Consulting, Coaching & Chatter

Just a quick post while I’m on the road. A colleague of mine and I were talking about appropriate follow-up plans for first-time visitors and I referenced a recent thread on the Easum, Bandy & Tenny-Brittian Community Advanced Leadership forum about what was considered a “valuable” gift. I had written about the pastor taking a gift to a first-time visitor within 24 hours of their visit in an earlier blog post and mentioned a coffee mug as a gift. In the “valuable” gift thread, I echoed Tom Bandy’s sentiments that a gift taken to a guest should reflect something of value … and folks, coffee mugs just don’t make it much in that realm. Why, even the local garage and the banks give away mugs and though they can be a “nice” gift, very few people marvel at the gift of a mug from a Realtor, let alone a church. A gift of value is something that sets you apart from the crowd … it makes an impression.

So, back to the convesation with my colleague. We were talking about “valuable” gifts and I mentioned that in some locales, a plate of homemade cookies (with a fridge magnet for posterity’s sake) would be more memorable than a mug. That sparked an insight. Turns out that one of the churches there in Jefferson City has a bee keeper and first time visitor leave the worship service with a small jar of honey. On the following day, a member of their follow-up team takes the guests a loaf of hot homemade bread to go with their honey. I thought … what a good idea!

But their program could be made even more effective with two additions. First, I love the idea of sending them home with honey. That’s a nice way to get visitors to identify themselves and give up their contact information. Second, I love the idea of taking them hot homemade bread … but the pastor should be the one taking it, and s/he should be taking it that day. But there’s still one thing missing. Permanency. Once the bread’s gone and the honey’s gone, there’s nothing but a memory. It’ll be a good memory, but they may or may not remember where the great gift came from six months from now when a crisis hits and they seek both God and a church in earnest.

So I did a very brief Google search and came up with this: a small honey pot to go with the bread and honey ($2,70 each). Someone with a steady hand could add the name and contact info of the church on the honey pot (or a ceramic’s group could actually make them and decorate them by hand) and then the valuable gift has everything … it creates good will, it makes an impression, and it has permanency to preseve the memory. And if this church (or yours) did this, first time visitors would be telling their friends about the church they visited that helped them feel valuable too.

This post started off as a response to a comment left by Frank in the Churches That Don’t Want To Grow post. He attends a fifty year old church in a fifty year old neighborhood that’s suffering from decline. He wanted to know a bit more about visitor follow up and so on.

So, let me offer a couple of observations. Churches that find themselves in this kind of dither would generally benefit from either an on site consultation or a one day training event. It’s really very difficult to offer specifics about what a church needs to do without knowing the church fairly intimately. If you’re interested in something like that, let me invite you first to visit the EBT site and get some information … or contact me directly.

With that said,I’ll make some general observations.

First, before you do anything, you have to check your hospitality level. Are you really as friendly as you think you are? Few churches are. The easiest way to discern your hospitality level is to get an unchurched person to visit the congregation (you might have to pay them), don’t tell anyone in advance that they’re coming, and then have them check out the congregation’s worship. Have them keep their eyes open for relevance, friendliness, cleanliness - in short, all the things they’d most likely be looking for anyway. Then meet them for lunch about a half hour after they’ve left and record the conversation. You’ll need to record it because nobody else will believe you when you tell them what they report.

Second, you have to determine whether what your worship is experiential for those who might visit. Imagine going to a worship service where the style of music was totally foreign, the words spoken were difficult to follow, and the customs were unfamiliar - for most people, even well churched people, the opportunity to experience a touch from the Holy would be slight. Same goes for an unchurched person. Our songs are often from two, three, or four hundred years ago, played on instruments that were last popular with the Doors (a mighty long time ago for many of us), and the style of communication and the traditions we practice can be difficult to follow (ask a thoroughly unchurched person to define “invocation” or “doxology” or if you really want to get an odd look, ask whether they can quote the Lord’s Prayer and whether they say sins, debts, or trespasses.

