Beware the Organization-Centered Mindset
Okay, so we are ready to start planning some marketing for your ministry. It’s time to pick a media channel and get some really cool graphics, right? Nope, it’s time to think about specific people, not your program. It’s time to connect with what people know, feel, and do in a meaningful way that links your message to their lives.
As you start your marketing planning, don’t start with the program you want to promote. Instead start with the needs of the people you want to reach. If you do so, you will create outreach that is attractive to people. You will reach more people than you have ever reached before.
This doesn’t mean you need to compromise what you believe and cater to people’s every whim. Instead, if you keep in mind what people think, feel, and do, when you reach out to them, you stand a greater chance of connecting with them in ways that give you more credibility and influence for changing their beliefs and actions. You can’t persuade them if you don’t establish a connection with them after all. You are not building bridges from your church out to people there in “Lost People Land.” The real goal is to understand the people you want to reach and build a bridge back to yourself from them.
Philip Kotler, the most respected expert in nonprofit marketing, warns that people who take the first approach have what he calls in his book “Strategic Marketing for Nonprofit Organizations” an organization-centered mindset.
“Several clues can be used to identify nonprofits that are still mired in an organization-centered perspective. They see their offerings as inherently desirable. They see the ignorance or lack of motivation of their customers as the major barrier to the organization’s success. Research plays a minor role in strategy formation. Marketing tends to be defined as synonymous with promotion. A “one best” strategy is typically used in approaching the market and generic competition is typically ignored in the process.”
Do you have the “organization-centered” mindset?
It’s easy to see if you do. Take an honest evaluation, do you more or less answer “Yes” to these questions?
- Do you think if people just visited your church they would naturally like it?
- Do you think the main marketing problem you have is getting the word out about your church?
- Is it true you haven’t really done much original research of the people in your local community?
- Do you think advertising and marketing are pretty much the same thing?
- You believe what you need most is better looking marketing materials and higher quality production values in your church services, right?
- Do you tend to think that people who don’t go to church are worldly, sleeping-in, overly materialistic or just plain too busy?
Problems arise in ministry marketing because people start in the wrong place. They want people to patronize their programs. They want people to come to their church service. They think, “If only people could hear me preach, they would marvel and wonder, ‘Why did I waste so much time? I have found it!’”
When what they really need to think is: Who are these people? What do they think? What are they like? What do they do? What do they think they need? What are their perceptions? How satisfied are they right now? What do I have to offer them?
Here’s some shocking food for thought:
- If people came to your church, they might not even like it.
- They may have already seen your advertising and are not interested in what you offer.
- They don’t think you understand who they are and what their life is about and they don’t regard you as an expert in anything.
- Your invitations to listen to you talk about things like sex, marriage, family, money management, success, end times, manhood, women’s issues, coffee, and God are about as appealing to them as attending an insurance seminar at work on their lunch hour
- Your new stagy contemporary worship service might seem campy and your preaching might sound like a bad motivational seminar to them.
- They may be engaged in some very meaningful activities (like making a living) at the only time you happen to want their attention and participation. They may never have an open Sunday to visit your church ever in their life, period.
Well, that’s a sad and pessimistic way to end this post. What if they do think all these things? Let’s take a worst-case scenario–all these are true. (Not saying they are, just hypothetically speaking.) Why should you be the last to know? What could you do about it if you did know they thought this?
The answers would be the very first inklings of your ministry’s new marketing plan.
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