Incorporate guests for growth

By Lauren Hunter

For all healthy, growing churches, the process of proactively connecting with first-time visitors is absolutely essential. The term assimilation, while sterile and impersonal, actually describes an important aspect of connecting people to your church and to the core ministry where life change occurs. The visitors you see each and every Sunday allow a church to continue to grow and an infusion of new, passionate members is vital to the mission of any church.

For a new church, effective assimilation is the only way to grow a church from the ground up. Finding and incorporating the correct tools to identify a visitor and then consistently following up with them could mean the difference between a growing, vibrant church or experiencing decreasing members when disciples fall through the cracks.

Tracking is essential
Tracking, contacting and following-up on your visitors, new attendees and even regular attendees can be difficult and time-intensive. Yet, it beats having to hear the stories of those who came once but stopped coming back. Many churches have begun to use technology to help stay on top of this time-consuming task. While these programs range in capabilities, sophistication and price, most churches have found that having some type of solution for tracking attendees and new visitors is now a necessity.

One of these churches is Albany Grove Church in Albany, OR. In October of 2009, Albany Grove sprouted as a fresh church plant with a desire to have a follow-up process in place that would allow them to build their church from the ground up, and prevent people from falling through the cracks.

One of the first things Associate Pastor Darrell Mishler did was to customize Albany Grove’s church management system to support their attendance tracking process. They added three custom date fields: 1) one field for first time guests, 2) another field for second time guests and 3) a third for third time guests.

As a visitor to a church, you want to feel welcomed and cared for. You want to know that you matter and belong. It is for this reason Albany Grove asks each visitor to fill out a card. The information received on these cards is entered into the church management system (in this case Church Community Builder), and the first of the boxes is used by putting the date of their first visit; this initiates a “first-timer process.”

First-timers
“We devised a (manually operated) process so that when a ‘first-timer’ was entered they received a ‘welcome email,’ then the senior pastor was automatically notified and then sent a hand-written note with a ‘coffee card,’” notes Mishler. “Finally, the visitor was added to a ‘30-day call back’ group. Their responses clearly show us how encouraged people are because of the process. The church developed a similar process for second and third-time attenders.”

Autumn Ridge Church in Rochester, MN also has used its web-based church management system to make sure new visitors are contacted quickly after their first visit.

“We are constantly hearing reports from new visitors about how quickly we recognize that they have visited the church and how we stay in contact with them,” says TJ Schultz, technology minister for Autumn Ridge.

A rule of thumb
Connecting people and impacting lives is reason enough to invest the necessary time and energy in developing an effective follow-up process, regardless of whether or not you empower it with technology. If you factor in the economic benefits, the potential ROI on good technology is significant. A rule of thumb (based on research in 2010) is that each member person will give an average of $1,000 per year to the church. While it takes a while for a first time visitor to mature into a giving Christian, it can happen much faster when people feel cared for as a result of good follow-up.

“Using the processes that we created within our church management system for first, second and third-time visitors, our church plant went from 100 who were our founding group, to more than 300 in regular attendance,” Mishler says.

Effective follow-up has helped drive a growth rate of more than 200 percent for their ministry.

Lauren Hunter is a freelance writer, church technology consultant and hosts the blog ChurchTechToday. www.churchcommunitybuilder.com www.laurenhunter.net

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