If your worship is meaningful to your community; if your hospitality is excellent, then follow-up is critical.

There are a number of ways to get contact information in worship, but in my experience, the most effective is a three-pronged approach. (1) Have a prominent, well staffed, attractive, relevant, up-to-date, Information Kiosk. There should always be two people at the kiosk who are more interested in being available to visitors than they are in each other. They should be so well briefed, that if a guest asks “What’s important to the members of this church” that they could recite from their heart the core values of the congregation. Those staffing this kiosk need to be the sharp pencils in the box and they should be trained not only to be founts of information, but have the wherewithal to get visitor’s contact information.

(2) Get rid of your pew pads … they’re only more effective than doing nothing, and that only just - UNLESS everyone in the congregation fills them out completely every single week. And I don’t mean they just put their name in the book and check the “I’m a member” box. Completely. And since that’s not going to happen, find a nice dark file box for them and tuck them away in the attic. The most effective way to get guest information is to have a registration and prayer request card (one card, two sides) that is included as a tear off in the weekly program. Then, during the service, a moment is taken for EVERYONE to fill out the registration cards (it won’t matter how much info the members put, so long as they are writing on the cards when everyone else is) and to add any prayer requests to the card. After a few moments, the cards are collected … preferably separately from the offering plates, but you can combine the registration with offering if needed.

(3) The third part of the trifecta is to raise up and train floaters. Your congregation will need a couple of these gregarious, charismatic folks (if they’re currently singing in the choir, kick them out - gently - so they can do what they really do best … connect with people) to float around the worship space to connect specifically and foremostly with visitors and guests. When they spot on of us, they go and introduce themselves and strike up a conversation. By the time they’re through, if they’re good (good does not include pushy), they’ll know which small group or ministry the visitor might enjoy or benefit from, has their contact information (which is collected at the Information Kiosk), and maybe even has a coffee date for later in the week.

One last thing about the floaters. If you do the standard “Greeting Time” where the majority of people somehow think there’s a contest on how many hands they shake during the two-minute period, then it’s critically important for the floaters to keep their eyes open for guests who came late and to get into their space to welcome them, find out if there are any questions they may have, and in general to be friendly.

Put the three of these together, you’ll find you get more contact information than perhaps you’re ready for. As for what to do with that information … if your church has less than 400 in attendance, the pastor visits first time guests within 24 hours. If there are more than 500, a visiting team will need to be developed, though if you can get a team of up-fronters to do the deed, all the better. Again … 24 hours.

I had a GREAT conversation with the pastor of one of the churches I mentioned in my post Churches That Don’t Want to Grow. It probably won’t take you long to guess which of the pastors contacted me, since only one even had any way to know that I was there!

So, this pastor emails me and invites me to lunch (he hadn’t read the blog entry yet) and we had an excellent conversation. There’s a lot to admire in this young pastor who has planted this church. He’s young (did I say that already?), he’s clearly an entrepreneur, and he’s already wise before his years. The conversation came around to the church’s follow up practices and I shared my experience and what we’ve learned over the years with both research and consultations with over 1000 churches (and yes, some of those were even with young congregations). I wasn’t surprised at his response. It’s not verbatim, but here’s the gist. “We don’t do the visitation follow-up to their homes. We have a younger crowd (they do … mostly twenty and thirty somethings) and we don’t want them to get the impression that we’re a boomer mega church.”

The rest of the conversation was excellent, lively, and I’m impressed overall with this pastor. On my way home - I actually walked because the pre-autumn day here is beautiful today - and I mulled over his words. I was weighing them up thinking, “Well, maybe he’s right” when a couple of things struck me like the proverbial ton of bricks.

