if possible, you need to incentivize it.
Getting the info you need
When it comes to contact forms, I’d encourage churches to be really choosy.
Most generic contact forms try to be all things to all people and have too many
fields. You need to know exactly what information your church needs and resist
the urge to ask for more. This is one form you should definitely consider creating
in-house.
Get rid of any information you don’t need for follow-up. Not planning on a visita-
tion or sending physical mail? Then don’t make visitors fill out address fields. The
easier it is to fill out contact information, the more likely you are to get what you
need. (Plus, shorter forms feel much less invasive.)
If you have a plan to use them, a name and an email address can be the min-
imum required fields. People don’t want phone calls and are nervous about
handing out their address, but they’re not too worried about giving out their email
address. (We’ll talk about what to do with those email addresses in a bit.)
Incentivizing contact information
Want more visitors to fill out your contact cards? Give them an incentive!
Pastor Todd Stevens from Friendship Community Church in Mt. Juliet,
Tennessee, wanted to address the poor return of visitor cards. Too often, visitors
just don’t fill them out or turn them in. So he announced that for every visitor card
that was turned in with the offering, Friendship Community Church would donate
$25 to a local non-profit on guests’ behalf.
The money was donated in the visitor’s name that day—and by Monday, the visi-
tor had received either an email or physical thank-you note from the non-profit for
the donation. Pastor Stevens saw a 95 percent increase in visitor card success.
It also helped communicate to the visitors that Friendship was a very generous
church that had relationships with local non-profits. Since incorporating this
change, the church has seen 80 percent of all its known visitors staying on and
becoming members.
14
Tear-off visitor cards
When greeters meet visitors at the door, they can hand out visitor cards. These
cards might have a map of the building, explain the child check-in process, give
information about the service order, or include any other pertinent information for
first-timers.
If you create perforated visitor cards with a tear-away section for contact infor-
mation, this can be used to get people to share their information. For instance, if
your church has an espresso machine, visitors could be instructed to trade the
tear-away section for a free drink of their choice.
Visitor cards should be bright enough to be noticed by church members.
Encourage your congregation to introduce themselves to anyone they see with a
visitor card and make sure that they’re finding their way around.
SAMPLE:
15
BRINGING VISITORS BACK
When it comes to bringing new visitors back to church, email is one of the most
powerful tools at your disposal.
Once visitors’ contact information is added to your church database, you should
have a couple templated emails going out to them during the following week.
They should get the first one on Monday, and the second one should be sent on
Saturday morning.
Email #1: Thank you!
The first email should thank them for attending. It should also provide contact
information for the pastor (and any opportunities to connect) and instructions for
downloading the church app.
Ideally, the email will come directly from the pastor’s email address and be signed
by the pastor.
A word about church apps
If you don’t have a native church app, you’re missing out on an amazing oppor-
tunity to continue to connect with visitors after their first visit. Your app gives
people the chance to familiarize themselves with more of your teaching and dis-
cover the things that are important to you.
Your app allows them to listen to your sermons while they’re in the car, at the
gym, or getting ready for work. The more exposure they have to your ministry, the
more likely it is that they’re going to come back.
EMAIL #1 SAMPLE:
Good to see you!
Steve at Redeemer
Dear ________,
Thank you for visiting Redeemer Community Church! I hope you felt welcomed and
comfortable.
If you’d like to see what Redeemer Community Church is all about, please download
our mobile app, which is available from the Apple or Google stores. You can listen
to more messages, read our latest blog posts, and see what kind of events we have
coming up!
We take community very seriously at Redeemer, and we’d appreciate any opportunity
to serve or pray for you. If there’s anything we can do, please let me know!
God bless,
Pastor Steve
16
Email #2: We’re looking forward to seeing you again!
In your follow-up email, you’re inviting them back by letting them know what to
expect and that you’ll be looking for them.
EMAIL #2 SAMPLE
See you tomorrow
Steve at Redeemer
Hi _________,
I just wanted to tell you what you can expect at Redeemer Community Church tomorrow
morning.
The service starts at 9:30 or 11:00 a.m. (But the coffee is hot and ready to go at 9:15!)
You can get a preview of the sermon on our church app! (You can download it for free on
iOS or Android.)
We’re looking forward to seeing you there at 9:30 or 11:00 a.m.
Make sure to say hello to me after the service!
Pastor Steve
CREATING A VISITOR
STRATEGY
Intentional pastors don’t grow their churches by hoping people randomly show
up. You need a strategy to get people to visit your church and a plan to get
them to return. Once you have that plan in place, you have to work it. After a few
months, assess what’s working and what isn’t, and retool your strategy.
ÎÎ Are people visiting? If not, what in the strategy can change? If visitors
are pouring in, how can you capitalize on that to make your invitations
even more productive?
ÎÎ Do visitors feel comfortable and welcome? If not, why? What do you
need to communicate better? Do you have the wrong people in the
wrong positions? Are you coming on too strong or not strong enough?
ÎÎ What percentage of people are returning after a visit? What’s getting
them to come back? What changes can you put in place to get more
people to return?
Once your leadership team gets serious about asking the right questions and mak-
ing the right changes, you’re on your way to creating a successful visitor process.
17
LET US HELP EQUIP YOUR
CHURCH TO GROW.
GET IN TOUCH
WITH US HERE.
VISIT US
18
echurch.com
(425) 939-8514
© 2016 Pushpay & echurch All Rights Reserved
19