First, I’ve been to a LOT of mega churches and have discovered that, in general, their follow-up is just about as bad as most smaller churches. They don’t seem to want return visitors coming to their churches either. They may have been good at it once upon a time (that may be one of the ways they grew to be a mega church), but somewhere along the line, they either got cocky and let their follow up system lapse because they were getting plenty of return visitors (that’s what happens when you have the best show in town … even if the best show is also the most faithful presentation of the Gospel), or they got so big that they didn’t invest in or design a continuing follow up system. Certainly, of the mega churches in Columbia, MO that I’ve been to, and there are a couple and I’ve been to all of them I believe, none appear to be doing effective follow up, so in that regard it’s not likely any of this young pastor’s visitors will be confusing his church with a mega church.

But for me, here’s the clincher. Twenty and Thirty somethings are, in general, two generations from the church. They have little, if any, church background. Sure, there are always a few, but most … nope. And even for those that have, they almost certainly have no idea about mega church (or any other church) follow up practices and programs. It’s only us clergy and church leaders who have been a part of the church for awhile who even know that churches are supposed to be following up.And it’s only us who are steeped in church research who know that the boomer churches practiced front-door follow-up once upon a time.

So, it’s a bit of a distraction to say, “Well, our congregation is so young, we don’t want them to think we’re ____.” These visitors have no church experience … so let’s get real and at least go through the motions that perhaps we’re interested that they visited us. And who knows, when the pastor is standing at the front door of a first-time visitor’s home on Sunday afternoon, ready to hand them a church-branded coffee mug filled with goodies and church literature, s/he might have an opportunity to do more than just say “Glad you were with us.” Someone out there might actually have a question about the service or about a small group or about the children’s programming or ??? that the pastor could answer. And if the pastor’s taking follow up to the next level, and if the first-time visitor shows a modicum of interest, the pastor can always whip out their Blackberry right there on the spot and schedule a lunch or coffee appointment for later on in the week.

Okay, over the years I’ve visited a LOT of churches. Lots of them. And I can’t help it, but when I visit, my consultant hat is always part of my couture. Normally this doesn’t cause me a lot of consternation … sadly, my expectations for most churches is pretty low. My hopes are high, but I’ve been in way too many churches that are more like the Rotary than the body of Jesus Christ in motion.

So I guess I shouldn’t really be surprised that the last four churches I’ve visited seemed apathetic about growing. Oh, they all made some noise about welcoming visitors - “Especially first time visitors” - but their actions, or inactions spoke way more loudly than their words.

I’m just going to mention my last two church visits as examples. Last week I attended a new church start. It was my first visit to the congregation. They’ve been doing public worship for about a year and last week they “relocated” to a theater where they could seat almost 1200 people. There were less than 200 there for the opening worship service, which was a significant increase for them according to the pastor. So far so good.

The worship was fine. They didn’t make the guests stand up or in any way identify themselves. They did the innocuous “Shake hands with those near you” moment and I got to meet another first time guest. The music was authentic and the worship leaders worshipped first and led second. All good stuff.

But when it came to getting guest and member information … well, that was pretty ineffective. There were guest registration cards and pens on every third theater seat. They invited any first-time guests to fill it out and “give it to the pastor or his assistant [hand waved to identify the assistant] when you leave.” The church didn’t “pass” the offering plates so I could drop the completed card into it. Instead, they used an offering basket up front where you could drop your offerings in when you took communion. But we were specifically instructed to give the cards to the pastor or the assistant.

Not the best way to get contact information, but not the best. But, like the compliant kind of guy I am, I saw the assistant on my way out and gave him the card. It’s now one week later … I didn’t return this week … and as far as I can tell the ONLY thing they’ve done with the card is sent me one email newsletter and a card with the pastor’s signature and note about being glad I was there.

No contact with the pastor or anyone else. No phone call. Frankly, no meaningful follow-up.

How many times do we have to say this? Church growth gurus have been saying it for almost two decades … if you want visitors to become returning guests, there needs to be an in-person visit by the church within TWENTY-FOUR HOURS. And currently, the up front pastor needs to be the one doing the visit. The odds of a visitor returning if your pastor isn’t doing this within twenty-four hours drops significantly. And this is a church plant where the pastor has to be the number one net-caster.

The church I visited today made a mistake that is even worse that the one above. Way worse.

They didn’t get my contact information at all. In this case, the church is well established. In fact, they hope to go multi-site within the next year. The worship was fine. They didn’t identify me as visitor in front of everyone. The music was quite good, but the worship leaders were leading first and worshipping second. I didn’t leave marvelling at the incredible spiritual level of the congregation. Common mistake - not a good one, but pretty common. Did I mention I don’t really have high expectations when I visit churches?

Anyway, back to their big mistake. During the shake hands with your neighbor time, the pastor said … he actually said this … “If you’re a first time visitor, if you’ll look around you’ll see some black registration books and pads in the pews. If you’d go get one and fill it out ….”

You’ve got to be kidding me! First, we’ve been preaching that pew registration pads are the very worst for gathering contact information from guests … and frankly, from everyone else. But if you’re going to waste your time using them, at least use them. Don’t ask the visitor go hunt one down. In fact, there wasn’t a registration pad in my pew and frankly, I don’t really want the whole world to know “Hey, there’s a first time visitor - let’s go mob him and tell him how friendly we are,” so I wasn’t going to crawl over my row of chairs to get the one that I could see.

So they can’t even blow it when it comes to follow-up because they have no way of following up. In other words, they’re not interested in growing.

Well, that’s not true. I suppose both churches want to grow, but like the duck, the dog, the cow, and all the rest in the Henny Penny story, no one wants to do any of the hard work it takes to make disciples of Jesus Christ.

So, just for the record … how is your church effectively getting the names and contact information of your visitors, guests, and members? And once you have that information, what are you doing with it? If you have great ideas, we’d love to know.

A week or so ago, my wife and I attended the World Convention of the Christian Church in Nashville, TN. It was a nice convention and we enjoyed Nashville. One evening we decided we wanted to eat something other than Tennesee barbeque, so we stopped in at the Stoney River restaurant. It was a great experience … pricey, but excellent food and service. It was pretty much everything one could ask for and when we go back to Nashville, Stoney River will likely be one of the destinations on our meal menu.

Of course, even though it was good, there were about six different places we ate meals in Nashville. Many of them were quite good. But if you ask me to name any of the others, I couldn’t do it. There were a couple barbeque places down on Broadway. There was a really nice place out by the mall that’s currently under construction (complete with a nightmare visit I’ll not soon forget). But I remember Stoney River by name … and I could find it again too. Why? Because two weeks after our visit we got the postcard you see here from David T., our server.

What do you notice about it? It’s hand written. He managed to spell our names correctly (yes, he copied it from our reservation form, but you’d be surprised how many churches don’t seem to get the name right from their Registration Pads or Visitor Cards that we ALWAYS fill out). And it was timely. Sure, we live hours and hours and hours away from Nashville, so we’re not likely to go back next week … or next month … but we were important enough to warrant the postcard. And they captured a loyal customer.

A friend of mine from Jefferson City, shared a similar event from a church in Colorado. He and his wife were visiting a large church there in the “West” (BTW, how does Colorado make the designation “West”? Seattle is West. LA is West. Denver is at best the Mid-West). They filled out the requisite visitor’s card and figured they’d get the photocopied “Welcome to our church” letter “Signed” (ha!) by the pastor. But a week later, a box of goodies arrived at their door. Inside was a church mug, branded pen, information about the church, a very nice “Come back when you’re visiting in the area again” letter, and several other branded “gifts.” He guessed that there was more than $5 worth of stuff in the box and they’d paid well for the postage.

Seems like a waste, doesn’t it. The spent $8-$10 to “woo” a family who lives in Missouri. Where’s the return in that?

Ask Stoney River. Handwritten card and they’ve won a customer. And you’ve read about the restaurant. And we’ve mentioned it in several conversations.

Our friends may never return to Colorado. But he tells this story to almost everyone who passes through his doors. And if someone is heading to Colorado, they make a recommendation to the church … by name and location.

Both Stoney River and the Colorado Church know follow-up. They’re good at it.

Lessons learned …